In our second post for 2018’s Academic Book Week, we wanted to take the opportunity to highlight some of the fantastic resources available to help support, encourage and develop women in academia. From blogs to books, to influential social media accounts and reports, the literature out there is both vast and dynamic.

In this second of a series of interviews conducted by Social Science Space’s Daniel Nehring, Ewan Mackenzie explains why he joined the May 4 ‘Reclaiming’ event at Newcastle, discusses hallmarks of the modern academic institutions and details some of the events that lead him to believe in both resilience and resistance.

For Academic Book Week, SAGE Publishing, the parent of Social Science Space, asked some of its authors and editors for their top tips for women in academia:

There is no doubt that good communications and framing research for your audience is important to influencing policy and having impact. But shouldn’t we be aiming higher than producing and packaging research that simply meets the demands of policy actors? James Georgalakis argues that research and researchers need to challenge dominant paradigms and expose inconvenient truths.

Centuries ago, myths helped the Greeks learn to reject tyrannical authority and identify the qualities of good leadership. Emily Anhalt argues that the same myths that long predate the world’s very first democracy have lessons for us today – just as they did for the ancient Greeks centuries ago.

Tina Basi and Mona Sloane argue that REF 2021 offers the opportunity to frame a discussion on the purpose of universities that is less focused on economics and more focused on people and public engagement, returning closer to the Humboldtian model of higher education.

CASBS at Stanford University and SAGE Publishing are announcing nominations to the fifth annual SAGE-CASBS awards. The award goes to researchers who have made outstanding societal contributions by using social and behavioral research to address or understand vital social concerns.

In this debut interview conducted by Social Science Space’s Daniel Nehring, Audrey Verma explains her inspirations in organizing the forum, how her claims of the feminization and racialization of higher ed are borne out in academe, and why critiques of neoliberal impulses in universities have had so little traction in the past four decades.

In the coming weeks, Social Science Space will publish a series of interviews on academic capitalism and academic resistance. These interviews pertain to the event “Between the discourse of ‘resilience’ and death by committee – Reclaiming collective spaces for academic resistance,” organised by the Early Career Forum of the British Sociological Association and hosted by Newcastle University.

This stark contrast between the internet’s light and dark sides has become a defining characteristic of the digital age, writes Timo Hannay founder SchoolDash, but is not an inevitable consequence of the mostly innocuous technologies on which it’s built. Rather, it is the product of their bewilderingly diverse and eccentric user base – otherwise known as humanity.

We spoke with social-science ethicists about how well Facebook’s initiative appears to protect users’ privacy. They’re skeptical, but still eager to see Facebook data studied.

Effective communication is fundamental to increasing public understanding and for building the bridge between the public and the sciences. Suzi Spitzer outlines five principles of holistic science communication that can facilitate collaborative learning between scientists and the public.