Middleword

You are holding a Zine, a compilation including traces of multitudes of research paths. It offers sketches, seams, crumbs, and sprouts. These outgrow norms of modern science and fail to comply with given boundaries of academic texts. They do not bring academic positionings.

It would be tempting to say that this Zine needs no explanations – because it is like a researcher’s curiosity which has led each one of us to academic paths – organic in nature. Paradoxically, however, we must say just this: there’s a need to liberate research – the studying and the analysis – from the tight mould in which it has been pressed; this pressing has in many cases reduced its makers into quiet servants of scientific and academic institutions. This need is a part of our “why”. 

In this publication, academic crumbs are offered by actual, flesh-and-blood people reflecting on their work and expressing its consequential experiences, feelings, and thoughts in a multitude of ways. It does good for the researcher to rehearse alternative modes of reporting, such as experimenting with means outside of the usual nonfiction prose which is cut in the fashion of disciplinary customs and traditional science communications. New ways to work bring new light on us and our work: why this subject or theme to my study was chosen? What was important about it? How did the studying happen, and what did it feel like? What thoughts did then awake in me? How did the researched field relate to me – were the participants interested at all? What else did I bring about, besides my intended results? Who am I now, and who am I becoming as I go on this path (of research and life)?

Zine offered us a format for challenging the customary ways of producing information. It allowed us to try on different styles of expression, suitable for different researcher-hoods, and different aesthetics related to research reporting. It was a new genre for all of us. We did look at other zines, but spent no great time with preparations, but rather understood this format as a free, wild, and permissive terrain. It appeared to us as a self-determined, even exuberant way to express the things that make us human researchers, with body and feeling. Experimenting in forms of expression is experimenting in forms of thought. Here, too, was another reason for stepping outside the usual: representations of what is research and how it’s reported tend to define – over time – what we humans take for reality.

This Zine has its origins in the discussions held at the Study Circle for Practice Theories (Käytäntöteorian opintopiiri, KOP). It was born on the ruins of yet another academic institutional fusion, the one of Aalto University in Finland in 2013. The study circle was inspired by the participants’ interest in the intertwining of “practice” and “theory”, and the related history of thought. It also answered a more personal need in its participants to reflect on their own academic work, the meaningfulness of which many found was being tested. The activity at KOP has characteristically consisted of identifying and cultivating that which is good in our work. Over the years, KOP has grown to a safe and inviting haven, as well as a source of empowerment for its participants. It has offered a place for practising the arts of thinking, sharing, and doing while furthering various kinds of research. It has also served academic activism.

Academia – science, research, the scholarly world – appears to us as diverse and polyphonic. We do not strive for a single set of skills or assets to “make it” in this world. In fact, we haven’t improved anybody’s career achievements or personal fame, the so called goods of effectiveness in research. Instead, KOP seems to be an open place for joint wonder, learning, and meaningful cooperation, things identifiable as goods of excellence in research. Many academics have found in KOP a kind of place of freedom, and a home from which to reach out and see the possibilities for doing things differently on the outside as well.

We have paid attention to how we operate. Meetings, preferably in person, were intentionally designed to be welcoming for all those interested in practice theories – be they novices or experts, representing this or that discipline, feeling in the heights of insight or out of clue. We kept them clear of academic show off. We have indeed challenged each other’s thoughts, but not by the all-too-common way of competition as an end value, in which others’ faults are dug out, and their merits are left unnoticed. We see that behaviour as a perversion of academic truth seeking. Our options have led us towards dialog rather than debate.

To people outside the Academia, it may be surprising that researchers in our day quite commonly fear for the freedom of science. Please, do not take this as a sign of professional lobbying. From the point of view of peace and democracy, the idea of a world without Academia is terrifying, if you take a moment to think about it. Academic autonomy can also crumble down slowly; and indeed its independence has been compromised many times during history. Before the time of industrial leaders, universities were directed by ecclesiastic powers and national interests. Even the seemingly free Victorian gentleman scientists were biassed by their unnoticed elitist interests and bonds. Today, research is a tool for industrial and commercial gain, or for geopolitics – at least if you ask the powerful.

We are not content merely to complain. We concretise our critique by looking at things from the angle of everyday activities, through the eyes of those who actually do academic work. With our voices and activism, we want to develop self-reliant practices, self-reflection leading to critical thinking, engage in clement and gentle discussion, slow science, engaged/struggle-based research, personal growth as researchers, the surpassing of criteria in excellence, and the curious and respectful border going at territorial (disciplinary) limits. The research we want to bring about is constantly striving towards independence, aware of its situatedness, honest, and transparent.

Today, we must ask: what does research depend on, and what should it depend on? Can we still believe that academic institutions serve those goods they were founded to serve – or that people over time started to trust they would serve? A Zine can be one manifestation of resistance, as both quiet and creative.

We have found it surprisingly easy to make this compilation as a group of academics and artists, as scholars, doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers, educators, teachers, earth caretakers, various kinds of experts and novices, and social activists. We produced a paper version of the Zine. One copy was on display in the university library, just as Finnish dissertations are displayed before their defence – the public had a free opportunity to examine the work.

We made an empassioned argument.

Despite the present degradation of freedom of research and civilization, we do not wish to drum despair. Hope is a matter of timing. We hold on to our dream of another kind of university. Our dream awaits for opportunity in the faculty backrooms, in disciplines declared unnecessary, in the textbooks removed from the library, in the bodies of researchers laid off, in the innocent questions of new students, in the emotions of researcher-teachers who work under performance management and close control.

Beyond this Zine, we struggle for our dreams every day – working and building the future. We struggle to give oxygen to our internal dialog, at least sometimes, amid the mounds of research publications and expert statements. Thus, we could help the students and all citizens to participate in the tradition of critical thinking, dialogues, and reflexivity. We aim that new generations could assimilate, grow, and continue our work – the long orientation of humankind that rests upon play and grows out of curiosity.

That is why we made the MetabolismiZine.