Symposium
Exactly one year ago, on 3 December 2020, in the midst of the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, we launched “Ideas in ALL”: The New Blog of the ALL Institute, as another way in which the Assisting Living and Learning (ALL) Institute seeks to contribute to approaching our most ambitious goal: the creation of a fairer and more inclusive society for all. In 2020, at a difficult and grim time, we felt that it was important to foster a dialogue on empowering people living with a disability or chronic illness, older people, or those marginalized from the benefits of mainstream society.
When we set up Ideas in ALL, we knew that there were several diverse and interesting blogs out there. In fact, it is hard to believe that the term ‘blog’ was coined in the late Nineties and, since then, we have experienced a continued and sustained mushrooming of all sorts of blogs. It may seem as if blogs have reached their saturation point. But no, they have not. Blogs remain one of the best ways to share our ideas, our research, and our curiosities, engage with the general public, contribute to open and transnational thought, in what Baumann has described as a ‘liquid modernity’ and a ‘liquid society’. For us, a blog was and still is the best way to ‘reflect on some old challenges, shed a light on new ones and feel our way in the dark of the unanticipated’.
Producing new and interesting content on a regular basis has been our key challenge. Despite the fact that we engage in a plurality of projects, collaborations and partnership, our blog has not been immune to this challenge. However, as time has moved on, we managed to establish the blog as a vibrant platform. We shared our work, our challenges, our successes, our doubts and we welcomed several guest posts from civil society and academic collaborators. We also give voice to lived experiences of people and to offer a platform to discuss diverse ways of seeing and doing things, perceptions, life trajectories, reactions to norms and power-relations. We published several thought-provoking posts that challenge conventional wisdom, alongside informative pieces. We welcomed posts that commented on and reflected on topical issues. We published and read, with a great deal of interest, a number of pieces sowing doubts about current systems and policies.
In this first year, we have nonetheless resisted any urge to frame the blog as a comprehensive source of information, because in fact it is not. We have focused on topics that are important to us and published discursive posts that align with our mission. Our blog posts are not—and are not expected to be—polished academic articles for other academics. They are geared towards broader constituencies.
Over the past year, the month-to-month growth of users has increased by 257.1%. People from all around the globe engaged with the blog. We had readers from Ireland, United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Netherlands, Finland, Italy, Austria, France, Italy and China among other countries (Figure 1). While we feel this is a fantastic achievement, we aim to further broaden the reach of the blog. The growth in the last period has been significant. Ideas in ALL has increased new users by 94% in the last month, and page views are up 459% compared to the last 30days. In the last quarter, there has been a 288.89% increase in visitors to the site.
Our first year editors Dr Emma McEvoy, Dr Emma Smith, Dr Laura Serra, Mohamed Maalin did a great job in working alongside authors and supporting the growth of the Blog, with the constant support of Anastasia Campbell. We were also delighted to have an assistant editor Kimberly Wright helping the team to streamline the editing process during her LLM placement within the ALL Institute. We are very grateful to the editors for all their hard work in enhancing the readership and the reach of the blog, and we are delighted to announce that they have now “passed the baton” to a brand new editorial team – Léa Urzel, Matthew McKenna and Hannah Casey – while Anastasia Campbell has taken the role of managing editor. They will continue to strengthen the blog and support its guiding values: Inclusivity; Accessibility; Respect for Diversity; Participation.
In this second year, we want to achieve an inclusive coverage of diverse social issues, display a diversity in research approaches and methodological orientations. Championing interdisciplinary, human-rights based and empowering research, Ideas in ALL will continue to discuss, from an array of perspectives, social inclusion, empowerment and participation. We invite scholars, activists and practitioners to think critically about social justice, inclusion, power-relations and technology, and to imagine the blog as a forum that can nurture provocative conversations across communities and disciplinary divides.
We were hoping to celebrate this first anniversary and commence this second year by gathering together in person in our ALL Institute space. We were looking forward to enjoying your non-virtual company and having a reception as in the old pre-pandemic times, which seem like a lifetime ago… However, the pandemic is not over, new restrictions are impinging on us, and the new Omicron variant has provoked new fears and triggered new travel bans, as we write. So, we hope others will write on how Covid and other important issues impact our lives and how we can most effectively respond to the continuing challenges we face.
With the new editorial board, we have prepared a special surprise for our readers and we have published a Symposium on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities on occasion of the International Day of Persons with Disabilities. The ALL Institute has a strong focus on disability and we have led several interdisciplinary projects, as well as collaborated within European and International organizations and networks, such the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Partnership for Promoting the Rights of People with Disability (UNPRPD), and civil society organizations, DPOs and NGOs, such as International Disability Alliance. The Anniversary Symposium, hence, showcases this ongoing research, but also engages in a dialogue with different stakeholders exemplifying the polyvocality (many voices) of our research. It is indeed a collective effort.
Happy reading!