We started a summer fellowship!

The 1RG summer fellowship is the brain child of Xavier, Max and I. We are manifesting it by establishing peer-to-peer mentorship rituals, and accountability systems in order to spend the next few months researching topics that interests us.

There are a few reasons that pull me towards this experiment:

1. I wanted to spend more time thinking and writing, but often find it hard to prioritize it and let it slide to the bottom of my TODOs
2. I have experienced academia as a soul crushing machine and found it impossible to pursue research in that context, despite being very drawn to the exploratory aspects of it
3. My experience at the recurse centre, a self directed retreat for curious programmers, was life changing and what originally drove me to go back to academia.

My hunch is that a self-directed fellowship will be a much healthier, joyous way to approach the kind of deep thinking and writing that I want to be doing, and that doing it alongside friends, with agreed upon rituals, will make it that much easier and fun!

The focus of my summer is to research is community, and what it means to build one. Some research questions I’m iterating on, in no particular order:

• What does it mean to care for our community?
• What are rituals, relational practices, and other technologies that generate trust and connections?
• How might we create an environment that fosters human connections, curiosity and creativity?