For those of us with interdisciplinary interests and concerns that go beyond our expertise, academia can be a lonely place. PLAN offers a great way to connect with others who have wide-ranging intellectual curiosity about the human predicament and our interrelated socio-environmental crises.
It’s also a great way to learn about different subjects, meet new friends, build networks, find collaborators, and more.
As a relatively new entity, PLAN is still expanding what it offers to its academic members. This page provides a brief overview of PLAN benefits.
Other Members
Perhaps the biggest advantage of PLAN is the connection it fosters between scholars from a diverse range of fields—perhaps leading to productive new collaborations. Members are able to view the member directory, see member profiles (showing, among other things, rankings and rationales for various concerns connected to planetary limits), and interact via some of the mechanisms listed below—the associated functionality becoming available to logged-on members.
Seminars and Discussions
PLAN is holding monthly interactive seminars via Zoom that give members opportunities to grapple with a question posed by the speaker in small groups, in addition to whole-audience discussion. A week after the seminar, we hold an informal discussion using GatherTown, allowing free-form discussions and mingling. This is where PLAN folks get to know each other and might strike up joint explorations.
Online Forum
The PLAN site hosts a forum for members to share ideas, reading recommendations, propose scholarly projects, react to news events, etc.
Resource Library
The public can see the Resource Library and aggregate ratings, but members can see who rated the items, and their brief accounts of the positive and negative attributes of each resource. Members may also add new resources, so that PLAN members and the broader public might be made aware of valuable resources through which to become better acquainted with planetary limits concerns.
A Chance to Guide PLAN
PLAN governance is flexible and non-hierarchical. Those who wish can get involved in shaping PLAN’s direction and contributing to its success.
Take the Next Step
The benefits described here are in the context of PLAN Members and Collaborators. These membership categories are described on the Join page, which also provides paths for either signing up as a Subscriber or applying to become a Member.