Emerging collaborative resources for young urbanists and scholars

3 min. read

There is an emerging trend within academia, and particularly amongst young academics, to collaborate more freely and produce alternative ways to engage with pressing issues. Equally, there is a great effort to "lower" the barriers of the ivory tower and provide more friendly, accessible, yet still rigorous ways to enter the academic world. From the opportunity to publish preprints for rapid discussion, dissemination and engagement in platforms such as SSRN or PLOS ONE, to experimental spaces for open access academic publishing like Academia Letters.

Within AESOP Young Academics we want to contribute to this emerging trend for the urban studies disciplines, and this is why Mennatullah Hendawy, member of our coordination team, has developed two very interesting collaborative initiatives:

The first one, a private (and growing) Facebook group for urban scholars "Co-Author a Research Paper" an initiative that aims to connect researchers to write together research papers to produce beneficial and impactful knowledge. Also aiming to share calls for papers and allow for a safe space for reviewing your co-authorship experience.

The second one, a Researchers' HUB on Medium ,with the aim of helping beneficial knowledge production, transfer, and equitable consumption. Check out their first article on a very quick guide of how to find academic PhD/MSc scholarships and positions, a collaborative resource that early graduates and soon-to-be scholars will certainly appreciate a lot.

Stay tuned with this blog and AESOP YA, as we are going to engage with more of these emerging collaborative resources. It is our goal to position AESOP YA as one of those spaces for collaborative discussion and alternative dissemination of what's happening within the exciting world of urbanism scholarship.

For the time being, please remember that this blog is also a collaborative space, we are happy to publish informed reflections from academics, practitioners, activists and so on in the form of short text and other innovative formats. As a forum for sharing experience and ideas, the blog of the AESOP Young Academics network enables everyone to learn from each other about issues that pertain to spatial planning in both academia, practice, community development and activism.

Besides traditional blog posts, we also highly encourage innovative formats such as, but not limited to: podcasts, video abstracts, 3 minute sprints, artistic contributions, infographics, and so on. 

The YA blog is a unique outlet for the AESOP community at large and beyond, so please check our call for contributions and guidelines and join the conversation!