The Hedgehog and the Fox

This week, we have a returning guest to the podcast, Oxford professor of geography Danny Dorling, who spoke to me recently about his new book Slowdown. Danny has given his book one of those subtitles that clearly map out the terrain he intends to cover: The End of the Great Acceleration—and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives.

You may currently be feeling at best ambivalent about the idea of slowdown, with so many of us are enduring a Covid-19-enforced pause and desperate to know when we might get back up to normal speed.

Danny’s message is not that humanity collectively needs to slam on the brakes, but that slowdown in many aspects of modern life (though not quite all) is already happening, and we need to think about its consequences, and potential.

In our day-to-day lives we may fail to see it, he suggests, but look at the patterns in the data and slowdown becomes visible. As he puts it in his opening pages, “An era is ending.”

But he’s not out to paint a picture of societal collapse or some dystopian regression to barbarism. In his first chapter, he writes:

There are good seasons to come, but not fertile seasons in which our numbers, inventions, and aggregate wealth grow exponentially; in fact, our numbers will very soon stop growing at all.The past few generations have seen great progress as well as great suffering, including the worst of all wars in terms of fatalities, genocides, and the most despicable of all human behaviors —including the planning and construction required for the mass nuclear annihilation of our species.It may take us some time to accept that we now face a future of fewer discoveries, fewer new gizmos, and fewer “great men.” But is this such a bitter pill to swallow? We will also see fewer despots, less destruction, and less extreme poverty.And we will never again worship the “creative destruction” that twentieth-century economists so stupidly lauded at the height of the great acceleration.

So for Dorling, slowdown is (potentially) a good thing: not only better than headlong acceleration, but our only hope of continuing to inhabit this planet. Not a guarantee of utopia, but a prospect of some sort of stable, sustainable life.

Danny Dorling, at home and podcast-ready, April 2020

But if slowdown sets the context, it doesn’t determine the political choices that will have to be made. And so much of what we believe about our lives and our world is still about quickening change, the need to keep up or be left behind, the obligation to produce more or be found wanting. We’re not imaginatively well-equipped to deal with the idea of slowdown. Canadian premier Justin Trudeau put it like this in 2018:

Think about it: The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again.

That’s the strongly ingrained perception that Danny is challenging in his book, and that’s where we started our conversation.

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Hedgehog & Fox

This week we have an interview with Amy Brand, who for the past four years has been director of the MIT Press. In a recent Q&A that appeared on the Scholarly Kitchen, Amy said of her role at the MIT press:

The job is a perfect fit for me because it builds on my experiences beyond publishing in academic science, university administration and research startups.

In our conversation, we talk about the changes Amy has made at the press and how she sees them against the wider context of the publishing and scholarly landscape. Amy's appointment in 2015, in fact, marked a return to the MIT press, as she'd been their executive editor in cognitive science and linguistics from 1994 to 2000. Between those appointments, Amy's career included a number of years at Harvard University, first as program manager of the Office for Scholarly Communication and then as assistant provost for faculty appointments and information.

When I spoke to Amy on the phone, I began by remarking that I'd noticed she was producing a documentary, so she was clearly interested in a wide range of ways of presenting knowledge beyond the traditional university press categories.

Amy Brand

Very, very much so. You know, that dates back to the experience I had as an editor at the MIT press in the '90s. The director of the press at the time, Frank Urbanowski, was, I would say, ahead of his time in terms of thinking about the potential for digital media in relation to scholarship. We were one of the first presses – along with Columbia University Press – to begin to really invest in online communities and specific subject areas. For us, it was cognitive science, which was my area as a PhD and also as an editor; for Columbia was political science. And I became fascinated with how we could translate the work that was going on in the academy for a broad audience and build in opportunities for immersion beyond your typical journal article or monograph in terms of the genre of the information. So that set me down that path. I had been an acquisitions editor here for about seven years before I left in 1999/2000 and that experience is what led me away from MIT initially, because I became so interested in digital publishing.

Hedgehog & Fox

Going all the way back to undergraduate work, you studied linguistics. Am I reading too much into it to see that interest in deep structures and connections that that linguists are involved in as something that's a thread running through your interests subsequently?

Amy Brand

Not at all. I think that I've very much stayed true to this interest in how language conveys information, how the mind structures language. And I see what university presses do and what publishers do is about that very path from text to knowledge. And so I see a great deal of continuity between my earlier interests and what I do now.

Hedgehog & Fox

But unlike some directors of university presses, you stepped outside the university press world. You were for a number of years an assistant provost at Harvard University. So I guess there must have come a point where you had to decide, do I want to step back into the university press world? Or, given that there are lots of questions about what his future holds, you might have decided, no, there are other areas that will absorb and retain my interest outside that world. But you made the conscious, very specific decision to come back.

Amy Brand

Yes. You know, I again see a lot of continuity in that. The Harvard story is a little bit different. What happened was, I left the MIT Press where I'd been an editor. I went to work at Crossref, which I am is an organization I'm still very involved in as a board member. And I feel very strongly about how it's transformed scholarly information. But when I was working at Crossref, that was sort of the start of the open access fervour. And a friend of mine, someone that I had known for my academic days, who was a professor at Harvard, reached out and said, ‘I'm starting this office for scholarly communication.’ That's when I left Crossref to go help start up the off...

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Tony Crowley’s new Liverpool English Dictionary is a treasure trove for anyone interested in the rich variety of spoken and written language found in this country. I suspect that even... Read More

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This week, another interview in the series of Conversations with Translators. My guest is Meredith McKinney, a translator from Japanese whose anthology of classical Japanese travel writing was published in Penguin Classics at the end of last year.

I was alerted to her book by an excellent review of it by PD Smith in the Guardian:

‘In this remarkable work of translation and scholarship, filled with wonderful vignettes of Japanese life and sensibility, McKinney introduces readers to the nation’s rich and unique literary tradition.’

The anthology takes the story of Japanese literature up to the late 17th century and the poet Basho, who wrote The Narrow Road to the Deep North, having begun around a thousand years earlier. In this interview, Meredith explained that the Western reader needs to set aside certain preconceptions of what travel writing is in approaching her book:

We think of travel writing really as writing about adventure; the traveller going off and witnessing new things, discovering new things about themselves and other people and other places. Newness is probably the essence of what we think about in travel writing, whereas this travel writing is hugely about its own tradition: going back and touching the things that earlier travellers had touched was really the touchstone, as it were, of so much of this writing.

Meredith lived and taught in Japan for around twenty years, then returned to Australia in 1998 and now lives near the small town of Braidwood, in south-eastern New South Wales. She is currently an honorary associate professor at the Japan Centre, Australian National University.

The post Conversations with Translators: Meredith McKinney appeared first on The Hedgehog and the Fox.

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