You never let a serious crisis go to waste … [I]t’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.
Rahm Emanuel
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, my colleague Jeff Bloem (International Food Policy Research Institute) and I decided to organize the Online Agricultural and Resource Economics Seminar (OARES) in an effort to maintain a semblance of normalcy for the field’s scholars.
The unspoken goal of OARES has been to break down the privilege barrier in two ways: (i) by featuring the work of junior (i.e., pre-tenure), women, or minority scholars for the most part, and (ii) by bringing frontier research to those who may not have had access to a regular seminar series prior to the pandemic.
Looking at past and planned talks, we have done well on those front. Over three years, OARES has featured 101 speakers, 61 percent of whom were women, 41 percent of whom were nonwhite, and 77 percent of whom were pre-tenure (or equivalent at non-academic institutions).
The seminar launched on May 6, 2020, and ended on May 12, 2023.
If you would like to watch some of the #OARES seminars, the majority of them can be found on our YouTube channel.