Imagine a city

A horror movie where being a woman is a crime!  By an Iranian Woman Imagine a movie about a city where people are enthusiastic about science. Imagine that it has a high literacy rate and the universities are always full of students seeking knowledge and success in scholarship. There are many intelligent people living and …

Save Cantonese: language advocacy for a project to preserve Cantonese in the West

By Research Scholar Keith Tse Cantonese means a lot to me. My interest in it is twofold: academic and personal. As I do research in Linguistics and I frequently analyse my native language (Chinese), I am naturally interested in Cantonese and its reception in the West. I also come from Hong Kong, China, and Cantonese …

Sustainability at the Ronin Institute

By Research Scholar Oumaima Ben Amor What we innovate, invent, advance, or know today started off as research fueled by our curiosity. Research is an essential phase in the understanding of problems and challenges which involves the development of new ideas and solutions. It has long shed light on the global threats that we are …

Reinventing the humanities: fostering a new culture of scholarship or looking back to the past?

By Research Scholar Miloš Todorović Why not start this with a personal story? It is, after all, a personal essay on why I joined the Ronin Institute, even if the title is a bit misleading. Like so many others, 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic took me by surprise, changing my day-to-day life entirely. Yes, this …

Image by Martin Bohle.

The story of making “Geo-societal Narratives – Contextualising geosciences”

By Ronin Research Scholar Martin Bohle The drafting of the book Geo-societal Narratives – contextualising Geosciences was a unique experience. The group of twenty authors were assembled in late 2019 by correspondence. The outlay of the book was agreed upon in early 2020 by correspondence. The book was also drafted by correspondence. No meetings, not …

Groundhog Day: the plight of postdoctoral researchers

By Ronin Institute Research Scholar Laure Haak The original version of this post first appeared in An Idea on Medium Let’s drive innovation by re-envisioning postdoctoral research as a fixed term “Tour of Duty”, with embedded offboarding, alumni services, and access to “Veteran’s benefits” for all who participate. Postdoctoral researchers are a critical component of …

Journal articles in the life sciences: expanding publication to improve recognition

By Ronin Research Scholar Heather Maughan Journal articles are aplenty these days (at least in the life sciences). I can never keep up with my “to read” list. Twenty years ago when I was a graduate student I managed to thoroughly read tens of papers each week, and could keep up on what was being …

Ronin Institute-IGDORE Scholarship Values Summit: September 14-16

The Ronin Institute and the Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education (IGDORE) are co-organizing an unconference called the Scholarship Values Summit commencing this Tuesday (US time) September 14-16, 2021. This is the third unconference that the Ronin Institute has been involved in organizing after unconferences in 2016 and 2020. The Scholarship Values Summit …

Success? What is that?

Notes from the Big Brain Collective as summarized by Research Scholar Emily Monosson The last Big Brain gathered around the idea of success. What does success mean and what are some challenges for reaching success? Ask a bunch of Ronin Scholars and you’ll get a bunch of different ideas; that’s part of what Ronin is about. …

Helpful thoughts_Big Brain Ronin

The Big Brain Begins to Think

By Research Scholars Emily Monosson, Arika Virapongse  and Judy Daniels  At the Ronin Institute, we’ve been working on a Big Brain project that intends to collect and share experiences and insights by scholars operating outside of traditional academic institutions. Our Big Brain project got off to a great start in early March 2021 with two …