Conducting field courses in times of a pandemic can be challenging. In our case, we had to cancel a planned field trip in economic geography that would have taken 19 students and two advisors to the Valle Maira in the Italian province of Cuneo in the Piemont. We had planned to spend 10 days in this region to develop ideas for sustainable development of peripheral mountain regions. Students would h ...[Read More]
Virtual Meetings: Hypnotic sedative or effective stimulant?
Some people claim that teaching online courses or virtual workshops is not very different from face-to-face meetings. In my experience, however, it is much harder to sneak away secretly from a half-occupied seminar room than to withdraw from a virtual meeting where you simply mute the speaker to work on your emails located only one mouse click away. And that’s not all! In contrast to physically pr ...[Read More]
Why social inequalities matter for hydrologists?
After a few years spent at an Earth Science department researching social inequalities and hydrological extremes — i.e. floods and droughts — I have often been asked these rhetorical questions: “Isn’t it obvious that the weakest individuals or social groups suffer the most in case of extreme hydrological events? So, why should we study these inequalities?” Driven by these questions, and the years ...[Read More]
Water Researchers of Color experts in their fields
The Water Researchers of Color (WaterPOC) database is a resource that aims to add to numerous efforts in the last year to raise awareness of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC*) in science, in this case specifically multiple disciplines intersecting with water. This resource mirrors many others, such as 500 Queer Scientists and 500 Women Scientists and numerous other databases [1], whic ...[Read More]