Creator
‘Allegra Lab: Anthropology, Law, Art & World’ (allegralaboratory.net) is a collective of academics, an association and an online experiment founded in 2013. It explores creative ways to fill the ‘dead space’ that exists between traditional modes of academic publication and ongoing scholarly and societal debates. Allegra Lab discusses issues related to anthropology, law, art and beyond, and it is run by a diligent editorial team of professional scholars.
Purpose
Despite the name the Academic Slow Food Manifesto is not about food! This manifesto is a guide for better academic writing based on ‘real scholarship’ – which like the slow movement takes time to craft.
Manifesto
More more more!
This constant pressure to write more.
More of what?
Slogans, catch phrases?
Analysis for tid-bit quotations?
The same-old, same-old?
They want to stuff our brain
with indicators,
guidelines,
readily-chewed soundbites,
impact and
expected outcomes.
That is not stuff of real scholarship!
That is the stuff of auditing,
of successful annual reporting;
Signs of yielding to extra-academic pressures.
We reclaim the space
for the real pursuit
of unknown horizons,
Of reflection, philosophising
and mind-wandering
We want words, imagination, poetry!
Things impossible to report,
but only thus with real meaning.
But, like slow food,
REAL research takes time
to mature.
It needs tender love and caring;
A space to freely grow.
Less but more
of something
immeasurable
and only thus of true importance.
Source
http://allegralaboratory.net/academic-slow-food-manifesto/
Comment
A list-based manifesto is easy to create. All you need is a list of rules, qualities or statements one after the other.
In contrast, crafting a worldview manifesto takes a little more care and attention to put it all together. Thus this style of manifesto is a consistent fit for the aim: considered academic writing.
More: Four Types of Manifestos