Welcome New Ronin Scholars

[Ronin Institute for Independent Scholarship (General Partnership)]

Dear all,

I have recently approved several requests to join this Google Group, and I apologise for the delay in doing so.

A number of requests, however, appeared inauthentic and were therefore not approved. If you believe your request was genuine but was not accepted, please feel free to contact me directly by email.

New members with a genuine intention to advance independent scholarship are particularly welcome. Many of the foundational issues central to the Ronin Institute—especially how it evolves organisationally—depend on our collective ability to define what independent scholarship is and can become. To date, these questions have not received sufficient attention.

I encourage you to familiarise yourselves with the material on
www.ronin-institute.org, in particular the “Learning from the Past” page.

The ronin-institute.org website has also received several membership requests that I have not yet been able to process. This is largely due to capacity constraints: we do not yet have a team in place, and much of what the Institute aims to be remains at a draft or exploratory stage.

My primary concern at present is assessing the authenticity of membership requests. Are they genuine? Are the individuals applying real people rather than bots? What criteria should guide membership, especially if we aim to open up new models of scholarship—without becoming another pseudo-scholarly or unserious society?

I am considering asking prospective members to participate in Zoom calls to verify that they are real, though I am aware that even such measures are no longer foolproof. I suspect I am not alone in this uncertainty. What constitutes a “scholar” and “scholarship” is itself being redefined, and the Institute must align thoughtfully with that broader trajectory.

At this time, I do not have definitive answers. I am also fully absorbed with deadlines and other commitments for at least the first half of this year.

For these reasons, I am calling upon this community to help advance these matters. Please introduce yourself to the group, share your interests, explain what qualifies you as an independent scholar, and offer your vision for how the Institute might evolve.

With thanks,

Paola Di Maio
Ronin Institute