The Neuroethics Blog is Retiring
By Karen Rommelfanger
Dearest Readers,
Since 2011, we’ve consistently been able to offer weekly and timely conversations at the intersection of neuroscience and society. More importantly, we’ve been able to feature established and future luminaries in the field from senior faculty to high school scholars. Our little blog has grown to a readership of over 100 countries, been featured in reports to US Presidents, and included in written roadmaps discussing the future of neuroethics for large-scale national level brain initiatives. While initially established as a university program blog, it has grown to be the online content partner for AJOB Neuroscience, the Society for Neuroscience, and for the International Neuroethics Society.
We’ve enjoyed working with each author from doing minor editing and copyediting to assisting new writers to the space of neuroethics (whether established scholar unfamiliar with neuroethics, or aspiring neuroethics scholar) find their voices and develop their neuroethics scholarship. We’ve also created freely available readers such as The Black Mirror Reader and other best-of compilations. Our team is largely comprised of trainees from the undergraduate to graduate level hailing from diverse disciplines from the humanities to the sciences. Over the years, our internal team has worked tirelessly to ensure weekly content of the highest caliber was offered to our readers. This experience offered not only a training experience for them but also an opportunity to create new networks with new voices for the blog and for the broader neuroethics community.
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Image by Negative Space via StockSnap |
The pandemic has given us new considerations. The blog is a labor of love and the pandemic has made that labor more challenging. Our blog received no financial resources which, on one hand, did allow us to be free of any undue influence from financial collaborators, but also made growing and expanding challenging. Blogs and online outlets have opportunities to incorporate new media, to move beyond text. In addition, what’s increasingly clear from the pandemic is how much need there is for publics to be able to critically analyze and understand evolving science. The state of the art of communication about science and its social implications has evolved to establish more robust forms of public engagement. Public engagement moves beyond broadcast style, uni-directional flows of information to forums of mutual exchange and dialogue. We hope the next phases of online forums for neuroethics will be led by people who have the drive and resources to make such dialogue possible.
In the coming weeks, you will hear from other members of our blog management team who will express their lessons learned and hopes for what opportunities may take shape after The Neuroethics Blog retires. While we have an evolving roster of dedicated blog editors, we are now at a point where our leadership team will soon be graduating, off to residency, graduate school, and jobs in the real world. They will collectively share their lessons learned as well as hopes for the future and for the neuroethics community. As for me, I will share my future plans in the closing post for the blog.
I sincerely thank you all for your continued readership and contributions. My personal and professional growth as well as that of our blog editing team have been directly tied to The Neuroethics Blog, for which we are forever grateful. I look forward to crossing paths with you in the future and for what collaborations the future brings.
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Want to cite this post?
Rommelfanger, K. (2021). The Neuroethics Blog is Retiring. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on , from http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2021/09/the-neuroethics-blog-is-retiring.html