I must admit that I am a little nervous about finally starting a blog. It’s something that I have been thinking about for most of my PhD and kept putting off. There is nothing like the self-doubt of “I don’t know enough yet” or “who cares what I have to say?” that helps me put off even the easiest of tasks. Okay, so why blog now? It’s not that I have finally achieved some amazing level of knowledge that allows me to easily explain it all. Instead, it’s simply that as I near the end of my PhD I realize that starting a blog has been a goal of mine since right around when I started four years ago and if I finish this PhD without at least trying – I know I will be kicking myself sometime in the future.

I do have a few ideas on what I hope this blog will do. ..

To engage and contribute

It has been two years since I joined twitter (@StefanieLBecker) and academic twitter has been amazing in connecting to me all sorts of interesting people and ideas. Who knew you could learn new research methods by following people in different disciplines on twitter? I definitely developed at least one paper from the stuff I have seen. But to be honest, I personally have not contributed much to twitter. My tweets summarize the articles I have read or comment on the political events of the day – but they aren’t really about my research and don’t contribute to public understanding and discussion. I hope this blog will be my contribution on my corner of research.

To talk about transitions without so much jargon

For me personally the jargon was one of the hardest things about getting into transition literature. I mean – what is a niche innovation? Why do we use the word regime to mean something different than what a political scientist means when they say regime? A landscape is a kind of painting, right? I want this blog to be a place where these topics can be discussed plainly (or at least more plainly?). I am still learning a lot on this topic, but I hope that we can learn together.

To make the academic knowledge about transitions more accessible to the public.

So much of transition research is based on data collected from members of the public. Much of my research, for example, has used data from community-based organizations. The results of all this go into beautiful research articles which are important for the advancement of science, but are often behind paywalls and are not very accessible to the public. This is a way to give back a little.

Okay, now to get started! My post next week will be about community-based initiatives, but please comment below if you have any ideas for topics.