The university should be the place demonstrating socioecological change, serving as a site of experimentation and praxis (see Dunlap et al., 2023). This, however, could not be further from the truth. Beside advancing technologies of digital, political and military control (Chatterjee & Maira, 2014), not to mention genetic dissection and animal vivisection—or some degree of this (Pellow, 2014)—universities fail to enact real examples of socioecological of renewability and sustainability. How come universities are not overflowing with agroecology, permaculture and forest gardens on and inside universities? How come universities are not self-generating their own electricity needs through wind, solar and other lower-carbon infrastructures? We, unfortunately, are witnessing the opposite at university campuses around the world.
Academic publishing seems like a problem that should be easy to solve. It’s a situation where greed is outright making the service worse for everyone, so it seems like a new journal that does things differently (e.g. by not charging researchers) could become wildly successful… So why doesn’t that happen? Are there barriers to creating new journals?