Challenges that Early Career Researchers Face in Academic Research and Publishing

the academic community. Yet, in some respects, they occupy a selectively inferior niche due to structural constraints, as well as personal and professional limitations. ECRs, who are at an initial stage of their careers, face multiple challenges in research and publishing due to a relative lack of experience. These may make them vulnerable to abuse and cause stress and anxiety. Those challenges may have been amplified in the COVID-19 era. ECRs' efforts may unfairly boost the reputation of their mentors and/or supervisors (Matthew Effect), so greater credit equity is needed in research and publishing. This opinion paper provides a broad appreciation of the struggles that ECRs face in research and publishing. This paper also attempts to identify extraneous factors that might make ECRs professionally more vulnerable in the COVID-19 era than their established seniors. ECRs may find it difficult to establish a unique career path that embraces creativity and accommodates their personal or professional desires. This is because they may encounter a rigid research and publishing environment that is dominated by a structurally determined status quo. The role of ECRs' supervisors is essential in guiding ECRs in a scholarly volatile environment, allowing them to adapt to it. ECRs also need to be conscientious of the constantly evolving research and publishing landscape, the importance of open science and reproducibility, and the risks posed by spam and predatory publishing. Flexibility, sensitivity, creativity, adaptability, courage, good observational skills, and a focus on research and publishing integrity are key aspects that will hold ECRs in good stead on their scientific career path in a post-COVID-19 era.

Geosocialities, Flow and Renewal in Microbial Rivers

This article draws on interview data and insights from environmental studies and somatic therapy to argue for the significance of thinking ‘with rivers’ in order to reaffirm human and nonhuman entanglements in the current challenges presented by anthropogenic devastation. River microbial communities are unintelligible and complex entities due to their unclear origin and continuous flow downstream. The account of one environmental scientist is presented to consider how the metaphors of movement used in the riverine context assist in exploring the complicated dynamics of fluid communities facing constantly changing environments I call ‘microbial rivers’. A pollution incident affecting a UK river, where microbial communities responded by growing in number and activity, further illustrates the intersection of communities and ecosystems in their adaptation to troubling human interventions. Engaging with somatic understandings of trauma, this article proposes thinking with flow as a possibility to reimagine the capacity for renewal when experiencing debilitating adversities, thus countering apocalyptic responses of immobility in the face of environmental destruction and inviting novel opportunities for growth for human and nonhuman communities.

Teacher’s Autoethnography

Literature has explored education and its values, highlighting the significance of experience in learning. However, a paucity of research has investigated the importance of teachers’ lifelong experiences in shaping their views toward education. Employing a collaborative autoethnographic methodology, this study attempts to provide insights into the significance of teachers’ lifelong experiences in shaping their views and their teacher identity. The narratives highlight the influence of the living environment and life events in shaping worldviews, along with affirmation of the individual’s agency in self-regulation. A dynamic accumulation of various lifelong experiences like losing Author 1’s father, war, and harassment at school shaped his teacher identity. Understanding the significance of this process helps teachers to appreciate their experiences and recognise their role in shaping students’ views and identifies. In conclusion, teachers’ socially constructed identity shapes their educational perspectives, reminding them of teachers’ role in shaping students’ experiences. This knowledge could be valuable in future teacher education programs and developing educational material for learners.

Question of Time for Norbert Elias

Norbert Elias is one of the great scholars who calls attention to the need for interdisciplinary studies related to actual societies’ challenges. He was one of the precursors of ‘Figurational Sociology,’ through which human relations are studied in a processual way (micro and macro-social aspects). Elias's focus was to understand these concepts, not as a state of fixed and immutable things, but to understand them in terms of their process. In this report, it is pointed out that the ‘civilizing process’ ended up imposing on individuals a greater number of activities as well as greater dependence and complexity in the social relations network. Such factors required a common denominator to regulate such relationships. In this case, the denominator was called ‘time’. By studying time, we may contribute to correct this erroneous image of a world with watertight compartments such as nature, society, and individuals. These are mixed and interdependent and require an interdisciplinary approach. Interdisciplinary studies of time and what to expect of the future are still waiting to being done.

Genetic Food Futures

The aim of this article is to offer an answer to the question: How can we improve public engagement in the genetically modified organisms debate? It will describe the models of Public Understanding of Science and Public Engagement with Science. Public Understanding of Science dates back to the 1970s and is intended to create a relationship between science and people through education. The UK’s House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology introduced the Public Engagement with Science model in 2000. Public Engagement with Science calls for a dialogue between scientists and society, enabling science to be questioned. These models have been used in the past with controversial issues such as GM organisms, although not always successfully. The article concludes by proposing the Genetically Modified Organism Consortium. This proposal is based on the idea of engaging more voices in the debate, and offers a global, national and local response.

