So you want to write and publish a book?

Questions, answers and other thoughts from Ronin Research Scholars and writers In January 2023, the Ronin Institute hosted a Research Skills 101 workshop for prospective authors curious about how to come up with a book idea, write a proposal and find a publisher. The Ronin Institute community is rich with scholars who have published in …

Academic Freedom

Why does academic freedom matter?

By Ronin Research Scholar Maria Jakubik I have spent more than half of my life living in Finland, but I have studied at five and taught at nine universities across Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the USA. Here is an interesting situation I would like to share with you. Recently, …

Overcoming systemic barriers to inclusion in academia: the case for a hybrid conference format

By Research Scholar William Donald An earlier original version of this post first appeared in the Times Higher Education on 9 August 2022. Conference season is upon us, and in-person events are back this year. My social media feed is full of posts from fellow academics jetting off to exciting destinations and relieved that the …

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 …

Our Ronin Institute home at 10 years

By Research Scholar Emily Monosson, first published in the May 2022 issue of Kitsune Welcome! You’ve stumbled across the launch of the good ship Ronin Blog, the official blog of the Ronin Institute. Updates here will cover developments at the Ronin Institute, as well as topics of potential interest to independent scholars everywhere – or …

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 …

Making change happen

Scholarship Values Summit 2021Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Barriers to academic reform are often more cultural than technical, and highlight the need for a sustained movement for change. To conclude the Scholarship Values Summit 2021–an unconference that was co-hosted by the Ronin Institute and IGDORE–participants discussed the necessary cultural change to realize …

Our shared values as scholars

Scholarship Values Summit 2021Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Identifying our values as scholars is the first step toward making needed change in our academic culture (see Part One of this three-part blog series). In this second blog post of the series (cross-posted on IGDORE’s Medium), we provide a summary of scholarship values …

What are harmful systems in scholarship?

Scholarship Values Summit 2021Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 The context for scholarship has changed. The cultural norms and incentives for scholarship today (e.g. ‘publish or perish’) were established during a now-outdated context for traditional academia (see Lancaster et al 2018). Such framing and assumptions no longer work in today’s mainstream academia, let …

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 …