This is a short episode to kick off the new Season of the Changing Academic Life podcast series.

Looking forward to bringing some great conversations coming on a range of topics fro reforming research assessment, burnout and neurodiversity.

A new website will be coming very soon!

You can access all the latest episodes via this link that will connect you to your favourite podcast player. And don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already to be sure you don’t miss any episodes!

Welcome to Changing Academic Life. I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick, and this is a podcast series where academics and others share their stories, provide ideas, and provoke discussions about what we can do individually and collectively to change academic life for the better.

Welcome to season four. For the changing academic life podcast. I trust that you've had a good summer for the Northern hemisphere people and a good winter for the Southern hemisphere people. And for many of us in the Northern hemisphere we're starting back in the, with the academic year, And so this is a motivation for kick-starting the new season of the podcast. And I'm looking forward to bringing you some great conversations and discussions this season about how we can individually and collectively change academic life for the better. And also just to share more stories so that we can see the diversity of ways in which we can be academics and play out our careers. As well as recognizing that we're not the only ones dealing with particular issues and challenges.

So I said in the episode at the end of seasons three, that this would be, there would be some transitions over the summer. And some of the work that we've been doing is moving to new platforms in support of the backend processes about how we process the audios and do the transcriptions and so on. And hopefully that will result in some better quality audio for you. We've also been doing some work, creating new logos as hopefully you will have already seen and thanks to Dara Emerson for her support on this.

There will be a new website coming as well. It's not in place yet as always happens with these things, but hopefully it will be soon. So we are in a bit of a state of ongoing transition at the moment with. The content on the old websites still there and not yet moved over to a new website, but that, that will happen. So there may be a little bit of a. Discontinuity in some of the access to the materials. But we'll do our best to make it as smooth as possible.

[

The first one that will be coming out next week is with Karen Stroobants. And Karen has been very much involved in the European initiatives for the coalition for advancing research assessment. And that's called CoARA.

And she talks about some of the challenges with the current approaches to research assessments and some of the costs of that. That motivates why we need reformed research assessment and to change research culture. She talks about what's involved in that initiative. And how we might help contribute to making change happening through that. And she reflects on her own experiences as an academic. Who's had a very interesting career transition into more policy areas. So that's certainly a conversation to look forward to.

Another conversation that will be coming is very much tied up with one of the motivations for why we need To reform research assessment more generally. And that's because of the real human costs of our current systems that are just not working and just not sustainable in the demands that they put on people. And the. The ongoing continuous of competitive pressure to. To produce and do more and more. And here we have someone who will share their very personal journey of burnout. And I found this a very touching, very sobering, and also in ways, very inspiring discussion.

And I have various others lined up that. We'll be talking to and bringing to you. And in between, I may also do some of my own reflections and musings on some of the topics that have been coming up or some topics that have been relevant to maybe things that are going on in my career. As I navigate my own personal transition.

As part of the ongoing episodes. I also want to thank the people who sent suggestions of names for people, other people that I could talk to. I really have appreciated that. And I'm in the process of following up on many of those. And if you do have any further suggestions, I'm always looking out for new ideas, new people to talk to.

So looking forward to bringing you season four and all the episodes and discussions here. The privilege of being able to give voice to people's stories. The feedback that I hear from people about the impact that these stories have on them. Makes the effort involved in doing this really worthwhile. I had some discussions at a conference last week that I was at, where some people just particularly mentioned the podcast and how helpful it was.

So you, the listener really important part of this podcast and also really key to how we make academia better. How we change academic culture for the better. So I'd really encourage you to think about subscribing if you haven't already and also sharing the podcast with people that you work with or taking any particular episodes that connect and looking at how you might. Use them as the basis for a conversation with people that you work with. Just to honor, I think as well. The vulnerability and the honesty and the generosity of the people who have shared their stories here.

Welcome to season four and let's continue to make academia a better place, a better research environment, more collaborative, collegial culture in which we can really do great science together and really make an impact.

You can find the summary notes, a transcript, and related links for this podcast on www. changingacademiclife. com. You can also subscribe to Changing Academic Life on iTunes,, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. And you can follow Change Acad Life on Twitter. And I'm really hoping that we can widen the conversation about how we can do academia differently.