We had a come-to-reality moment and concluded that what the world needs right now is not another scicomm podcast episode from us. So, we are pausing what would be our next season of Meteor, indefinitely.

We have several reasons for this decision, which we discuss in this brief episode:

• Our most reliable, trusted communities are tighter in scope and focus, and we’re especially prioritizing spending time sustaining those connections right now.
• We do not want to just join the pundit discourse about what’s happening in the world. Talking about the state of scicomm via the podcast just doesn’t feel like concrete action.
• A support course or coaching process around social justice and collective action would probably help us all, but the two of us don’t need to create that. Many, many valuable resources to this effect already exist.
• Social change and reciprocal communities/relationships require that we embrace knowing that the work takes all kinds of efforts and people doing all kinds of roles. (And that we divest from the toxic notion that we must, as one person, do all the roles.) In other words: we feel like we need to fill other roles than “podcaster” right now.

The book Bethann mentions in this episode is Deepa Iyer’s Social Change Now workbook (socialchangemap.com). It helps identify lots of social change roles, emphasizes how important it is that people fill all sorts of roles, and underscores that we should not try to fill every role on our own.

Take good care, fellow scicomm folks!

Thanks for your support over the past 4 years! If you’d like to connect, you can reach us on social media (BlueSky, LinkedIn, various Slack communities, etc.) or at www.meteorscicomm.org.