The Universiti Putra Malaysia has appointed me as a member of the editorial board of their new journal Pertanika Journal of Quality of Life Studies (JQoLS) for the next three years. The journal is published by UPM Press, with Nik Ahmad Sufian Burhan as Editor-in-Chief.
I am currently a member of the editorial board (or similar) of six journals (cf. Brief academic CV).
Today I´ve had half an article writing day, with work done related to my book review of Interpreting, Communication and Animal Welfare for Biosemiotics. Also, I took note that four Store Norske Leksikon encyclopedia entries I have previously suggested edits to have now been updated - specifically, this concerns the entries "Albert Schweitzer", "bærekraftig utvikling", "etikk", and "miljøbevegelsen". This brings the number of writing days so far this Spring up to 28, including 19,5 article writing days.
Minor edits I have made previously have now been approved in six encyclopedia articles in Store Norske Leksikon (SNL), namely "antroposentrisk", "dypøkologi", "dyreetikk", "miljøfilosofi", "rettssubjekt" and "økosofi".
Yesterday my encyclopedia article "Ulvejakt" was published by Store Norske Leksikon. This is my first encyclopedia article. A couple of weeks ago edits I made were published in three other encyclopedia articles, "barneskolen", "dødsstraff" and "Thomas Kuhn".
The title for my forthcoming book with Bloomsbury Academic previously titled Captured: CCS and the fight for the soul of the environmental movement has now been renamed Carbon Capture and the Future of Environmentalism. The book manuscript is currently in review.
I am currently a member of the editorial board of six academic journals:
– Biosemiotics (Springer)
– Eikon – Journal on Semiotics and Visual Culture (Universidade da Beira Interior, Portugal)
– Environmental and Sustainability Indicators (Elsevier)
– Journal of Quality-of-Life Studies (JQoLS) (UPM Press, Malaysia)
– TRACE ∴ Finnish Journal for Human-Animal Studies (Finnish Society for Human-Animal Studies)
– Politics and Animals (Lund University, Sweden)
I have agreed to join the Editorial Board of the Journal of Quality-of-Life Studies (JQoLS) as part of the international advisory panel. The new journal is to be published by UPM Press, which is a university press related to Universiti Putra Malaysia, a public Malaysian university.
Today I have had what ended up as half a book writing day, with some 150 words written on my scientific monograph Captured: CCS and the fight for the soul of the environmental movement. So far this Spring I have had 64 writing days, including 55 book writing days.
I have been recruited as responsible (fagansvarlig) for environmental ethics in Store Norske Leksikon, which is the largest and most read edited encyclopedia in Norway and written by professionals. The category now also includes animal ethics.
Today I have spent half an article writing day editing the article "Friluftsliv in therapeutic residential care: When staff take youth out to find a way in", which I co-write with Joakim Jiri Haaland. Hopefully this article is now completed. I also had a look at reviewer feedback on a rejected article from the "Live better" research consortium which I take part in.
So far this Spring I have had 62 writing days, including 9 article writing days.
Since I last mentioned it here in the blog, the Nordic Association for Semiotic Studies (NASS) has issued two new newsletters:
NASS Newsletter 25_2024 (Autumn), issued in November 2024
NASS Newsletter 26_2025 (Spring), issued in April 2025
I am a co-editor of the newsletter along with primus motor Inesa Sahakyan. Here is a link to all NASS newsletters published to date.
Alexei Sharov has written a farewell editorial for Biosemiotics, for which he has been an Editor-in-Chief for about 10 years. The editorial is entitled "Following developments of biosemiotics", and includes some passages I really appreciate mentioning me, our joint work, and some initiatives of mine.
"Many prominent scientists and philosophers in biosemiotics, such as Kalevi Kull, Jesper Hoffmeyer, Donald Favareau, Howard Pattee, Karel Kleisner, Prisca Augustyn, Morten Tønnessen, Anton Markoš, Stanley Salthe, Bruce Weber, Frederik Stjernfelt, Paul Cobley and others, supported the journal and published their articles in the initial years."
