🍎your Scholarly Digest 6th March, 2025

Academia essentials hand-picked fortnightly for the informed scholar

Image Courtesy: National Gallery of Art, Washington

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Hey Scholar, here's what we have for you this week:

• PhD and postdoctoral opportunities 🇦🇺 🇬🇧 🇳🇱 🇩🇰;

• Is research a completely human endeavour (and we’re not talking about animals);

• Are chemistry professors really paid more than anthropologists?

• Social science for national security loses funding;

and other carefully curated distractions from your actual work.

Brain Food

Is Research a Completely Human Endeavor?

In one sense, research is undeniably human—it begins with innately human faculties like imagination, creativity, judgment, insight - the list goes on. It is also aimed at advancing human society. Both of these taken together might be enough to argue that research is a human endeavour. But is that all there is to research?

Researchers are always embedded in material contexts that shape not only how they conduct research but also what they study and how their findings take shape. The relationships that produce knowledge in research are rarely confined to human interactions alone. Research often engages with phenomena that are not exclusively human and relies on instruments, materials, and environments that are just as integral to knowledge production.*

This article offers several examples of how scientific research is shaped by forces beyond the individual researcher. The discovery of green fluorescent protein (GFP) transformed biological research—but only because certain jellyfish happened to produce it in the first place. Likewise, the 1989 Jackson Laboratory fire didn’t just destroy infrastructure; it wiped out entire strains of mice, disrupting research trajectories for years. Whether through the destruction of lab animals in a fire, the commercial availability of chemical probes dictating which proteins biologists study, or the rise of fraudulent research fueled by systemic incentives, things - nonhuman factors - often play a decisive role in shaping scientific inquiry. And yet, despite arguing that knowledge is "inexorably shaped by the material and practical constraints of its societal context," the article is ironically titled "The Scientific Enterprise is a Human Enterprise."

If being "human" in our scientific endeavors means being thoroughly intertwined with the material and nonhuman world, then perhaps research is a human endeavor. But we would do well to remember that this does not mean our processes of knowledge production exist independently of the material world we share with other things. Research is human—but never purely so.

*One might argue that these tools are still designed and made by humans—and while this is true, it overlooks the fact that such creations depend on the properties and affordances of the materials themselves. For example, a microscope is only possible because glass can be shaped into lenses that refract light in a particular way. Similarly, the development of AI models relies on silicon for computation and water for cooling, both of which impose limits and possibilities beyond human control.

RESOURCES

Teaching AI, Thinking Critically

The question of how to incorporate AI into pedagogical practices is just as important as concerns about its role in knowledge production. This article offers practical strategies for teaching with AI, including addressing its limitations in the classroom, encouraging critical thinking, and developing your own AI literacy. You may be looking for ways to help students better understand AI’s limitations (and think critically about its use), or struggling with these questions yourself; in either case you’ll find the strategies in this article particularly useful. Although the second article primarily focuses on schools in the US, its principles can be adapted for higher education more broadly.

NEWS

The Minerva Research Initiative Gets Funding Cut

The Minerva Research Initiative, a project funded by the U.S. government that provided funding to social sciences research with implications for national security, is the latest research funding body in the U.S. to have funding disrupted. The Minerva Initiative is part of the Department of Defence and was set up following the realization that military capacity alone is not enough to anticipate or manage international challenges in the modern world. Previous projects have investigated how Colombian drug cartels recruit new members and how climate change may lead to armed conflict over access to fish stocks, instead of the development of weapons or military strategy. Several grants that had already been awarded have been terminated, stopping projects in their tracks, with more cuts feared to come.

Opportunities

Funded PhDs, Postdocs and academic job openings

• Postdoc and Academic Positions at The University of Adelaide, Australia: click here

• Postdoc and Academic Positions at University of Sussex, UK: click here

• PhD Positions in Wageningen University, Netherlands: click here

• PhD Positions in University of Copenhagen, Denmark: click here

KEEPING IT REAL

Dr Moneybags

We all have a terrible habit of measuring scholarship with money. Research impact and progress is measured in economic terms like GDP increases, and certain subject areas are ‘better’ than others because they pay more. Well, someone crunched the numbers for how much academics earn by subject and their findings are.. not what you’d expect.  

The ElbowPatchMoney blog found that in the USA for the 2022-2023 year, Anthropology Profs were paid more than Chemistry or Biology Profs and Music Profs were paid more than Mathematics Profs. Maybe there’s no need to improve your statistics skills after all, maybe it’s time to pick up the flute.

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