Seeing a lot of academic tweetage dissing other academics for showing an interest on coronavirus or for going for grants that have only recently emerged for coronavirus research.

I know Twitter sucks at nuance and I know context collapse is real. That caveat should be implied for each and every tweet, including tweets about tweets.

For what it's worth I think that however belated it is a good thing that academia is publicly engaged with this pandemic and that there are new opportunities for fund research, whilst recognising it's important not to defund or discourage research on other topics.

It seems a bit ungenerous to me, however, to negatively criticise those trying to engage proactively with any aspect of the pandemic from their own disciplinary frameworks and areas of expertise.

Again this is just me personally, fwiw I think having an interest in a public issue affecting the whole word right now and wanting to contribute proactively does not mean one is not interested in continuing research on other topics, under different circumstances and timelines.

If the argument is that some academics may be going for projects on coronavirus just because there's suddenly grant money for it then we need to look into the system that has made that an expectation, a modus operandi and even an ethos way before this pandemic.

Anyway, I think it's a good thing that academics are thinking out loud in public, sometimes outside the most traditional dissemination models of #scholcomm, about a very serious problem that is truly transforming our daily lives (and deaths).

Apologies for typos in this thread. Need to go to bed... hope you had a good Tuesday! Take care.

[Tuesday Motivation Last Updated 4/7/2020, 9:48:44 PM BST; live updates: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html  ]