Could Distributed Peer Review Better Decide Grant Funding?
The landscape of academic grant funding is notoriously competitive and plagued by lengthy, bureaucratic processes, exacerbated by difficulties in finding willing reviewers. Distributed […]
Covid-19: How to Learn the Lessons of Policy Failure
The dust is settling on the UK House of Commons report, produced jointly by its Select Committees on health and on science […]
Traditional Chinese Medicine and the COVID-19 Pandemic
Studies of medicine in China must not neglect Chinese medicine, writes medical sociologist Robert Dingwall..
COVID Science and Politics – the Case of Face Masks
A troubling turn in the public policy management of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the increasing tendency to justify interventions by assertions […]
Florence Nightingale at Home (with COVID-19)
A conspicuous feature of the pandemic has been the idealization of the home as a place of safety and refuge.
COVID Variants – Time to Stop Jumping at Shadows
When variant forms of COVID appear, argues Robert Dingwall, we must, then, learn not to jump at shadows. No-one can ever say there will never be a risk – but everyday life is full of much more common risks that we tolerate because of the benefits that they deliver.
The Insufferable Smugness of Working from Home
Back in the day, I attended one of those schools where male character was thought to be formed by endless afternoons of […]
COVID-19: Blood on Whose Hands?
Lessons will be learned from this pandemic and it is right that there should be inquiries to spell them out. It will not, however, be helpful to see this as a partisan exercise in blaming individuals for acting within the limits of what was possible in systems that others had designed for very different purposes.
Resisting the Biosecurity State
These are extraordinary times, and not just because we are coming through the greatest national trauma since the Second World War. The […]
