This blog, with the title Geographies of belonging, was started in March 2012, just before I went on my half-year journey along the North American west coast. And even after I came back from there, the theme of this blog has to some extent kept on loosely revolving around finding my place in the world, and especially when on the road. Liberia, my summer in Europe, Burkina Faso.
Lately, though, I’ve been thinking it’s time for me to get a more specified focus on the blog. I will probably not go off on any long trips anytime soon, now that I’ve graduated and have a job. But there are other stories to tell. The science, for example. My new job.
I think it could be good for me, to practice writing about what I do in layman’s terms. And maybe, if I learn to do it well, it might become interesting from a more general public, and not only consist of musings about my own life that probably only are interesting for people who know me. I would like to be a good science communicator, and I think it’s important that the kind of science that I hope I will be doing gets out there, in a way that people can understand. The world is changing fast and if we want to keep this change on a trajectory that will enable future generations to have good lives too, all of us need to take our part in steering progress toward the future that we want.
Science is important for knowing how to get to where we want to go – but at least in the past, science has had a tendency to exist in its own little bubble, to a large degree separated from politics and the economy and public knowledge. Not really on purpose, but out of elitism and narrow-mindedness. This needs to change. Research might come up with amazing solutions for our shared problems, but if people don’t know about these solutions, and how they relate to other issues, the solutions can’t be implemented in any efficient way. Especially the solutions that are not pure engineering, but more socially and culturally oriented, needing more than only expert participation. We need transparency, communication, mixing up of knowledge systems. Discussions and change needs to happen on all scales, from the grassroots to top-level political forums.
And I think, with some practice, I would like to become a small part of that bridge between knowledge systems. With time, once I’ve become a more established researcher (if that’s the sphere where I will end up working, we’ll see what the future brings), I would like to be able to communicate some of the cool and progressive things that sustainability research comes up with for people who might not be academically trained but have a stake in the things that are being researched upon. Agriculture and food systems, for example. Or water resource management.
Stockholm Resilience Centre, where I’m now working, is a great place to do this too. The director of the center, Johan Rockström, is an amazing science communicator (check out his TED talk, for example), and I think if I stay there, developing transdisciplinary research and my science communication skills would be encouraged – not least through all the amazing people who come through the center as employees, visiting researchers and non-academia collaborators.
Yeah. Simply put, this is what I wanted to say with this very long post: From now on, I will be focusing on my job on this blog. It will be a test run and training center for my science communication skills. I will give it a new name, I just haven’t come up with it yet. And there might still be the occasional post about life in general, or certain details of my everyday life, but I will try to frame it in a way to still be relevant in relation to my job – which shouldn’t be hard. Resilience and sustainability science could basically be about anything, after all. It is not a particularly limiting focus.
So, please, bear with me while I figure out this new format. I hope it will work out. I’m quite excited, as I always am in the beginning of a new project. Let’s see how long the excitement lasts.
Katja Malmborg 