Why are we opening things up?
💡Over the last 4 years, practitioners & policymakers have shared challenges of submitting a paper (bandwidth, resources, etc.)
I don't know about other scientists and scholars, but man, I love my source material / study objects. I'm a pro, not an amateur, but sometimes I feel more akin to those who approach #archaeology for love, in their spare time. Amator in Latin.
I’m looking for PhD programs that are pretty self-directed? I’m just starting my search for schools to apply to and wanted to reach out for recommendations and places to start my search.
Specifically I’m looking to study a combination of Posthumanism and Community Development. To my knowledge, this would be a very interdisciplinary degree, and thus I might need a school that offers an Interdisciplinary Studies PhD or something similar. Or possibly a degree in either Posthumanism or Community Development, but that is flexible and allows me to study across disciplines.
I also have done my entire masters degree with independent studies (self-designed coursework and evaluation) under various mentors, and I’m looking to continue that sort of learning style (though if I have to take a few structured classes I can plug my nose and dive in, lol).
We're looking for a Transportation Researcher with a passion for sustainable and equitable transportation strategies and a background in planning, engineering, or a related field. Applications due May 5. https://ssti.us/join-our-team/
In 2019, J.E. Macedo de Medeiros defended his PhD thesis in #archaeology at the Albert-Ludwig University in Freiburg. He was so confident of the importance of his work that he titled it "Hoard finds of the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages: a process-logical paradigm shift" (my transl.). Five years later, no such shift has to my knowledge taken place.
"The historical record suggests that the regime, in testing various tactics of intimidation and surveillance in Italian universities, wanted to keep academic elites in line and undermine their expertise. Universities also became sites of quite ruthless transaction. Italian scientists... collaborated with the regime in the creation of the sociotechnical infrastructures that enabled the persecution."
On positioning: Every time I do sociolinguistic fieldwork or conduct interviews, people assume I am a student 🙃 I could decide to be angry, and I am, at a structural/systemic level, but I think I also use it to my advantage to minimize inherent power hierarchies... Thoughts?
India demonstrates academic growth globally.
The World University Rankings by Subject 2024, announced by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), places IIT-Delhi among the top 50 institutions globally in engineering and technology, with a rank of 45.
In her ECR Spotlight, Chiara Ciccone talks about how she spent time outside as a child looking for insects, how reading diving physiology papers in Rome led her to studying in Norway & the good and bad aspects of sailing all the way to Greenland to study seals
"Resilience. I have learned that the most important part of this job is to be able to keep going. That is when you are seasick in the middle of a storm in the North Atlantic Ocean, or you have spent days in the Greenland Sea unable to find a seal anywhere on the ice, or when your western blots are not working even after a thousand repetitions. I have learned that is important not to judge my personal success over a failed experiment. What matters the most is to be able to come back to it, ready to learn from what went wrong before."
god help the poor grad student who gets saddled with committee members who are all hungry and/or tired on the day of their defense yet who will defend the rightness of their positions (and the ways in which the student's position is "problematic") to the death rather than acknowledge that oh, I really need a sandwich and a nap #academia
An international team of scientists - including a research team from UC Santa Cruz - have discovered first known nitrogen-fixing organelle within a eukaryotic cell!
The organelle is the fourth example in history of primary endosymbiosis — the process by which a prokaryotic cell is engulfed by a eukaryotic cell and evolves beyond symbiosis into an organelle.
As the first of its kind, this discovery is one for the textbooks.
"Sorbonne University—which discontinued its subscription to the Web of Science last year and switched to a newer, open platform called OpenAlex—said in a statement that “by signing the Declaration, we want to show that not only this move towards open research information should be an objective, but that it can be done.”"
In this time and age there's no reason whatsoever to use Web of Science or Scopus. Besides the fact that open alternatives exist like OpenAlex, using citations metrics or journal impact factors for recruitment or promotions is simply wrong, and a great signal for prospective applicants: if an institution uses them, run, don't apply. Find one that values and understands your work instead.
Want to help striking TAs at McGill who've been fired or suspended from their other campus positions for participating in the strike? Here are a couple of mutual aid links for funds to support students facing financial hardship. 🧵
"Rebeca Omordia performs Nocturne no. 6 "La Montagne d'Imsfrane" by Nabil Benabdeljalil, part of her African Pianism recital at The Phillips Collection, Washington, 26 November 2023."
It's really a shame just how many anti-capitalists are out there spending their time and their voice trying to predict just how soon #capitalism will fail. It's already failed! I am more anti-capitalist than most, but I do not see capitalism going anywhere anytime soon. There is nothing wrong with being a realist.
I come across so many articles online where the pipe dreams of anti-capitalists are really no different than all the tone deaf articles that #capitalism will save the world. There is so much bad writing online. It is my belief that is why #academics need to worry less about publications and see blogging as a public service.
All that would definitely be bad – cynical, self-sabotaging, philistine. But there’s another possibility that is worse: that culture wars aren’t being fought to destroy the humanities – rather that humanities are being destroyed because they’re incredibly inconvenient to authoritarianism
"When you embark on an education that cannot obviously be commodified, that doesn’t translate into earnings, it is a way of saying (and believing) that your mind’s value to society is innate. Politics is your business because you are its business. You are the keeper of ideas, historical memory, compassion, context, hope, that the market cannot understand and authoritarianism cannot stomach."