PhotoEssays: the new website

After two years, I am closing off this environmental gateway web site and its associated enviroblog weblog. I set up environmental gateway as both a repository for research records and as a way of maintaining connections across the alumni of the Centre for Ecological Economics and Water Policy Research, closed by the University of New England via a fit of astoundingly dysfunctional, managerialist restructuring (a transdisciplinary research group such as our Centre had no place in the new vision of disciplinary silos now firmly implemented and protected by an academic research establishment with no real notion of across-disciplinary inspiration and collaborative synergy). Given that the Centre was not provided with any pathways through which to negotiate a future at its host university, it's inventory of research resources were simply cut without contemplation of how those materials might be made available to the community via a publicly assessable legacy. As the Director of that Centre, I felt those resources should be made available to those who had supported our initiative over its proud 22 year journey. I thus created the Environmental Gateway web cluster as a private initiative, at my own expense, simply to offer continued access to materials that I consider still have some positive value to the environmental and resources policy areas. Two years is enough to provide continued access to those resources so now it's time to close off the facility. This also means that the associated transdisciplinary and water gateway sites will also go.

My interest in writing around the general territory of re-imagining opportunities for dealing with the world's pressing environmental issues through across- or transdisciplinary interaction and learning remains, so I am going to keep on writing for as long as I am able. There are so many new opportunities for intellectual exchange and learning emerging through the open-communicative discourse of the internet. The future of laterally reconfigured alternatives to disciplinarily free-form learning is exciting, if not disturbing to established communicative interests. We are right on the edge of a tipping point from the old 'expertocratic' model of instruction to more interestingly collaborative, if not discursively-bracing learning frameworks. 

The key problem with the standard model of academia is its inclination to self referentialism as a setting for individual and group validation. Peer reviewed publishing is, I think, a poor option in terms of being a vehicle through which to spark new ideas and intellectual progress. But peer reviewed publishing still remains the be-all-end-all of conventional academia to this day. Personally, I could not care less  about miniscule readership, arcane, communicatively exclusive publishing. Innovative thinking is, I would suggest, poorly serviced by the conservatism and closed-shop character of an exclusive or dominant reliance upon peer self-referentialised publishing. The transdisciplinary project with which I have been engaged for 20 years or so is, or should be, all about harnessing the opportunities to be realised through breaking down disciplinary cliques to the insight and learning available through interaction with a broader, more eclectic and even discursively-disorganised pool. 

For me, my interests now turn to fulfilling my lifetime interest in communication through the synthesis of words and image. My focus is on writing and photography combined. So, I have created a new front door to the next iteration of my professional life in the form of rodericgill.com . Associated with that new internet home is my new blog: PhotoEssays . That new blog will constitute the next generation of enviroblog. Naturally, my entire bicyclism.net /bicyclism.blog adventures will continued unabated. I'd certainly appreciate the readership of envoblog travelling with me to the new PhotoEssays space. I have a few posts up and running there already.

Thanks for your interest in my 'academic projects' to date.