Hi friends! Just a quick note to say that, over at Liminal, we’ve started a newsletter called Making Science Make Sense. You can subscribe and read our first post now! I’ll be writing quite a bit there in the coming months.
Also, Melina and I are hard at work revising Wild At Heart [Insert Title Here]: A Feminist Science of Animal Behavior. The book is undergoing an interesting metamorphosis, from a weird hybrid between an academic book and a book for broad audiences to one that is more squarely in the “trade” or “popular science” category. We still believe that academics will get a lot out of it! The book is metamorphosing in parallel with me getting further away from academia and becoming someone who works with academics from the outside. Even though it’s only been a month since I officially left academia, it’s much easier for me to see now what parts of the book were written for academics vs. for people outside of academia. Indeed, the most clear indication that we hadn’t previously been clear enough about the book’s audience was that we were wildly inconsistent across the book about who the word “we” referred to. So Step One of this revision was to comb through 70,000+ words (thank you Ctrl+F!) to search for the word “we,” think carefully about the work that the word was doing in different sentences and paragraphs, and try to bring more coherence to it all.
Which then leads me to wonder–how careful am I about who I mean when I say “we” in general? Do I feel differently about who “we” is when I’m at the grocery store vs. an out-there music show vs. deep in the woods? Something I’ll be paying attention to in the coming days.
Until soon, <3.
Ambika Kamath 