Humans do science: Thoughts on fostering humanity in academia

I'm on leave for the next several weeks, so I have queued up a series of "reboot" posts, revisiting evergreen material from the early days of this blog and elsewhere on the interwebs.

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Behind every data point is a human (and usually several). It's long past time we reflect that in our work and communication about science. (Image: B.G. Merkle)

A lot of my writing (and advice) this year has focused on retaining our humanity as people who work in or adjacent to science and/or academia. For years, I've also written about this theme as relates to art, specifically.

It matters that we protect and foster people's ability to reflect their humanity in a lot of different ways. Perhaps one of the following perspectives will be helpful to you as you carve out some time for yourself in the next few months:

• showing yourself as part of your science

• daring to make drawings even if you don't feel like an artist

• rejecting the tradition of soulless academic writing

• finding meaning in working together, not in awards

• imagining report cards that account for us being whole humans

• why it matters so much which words we use to describe people we work with and try to share science with

• ways we can use data to make our departments more supportive for everyone

• why it's important to not see academia as a passion job