"In 2014, Marcello Barbieri transferred most of editorial duties to a new team of editors, that included me, Timo Maran, and Morten Tønnessen, and we took full charge as Editors-in-Chief in 2015. Our first joint editorial titled “Towards Synthesis of Biology and Semiotics” outlined our vision of the state and future of biosemiotics and its representation in this journal. We wrote:
The main idea of biosemiotics is that life and semiosis are coextensive. Here semiosis is understood as a sign process or sign exchange, where signs stand for something else in some respect or capacity. In particular, life has a semiotic nature because it is based on endless interpretation of environmental cues and transfer of life-related functional meanings vertically across generations and horizontally to neighboring organisms. Semiotic processes help organisms to perform their functions, preserve their habits and pursue their agendas through generations (Sharov et al., 2015): 1–2).""I am thankful to Morten Tønnessen for suggesting two new activities that helped to invigorate the relations between the journal and readers. First, it was the establishment of the Annual Biosemiotic Achievement Award in 2014 for the novelty and relevance to biosemiotics. And the second was the Biosemiotics Glossary Project, which started with the article on semiotic agency (Tønnessen, 2015), and then continued the discussion with the terms: umwelt, semiotic threshold, and intentionality. An important part of this project is answering questionnaires and statistical analysis of results which reflects the range of opinions within the biosemiotics field."
"Also we published the special issues “Can quantitative approaches develop bio/semiotic theory?” edited by Dan Faltýnek and Ľudmila Lacková, “Agency and (the Built) Environment” by Tim Ireland and Paul Cobley, “Biosemiotics of waste” by Yogi Hendlin, and “Umwelt Theory and Phenomenology” by Carlo Brentari and Morten Tønnessen."
"I enjoyed my work as Editor-in-Chief of Biosemiotics for many reasons. First, biosemiotics has been my major interest and activity for 36 years, although I combined it with my regular jobs in ecology, molecular biology, and bioinformatics. Second, I like helping young authors to improve their manuscripts, as well as interacting with reviewers. And third, my editorial job stimulated reading related publications, and I learned about new discoveries and theories in various fields of biology and the humanities. This knowledge helped me to write a book together with Morten Tønnessen Semiotic agency: Science beyond mechanism (Sharov & Tønnessen, 2021)."
Sometime earlier this year I have done a peer-review for Humanities & Social Sciences Communications.
Theis year I have done a peer-review for the Slovak academic journal Philozofia.
This year has been a special year for me in that I returned to a scientific position on Friday January 6th after 2 years as Head of department (after having been Vice-Dean of Research the 2 previous years, resulting in 4 years in academic leadership 2019-2023). For the first time in years, by Summer, I no longer held any leadership positions. In the course of the year I was replaced as steering group leader of Cognitive lab at University of Stavanger, and stepped down as President of the Nordic Association for Semiotic Studies (NASS), returning to the position as Secretary of NASS. An unhappy consequence of my resignation as Head of department was that my Scientific assistant Jan Karlstrøm´s position was terminated earlier than initially planned, but our collaboration on two scientific articles will continue until completion. In Spring, I had some time for academic updating, which in effect mostly amounted to getting to the bottom of my email inbox over the course of several weeks, and a visit to Oxford University.
At the Department of social studies, I have been involved with teaching in collaboration with Christian Wedler in a course on law and ethics in Spring, and Ex.phil. in the Autumn (all teaching by me, grading by me in collaboration with Rune Falch from University of Bergen). Both courses are part of the department´s bachelor in psychology. In the Autumn I also gave a couple of lectures in the university´s new course on sustainability and green transition, coordinated by Andra Riandita at the UIS Business School.