Fiction as Therapy

The Unnamable (1953) shows the breakdown of the Cartesian Cogito in a post-war soulless world in which its inhabitants suffer from disconnectedness. When the speaker’s consciousness breaks down and is no longer able to attribute the projections of its own consciousness to the self, he becomes incapable of ascertaining his own agency, authority and existence; hence the dissolution of the Cartesian Cogito. The condition is further exacerbated when the speaker who hears unattributable, disembodied authoritative voices finds himself in a universe where there is no one else to ascertain one’s existence. The sense of agency is therefore lost. Yet, the speaker, as in the fashion of AVATAR therapy for people with schizophrenia, attempts in writing, turning the voices into characters and stories and entering a dialogue with them to overcome his ontological insecurity in a universe that is generated out of his head and yet achieves an uncanny kind of independence. In other words, it is a therapeutic attempt to put the dismantled elements back into place in order to overcome the consequent ontological insecurity that this dissolution generates. This is done through a kind of quasi-corporeality that Steven Connor calls ‘the vocalic body.’ Nevertheless, as this paper argues, although being able to substantialise the voices, the Unnamable is still wavering between mediumship (being the medium of others’ voices) and agency.

A Tasty Encounter with Routine Dynamics Ideas

On Friday 9th April 2021, I attended my first conference with the Routine Dynamics research community. As an interested newcomer to this scene, the event inspired some personal reflections for my own work. To go beyond these personal benefits though, I was also inspired to share the new thinking and wider research directions from this research encounter, with our Exchanges readership. The emerging thoughts and practices from the Routines Dynamics community seems to be a welcoming and inclusive oasis, in the latticework of ideas being developed across our natural, social, and humanities worlds of scholarship. What follows is my attempt to make a little difference to the work of colleagues, in sharing the impact of this intellectual encounter for a wider audience. In reflecting on the events of this conference, I was guided by Johnson (2018)’s suggestions for possible structure and content for this type of article (as distinct and different from original empirical contributions).

An Assessment of the Visual Appropriateness of Selected Brand Logos

This paper focuses on assessing the appropriateness of selected logos of popular brands. The paper enunciates the relevance of logos to the public perception of brands. Logos function as signifiers, denotative, point of contact and identifiers. The visual components of logos and the suggestive meanings of shapes which are the building blocks of the pictorial contents are articulated in this study. Thirty (30) logos of popular brands were purposively selected and subjected to the analysis of Eighty (80) people constituting thirty (30) formally trained practicing graphic designers, ten (10) experienced printers and forty (40) individuals who are familiar with the selected brands. The collated data were analyzed using the Statistical Package of Social Science (SPSS). Findings revealed that logos are visual seals that communicate brand promises to the targeted audience, viewers recall simple logos more easily and logos crammed with colours are not appealing. The study recommended that visual contents of logos should resonate balance, application colours in logos should be limited to two and logos design should be a product of a sound brand strategy.

Twenty is Plenty

In this introductory editorial, the journal's Editor-in-Chief reflects back on reaching the milestone 20th issue of Exchanges, at the end of a busy publication year. The piece moves on to introduce each of the articles in the issue in turn, providing a brief summary of each piece. Next the open calls for abstracts and papers are highlighted, with the current 'plurality of translation' special issue call given particular attention. After looking forward to future issues, and acknowledging the title's supporters, the editorial closes by highlighting the ways readers and contributors can engage in ongoing conversations with the journal and its editorial team.

Best Practice versus Reality

COVID-19 was repeatedly labelled ‘unprecedented’. In unprecedented times, we rethink conventional wisdoms. This short article explores oral history, an important element of the Then & Now student-led research project explored in this Special Issue, with such rethinking in mind. Then & Now’s alumni interviews had to be conducted remotely but remote oral history interviews are not universally popular. The Oral History Society (OHS) is hesitant and suggested postponing interviews, reflecting best practice concerns about rapport-building, audio quality and archiving, data protection and security, and community building. For groups like the Disability Visibility Project (DVP) and oral historians like Sarah Dziedzic, remote interviewing is the only viable method and ideals of best practice are too rigid. For oral history to uncover the experiences of those disregarded by conventional histories, access to it and its employment as a research tool should be as universal as possible. This article examines and questions best practice guidelines in light of the pandemic and the experiences of the DVP and historians such as Dziedzic. It draws on personal experience of interviewing and from the Then & Now project. This article argues that oral history, an inherently fieldwork-based activity, needs to take remote interviewing as seriously as face-to-face interviewing to become more widely accessible and sufficiently flexible to adapt to conditions in the field.