On the mission to bring fresh life into “Reflections” and keep it closer to every day life at Vienna STS, there is now—in addition to the possibility to spontaneously submit posts—a preliminary schedule including all department members in the yearly blog-cycle. But how did the editorial team come up with such a schedule? Considering that a certain degree of chance and “luck” are inherent to life and work in academic research (Davies & Pham, 2023), what could be a more fitting way to schedule blog submissions than via a tombola!
Last Thursday, the “Reflections” team came together to make the final draw: An Excel spreadsheet assigning numbers to members of the department staff (including blog editors, off course!) was used as the basis. Then, the team carefully numbered and folded paper slips and mixed them together in a ceramic bowl to ensure the utmost fairness and discretion. Members of the team took turns drawing numbers—two for each month of the ongoing year. The numbers were read aloud and the colleagues assigned to them were added to the respective cell in the spreadsheet. You can review the final product below, as well as documentation of the joyful process above.
The “Reflections” team is looking forward to working with all of our blog contributors this year! The team will soon reach out to those scheduled for the next months. In the meantime, we kindly ask department members to contact us via email in case there are any questions or concerns.
Reference
Davies, S. R., & Pham, B.-C. (2023). Luck and the ‘situations’ of research. Social Studies of Science, 53(2), 287-299. https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127221125438