I have supervised Joakim Jiri Haaland in his ph.d. studies and co-supervised Jacob Tom in his, with Jacob going through with his midterm evaluation in September. I have had some extra research time for working on my book project Captured: CCS and the fight for the soul of the environmental movement, have taken part in the national editorial board of the new Stavanger-based festival on philosophy and science "Wonderful World", which was first held in June this year, and have hosted Lenart Škof, Professor of philosophy and religious studies at Alma Mater Europaea in Ljubljana, Slovenia, on an Erasmus exchange in December. Meanwhile, I took up the responsibility as guest editor, along with Carlo Brentari at University of Trento, for a special issue of Biosemiotics on the topic of "Umwelt theory and phenomenology", which will be published next Summer. I also co-wrote two consultative statements issued by Norway´s Council for animal ethics, and was in the Summer of 2023 reappointed as a member of the council for 4 more years.
In 2023, my paper "Existential universals: Biosemiosis and existential semiosis" was reprinted as a chapter in the anthology Transcending Signs – Essays in Existential Semiotics edited by Eero Tarasti and published by De Gruyter (Berlin). My article "The study of past Umwelten" was published in a special issue of Discipline Filosophische (Italy) edited by Vallori Rasini, and my chapter "Umwelt theory for practitioners: Semiotic guidelines for application in a more-than-human descriptive phenomenology" was published in the book set Open Semiotics, edited by Amir Biglari and published by L’Harmattan (Paris). My introductory chapter "Nosology and Semiotics" appeared in the book Organ Crosstalk in Acute Kidney Injury: Basic Concepts and Clinical Practices, which was edited by Carlo Guido Musso & Adrian Covic and published by Springer Nature, and I co-authored the short communication "Biosemiotic Achievement Award for the Year 2022", published in Biosemiotics, with Ludmila Lackova & Ahti-Veikko Juhani Pietarinen. Finally, my article "Wasted GDP in the USA" was published in Humanities & Social Sciences Communications.
Among my personal achievements this year, I have given a scientific lecture for the UNDP´s Human Development Reports Office in March, seen my article "Wasted GDP in the USA" be mentioned in about 1500 tweets, and reached 1.000 citations by the count of Google Scholar. I further gave a keynote speech at the conference "Contemporary Umwelt Analysis: Applications for Culture and Ecological Relations" in Tartu, Estonia, in April - which also resulted in an extended interview with Martin Avila and me by Thorolf van Walsum - and was an invited speaker at the research colloquium «After Nagel: Science and the phenomenology of animals subjects” held in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, in March, at the “Henrik Steffens – The Prophet of the Anthropocene?” conference held in Stavanger in September, and at Dyreetikkonferansen (the Norwegian animal ethics conference) 2023, held in Oslo in December. Also, an interview by Norway´s national broadcaster NRK with Erica von Essen and me on the ethics of wolf hunting was featured in NRK TV´s daily news program Dagsrevyen as well as the popular weekly comedy show Nytt på Nytt.
In 2023, I have engaged in new collaborations, which include commencing article work with my department colleague and legal scholar Maren Sagvaag Retland, with Thomas Hylland Eriksen, based at the University of Oslo, with Martin Drenthen at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and with Søren Nors Nielsen at Aalborg University, Denmark. Of larger research consortia, I am thankful to have been included in the astrobiology-themed book project Mars and the Earthlings, with initial contact made via David Dunér in Lund, Sweden, and in the "Live better" research consortium led by Kuba Krys, based at Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland. In the latter, I am currently gaining experience with international quantitative surveys.
I have done what I mention in this post within a work year that has been shorter than usual for me - around 2.500 work hours, compared with around 3,000 work hours in previous years. This has allowed me to basically have weekends and evenings off from academic work, making for a healthier balance in my life.
See also:
Over the last few weeks I have conducted three peer-reviews, for Visual Studies, Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science and Environmental and Sustainability Indicators respectively.
Today I have had a writing day, #22,5 this Autumn, devoted to our GDP review article, with some 150 words written and editing done. I have also taken part in some planning regarding an article I co-write with Joakim Jiri Haaland, who I supervise (ph.d.).
Yesterday and today I have had half a writing day, #17 this Autumn, with some feedback given on others´ text constributions to Mars and the Earthlings, and final editing of my forthcoming article "Wasted GDP in the USA", which has now been accepted in principle for publication in Humanities & Social Sciences Communications.
