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This open access book shines a light on how and why academic work became entwined with air travel, and what can be done to change academia's flying habit. The starting point of the book is that flying is only one means of scholarly communication among many, and that the state of the planet now obliges us to shift to other means. How can the academic-as-globetrotter become a thing of the past? The chapters in this book respond to this call in three steps. It documents the consequences of academic flying, it investigates the issue of why academics fly, and it begins an effort to think through what can replace flying, and how. Finally, it confronts scholars and scientists, students, activists, research funders, university administrators, and others, with a call to translate this research into action.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: ending the romance of academic flying.- Chapter 2: The carbon footprint of travelling to international academic conferences and options to minimise it.- Chapter 3: The end of flying: coronavirus confinement, academic (im)mobilities and me.- Chapter 4: The absent presence of aeromobility: a case of australian academic air travel practices and university policy.- Chapter 5: How environmentally sustainable is the internationalisation of higher education? a view from australia.- Chapter 6: Who gets to fly?.- Chapter 7: Exceptionalism and evasion: how scholars reason about air travel.- Chapter 8: Academic aeromobility in the global periphery.- Chapter 9: The virus and the elephant in the room: knowledge, emotions and a pandemic - drivers to reducing flying in academia.- Chapter 10: Decarbonising academia's flyout culture.- Chapter 11: Aeromobilities and academic work.- Chapter 12: Means and meanings of research collaboration in the face of a suffering earth: a landscape of questions.- Chapter 13: Academic air travel cultures: a framework for reducing academic flying.
About the author
Kristian Bjørkdahl is a rhetoric scholar at the University of Oslo. He currently does research on the organization of science communication work, and on how the idea of Nordic colonial innocence is used rhetorically. He has been editor or co-editor of several volumes, including
Pandemics, Publics, and Politics (Palgrave, 2019).
Adrian Santiago Franco Duharte is a lawyer pursuing postgraduate study at the University of Oslo. He has experience from public-private partnerships, social and environmental dispute resolution, and infrastructure projects. He is currently conducting research on the role of social media communication in environmental disasters.
