One of my goals for the group in 2021 is to start ramping up blog posting. To that end, I want to get started introducing a new project that the lab will be running from 2021 until 2024, funded by the FNRS (Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique – FNRS)! We’ll be tackling the hotly debated role of taxonomic concepts in the unfolding biodiversity crisis.
As you can tell by the fact that we haven’t updated this blog since January, the pandemic has hit our research group pretty hard. With one of our postdoctoral fellows stuck in Italy, and all of us having at best spotty access to much of our digital humanities infrastructure, things have been moving pretty slowly. But there is some good news to report! As a part of a seven-university consortium, the lab has just been awarded a new grant from the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 “Science with and for Society” program. Read on to learn more!
This year has been amazingly busy. As part of keeping us honest, I want to step back and think about our accomplishments, what we’ve done well, and what we’ve done badly – and speculate a bit about what 2020 might bring!
There’s a common refrain that I hear when talking to students, even doctoral candidates, that I wish we could somehow communicate better about. It starts with mentioning something about getting a new draft finished or what have you, and then somebody says something like:
“Oh, sure, this writing is easier for you because you’re good at it.”
Sure, for some people this may be right. We all know stories of people who publish six or eight books a year, or can sit down at their laptop and crank out an article in a half an afternoon. But not for me. (Me, I’ve only once written an article in a single day, and it was only because it fell sideways out of my book project, so I’d already finished all the research for it.) And, I suspect, not for many of us.
As I’ve been doing more PR for the lab online, a few people have been confused by the fact that I call the group a lab in the first place. What do you mean, a philosophy lab? Does that make any sense at all?
On the one hand, I have a pretty simple answer: I’m borrowing from the way that our scientist colleagues organize their research groups, and I think they both have a lot more history doing it, and are a lot better at it than philosophers are! But that’s not all, and I wanted to write something here to say why.
(N.B.: Français ci-dessous !) I was asked recently by the Brussels newspaper La Libre to provide some comments regarding research ethics concerning some recent experiments in macaques, which involved inserting a gene responsible for human brain development into a number of monkeys. (See some very nice coverage at MIT Technology Review.)