Social Science Space

This seems, writes Daniel Nehring, to be a good time to feel pessimistic about academia in the COVID world, and to turn this pessimism into meaningful debate and effective action.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacted a toll on academic freedom is several ways, in particular by restricting mobility and allowing for greater surveillance.

In terms of the organization of academic labor, higher education is ever more sharply divided between, on the one hand, an advantaged minority in full-time, long-term employment and, on the other hand, academia’s reserve army of labor.

Throughout the 20th century, psychological knowledge managed to break free from the confines of academic debates and clinical practice, defining, by the early 21st century at the latest, how we think about who we are, how we feel, what our goals in life are, how we form relationships with others, and how society’s institutions operate

Academic capitalism exhibit a lack of transparency and accountability where it truly matters. Peer review and the ways in which journals often handle peer reviews are one key site of such intransparency and unaccountability.

Around the world, face-to-face teaching has ceased, campuses are closed and empty, a sudden shift to pervasive online has generated little enthusiasm among students, travel restrictions have drained the lucrative flow of international students to a trickle, and many universities have reported significant financial problems. So what do I do with my freshly minted PhD?

Brexit seems likely to extend the hostility of the UK immigration system to scholars from European Union countries — unless a significant change of migration politics and prevalent public attitudes towards immigration politics took place in the UK. There are no indications that the latter will happen anytime soon.

With a little luck, nunchi — billed as ‘the Korean secret to happiness,’ might just become the next mindfulness, spawning a decade-defining self-help trend and sparking a lasting media debate.

A new report from the Royal Society about the effects on Brexit on science in the United Kingdom has our peripatetic Daniel Nehring mulling the changes that will occur in higher education and academic productivity.

In recent years, sociology has begun a twin global and decolonial turn, marked by a series of high-profile publications that have sought to engage with sociology’s roots outside the Global Northwest. So how effective have these efforts been?

Daniel Nehring describes China’s social networking platform WeChat as ‘Facebook on steroids,’ and notes it has long surpassed e-mail as the main tool of mediating communication at Chinese universities while obliterating boundaries between work and home. Is this a cautionary tale for academe outside of China?

Is scholarship that doesn’t appear in the Social Science Citation Index — a commercial index of ‘internationally leading’ journals in the social sciences, compiled by Clarivate Analytics — worthless? Before you say ‘Of course not,’ know that some universities essentially are saying yes.