While a guild has always been linked to a profession’s market-based exchange of goods with the surrounding society, monasteries were based on a principle of self-sufficiency, where monks and nuns grew their own food (and brewed their own beer, not least). This self-sufficiency made the religious search for truth independent of market demand, because the content of liturgy could not depend on what the customers wanted.Within this tension, academics have for a millennium balanced exchange and engagement with the solitary pursuit of truth. An excellent academic institution is one that helps its practitioners in this noble art of balancing. The Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Amsterdam is indeed an excellent institution in this respect. I was fellow at the IAS from 15 September to 15 December 2024, and I found an environment that scaffolded my academic balancing in multiple dimensions – including the following four.

First, all academics know of the oscillations between silence and solitude on the one hand, and engagement and collegiality on the other. When I arrived in Amsterdam, my main goal was to author the two pivotal theoretical chapters of my upcoming monograph on Language & Ecology (for Cambridge University Press’s book series on Key Topics in Applied Linguistics). In my attempt to formulate an ecolinguistic theory of how language and the environment is connected via human behaviour, I was looking for a retreat that gave me the time and space for immersion. I found that in “The White Office” – the second-floor office space in IAS. But developing ideas also requires hecklers, tricksters, challengers, critics, and curious interrupters. They are legion at IAS in Amsterdam! I found them among my academic hosts (Erik Rietveld and Julian Kiverstein), among the visiting co-fellows (Giulia Dal Maso, Rami Kaplan, and Stephan Besser), and among the five research groups who alternate in animating the beautiful Sweelinck meeting room and the IAS Common Room.

A second balancing discipline in academia is how to juggle the focus on scholarly questions, issues, and methods, while still appreciating the importance of other epistemic stances and societal issues, such as those pertaining to art and society. IAS offers a remarkable and, from my perspective, rather unique construction, namely that of hosting fellows from the domains of art, policy, and journalism. I had the great fortune of engaging with four of IAS’s Artists-in-Residence. In my week of arrival, Emilia Tapprest and Matthew C. Wilson premiered their movie on social imaginaries and biodiversity loss – As Messengers – at the neighouring institution, the Allard Pierson Museum. Knowing Emilia from previous collaboration, it was great to experience an artistic take on questions that I pursue as a researcher who attempts to develop an ecolinguistics that draws on Radical Embodied Cognitive Science and eco-Marxism. Similarly, Irene Kopelman (artist-in-residence), Sanne Bloemink (journalist-in-residence), and Daniël Hogendoorn (Policy Fellow) opened new avenues of thinking during my stay.

A third balance is known all too well by all academics. This is the balance between, on the one hand, the slow, assiduous, persistent pursuit of a theme or an idea in all its manifestations, as it metamorphoses, disappears and reappears in new guises. We’ve all been there, and we’ve all been lost on the way. Without this focused persistence, we will never reach a result. But on the other hand, we have all been surprised by serendipitous insights, unexpected influences, and eye-opening viewpoints. The unthinkable thoughts that change our pursuit. IAS’s unique structure cultivates the opportunity for such serendipities that leave a mark in one’s research. For me, three such serendipities stood out: 1. The opportunity to explore artist-in-residence Ronald Rietveld and colleagues’ work Deltawerk // (which lies in the Noordoostpolder in the East of the Netherlands), as part of David Habets’s Ph.D. project (under the supervision of Erik Rietveld and Julian Kiverstein); 2. The opportunity to explore how processes of valorisation and devalorisation can be studied in so different fields as ecological linguistics and finance capitalism – in collaboration with fellow Marxist and comrade, Giulia Dal Maso; 3. The engagement with contemporary thinking on temporality in Science and Technology Studies, represented by Paul Edwards (MIT) who gave a lecture on “Time and Techno-metabolism in the Anthropocene” and who generously allowed me to function as commenter, that is literally, as co-thinker.

Fourthly, and somewhat overarchingly, how do you create an academic space that balances solitude vs. collegiality, academic introversion vs. societal extroversion, and unruffled focus vs. insightful serendipities? That requires a social space that balances between being ‘away’ and being ‘home’. If this space is too ‘home’, you are caught in the everyday grooves, if it is too ‘away’, you struggle to establish psychological safety and new work routines. IAS in Amsterdam has found the sweet spot between home and away. While providing visiting fellows with a retreat, a sanctuary for immersion, it also functions as a home. Nay, it is a home! Huub, Julia, Iris, Jayshri, Edwina, Merel, Gianluigi, and Sara are the true academic stars in IAS, the jugglers that keep us all in balance!

So, you may wonder: Did it work? Did I get my work done? Yes, I returned to the University of Southern Denmark and the Danish Institute for Advanced Study with 30,000 words in two chapters, with a sense of ‘mission accomplished’, and not least with a strong urge to start planning my next visit at the IAS at UvA – or one of the many other similarly fabulous IAS’s in the world!