Eek, August is here! Fear not, fellow interdisciplinary scholars. If you’re staring at the calendar and getting anxious about the waning writing time, know you are not alone. This month’s Ideas on Fire newsletter has resources for making progress on your summer writing and publishing goals no matter where you are in the process. August is a wonderful opportunity to revisit your summer goals, evaluate your work spaces and writing routine, and make some concrete decisions that ensure you rock...
2 months ago • 3 min read
Collaboration is a crucial part of interdisciplinary scholarship. While tenure and promotion processes often emphasize individual research (at least in the humanities and many social sciences), the collective strength of scholarly collaboration can enhance the depth, scope, and impact of interdisciplinary research. This month’s Ideas on Fire newsletter offers resources for scholarly collaboration within and beyond the academy. One of the most prominent forms of scholarly collaboration is...
3 months ago • 4 min read
The 2024 International Communication Association conference is coming up June 20–24, and we’ve curated a bunch of resources to help you get the most out of your conference experience. This year’s theme is Communication and Global Human Rights, and the event aims to “take stock of the contributions of communication scholarship to the study of human rights; to foreground current research and practice; and to outline promising directions for communication studies.” We are jazzed to celebrate so...
4 months ago • 1 min read
Interdisciplinary mentorship offers a unique opportunity to blend knowledges from diverse communities and fields, which can spark innovation and creativity. This reciprocal relationship benefits both mentors and mentees alike, as each learns from the other. In this month’s Ideas on Fire newsletter, we’re sharing resources for building interdisciplinary mentorship relationships that can withstand the test of time. Great interdisciplinary mentors come in all forms, and non-academic mentors in...
4 months ago • 3 min read
Transnational feminist movements have long woven together art, activism, and academia to build better worlds. Archiving this important work and celebrating its exciting future is a key part of what our podcast Imagine Otherwise is all about. In episode 160 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews Ideas on Fire authors Amber Rose González, Felicia Montes, and Nadia Zepeda—three legendary feminist artists, activists, and scholars from the genre-defying, transnational feminist of...
5 months ago • 1 min read
As the semester winds down, the Ideas on Fire team has been fielding a lot of questions from authors about how best to structure summer writing. So this month’s newsletter tackles how to set up a summer writing plan that helps you make progress on your writing and publishing goals while still leaving you room (and energy!) to enjoy the season. Breaking down your writing and publishing goals into smaller writing and revision tasks can help you see where in your summer calendar they would fit....
5 months ago • 4 min read
There’s a major aspect of being a scholarly book author that rarely gets discussed: If you want people to read your work, you’ll need to do at least some of your own book promotion. And by “some” of your own promotion, we really mean “most.” Marketing isn’t the hardest part of getting a book into the world, but it is a part that many authors dread. This makes sense—most of us trained to be scholars, artists, and activists, not marketing specialists. Still, getting the word out about your book...
6 months ago • 2 min read
Silicon Valley's specific form of technocapitalism has shaped global geographies in complex ways. With the rise of generative AI, we're currently seeing a new aspect of this playing out across interdisciplinary classrooms and scholarly publishing (among pretty much every other realm). This is raising political and ethical questions about the role of technocapitalist frameworks in our everyday lives—questions that have longer histories and broader geopolitical roots than much of the current...
6 months ago • 1 min read
As academics, we’re taught from the moment we enter graduate school that conferences are an essential part of our work life. They’re opportunities to venture outside the bubbles of our departments and engage with larger conversations in our fields. They’re also expensive and time consuming. If you’re introverted, new to academia, and especially if you come from a historically marginalized community, they can be hard to navigate at best. This is in part because, like so many parts of academic...
7 months ago • 3 min read