❤️🔥 HEARTH ❤️🔥
Welcome to the site of HEARTH: Helping Empower Academics to Resist Toxic Hegemonies.
HEARTH is a community created in response to the more toxic aspects of the predominant culture in academia and associated/adjacent fields (research supporters, alt ac, etc.).
We’re in the process of getting started over the summer of 2026. To give you an idea of what we’re aiming for, we’ve drafted preliminary vision and mission statements, and have listed our core values.
The HEARTH vision
The landscape in which scientific work is done and supported has a healthy culture, with room and respect for boundaries, self-care, mental health, and support of diversity.
The HEARTH mission
We strive to realize a world where:
- People feel safe to indicate their boundaries;
- When boundaries are expressed, these are treated respectfully;
- Overwork is not glorified (i.e. working more than a full-time job is not seen as prestigious or otherwise intrinsically valuable);
- Having a vocation is not the same as feeling exploited;
- People acknowledge, in their work, that they and others have emotions and that different tasks can also affect emotions.
The HEARTH core values
- Compassion
- Openness
- Respect
- Equality
- Diversity
Who we’re for
We focus mostly on the culture as it exists in academia and associated/adjacent fields.
Initiators
HEARTH was initiated in July 2026 by (in alphabetic order) ginger coons, Gjalt-Jorn Peters, Leona Ryan, and Tanya van Goch