Designing a collective prototype of future tropical and subtropical science
The future tropical scientist in the field! Amazing artwork by Tanya Strydom.
The world is constantly changing, but the way we do science is not. While there’s space for reimagining our future, there’s space for transformation. We must take a time now to think about the future we want to have.
Being a scientist from a tropical or subtropical country is a unique experience, with its own challenges and opportunities, but it is often normalized that a successful scientific career can not be pursued in our home countries. As a hyper-diverse region, it is important to acknowledge the equally diverse stories behind each scientist so we can understand the history and redesign the future of an inclusive global science.
This session aims at promoting a collaborative speculation experiment to prototype the future of the next generation of tropical scientists. To do that we will combine stories from the past, provided by you in one of our surveys, and participants’ creativity to reflect on, and redesign your stories during our ATBC session.
Together, we will assess the diversity of challenges and opportunities frequently hidden in tropical science, while envisioning a strategy to diminish the challenges and potentialize the opportunities. We will also collectively transform these stories about the future into guidelines, and identify what can be done from now on to rewrite the next generation’s story in our home countries.
Keep an eye on this website as we will add the resulting products of this session here around August 2021!
Help us reimagine the future!
We invite you to help us in this task by answering our survey. It can take as short as three minutes, or as long as you feel like! Please consider sharing your story with us if you:
Are an early career researcher (ECR). This usually means that you are a grad student, a researcher that graduated up to a few years ago, or even a new PI (first year or so). We are very open about this definition. If you are not sure if you can be considered an ECR for this matter, feel free to contact us!
Grew up in a tropical or sub-tropical country.
If you need inspiration, take a look at your hosts’ stories in their native languages!
You can answer the survey in English, French, Portuguese or Spanish!
Please chose the link correspondent to the language you want to use in your answers:
Join uuuussszzzz!!!
Let’s discuss how the future will look like!
The session will last one hour and will have basically a three-step structure:
Learn! Take a look at other people’s anonymous stories.
Remix! What could have been different in the stories you’ve read?
Design! Build a prototype of the future of tropical ecology!
More information about the session can be found here. If you are interested, go to the ATBC Meeting webpage to register!