By Joern Fischer Some years ago, together with a couple of colleagues, I published a little note called “Academia’s obsession with quantity”. We followed up on this with another slightly longer note outlining a roadmap for “an academia beyond quantity”. Some years have passed, and I felt it’s time to re-visit these original ideas here. … Continue reading
By Joern Fischer A little while ago, together with my colleagues Euan Ritchie and Jan Hanspach, I led a paper entitled “Academia’s obsession with quantity”. This paper quickly became one of the most downloaded papers from TREE, and considering how short it is, it has clearly had “impact” (ironically, perhaps more so than its more … Continue reading
by Tibor Hartel I was just re-reading the paper of Joern Fischer and his colleagues about academia`s obsession with quantity, more papers, more grants and more everything. Here, I focus on one potential aspect of this issue. I am aware that here and there I may look crazy, and exaggerate, but the intention is to … Continue reading
By Joern Fischer … individual academics can start the process of change within their workplaces, rather than blindly running along on an ever-faster treadmill to intellectual nowhere… Without much further ado, I’d like to point you towards our latest (and for the time being, probably last!) paper on how to move towards an academia that is not … Continue reading
By Joern Fischer Readers familiar with this blog will know that I struggle with occasional frustration about modern academia — its competitiveness, its speed, its often polarised debates (see this previous entry and below that one, those citing it). Talking with two of my colleagues, Jan Hanspach and Euan Ritchie, we felt it was time … Continue reading
By Joern Fischer Many years ago, I published “Academia’s obsession with quantity”. Similar arguments about unhelpful trends have been made in many places, including recently in a nice piece by Paasche and Österblom. My sense is increasingly that many university systems are deeply broken already. Arguably, we have a new wave of “crowding out” unfolding: … Continue reading
By Joern Fischer Our jobs as researchers are pretty nice in many ways — we get to work on stuff we’re truly interested in, we might get to enjoy the occasional sense of achievement, and we might even feel that we’re doing something good in the world. This good side of academic life has been emphasised by some; … Continue reading
By Joern Fischer At last, a paper we started to think about at a SESYNC workshop in Maryland finally got published in Regional Environmental Change. The paper lays out a conceptual foundation for how to think about food security and biodiversity conservation from a social-ecological perspective. In this blog post, I’d like to highlight two key … Continue reading
By Joern Fischer A little while ago, I published a bit of an outburst about academia’s obsession with quantity. Some people have interpreted this to be in favour of a lower output academia. However, that’s not quite what I meant: I’m not at all against productivity. Rather, what does concern me is the frantic, incoherent … Continue reading
By Joern Fischer In a particularly insightful comment to a recent blog post of mine, Jahi Chappell challenged the ultimate benefits of ever-increasing specialisation. Having thought about this a bit, I was struck by the generality of what this may mean. I was amazed by just how often, the problems we discuss in sustainability science … Continue reading
Ideas for Sustainability 