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, Simmel and the Future of Cities
Robert Dingwall summons the writings of Georg Simmel to present ‘crucial arguments against the break-up of urban life that is envisioned by some contemporary Utopians: the case against the 15-minute city needs to be heard.’
Medical Imperialism and the Fate of Christmas
What happens, asks Robert Dingwall, when governments attempt to impose a moral code on the everyday lives of citizens without the consent of those citizens?
We Must Learn to Live With the Virus – Just Like Samuel Pepys Lived With the Great Plague
Humanity has a long history of dealing with things like pandemics. What history shows us is that the only practicable interventions are social and behavioral. How can we slow the movement of the new infection through the population while medical science catches up with treatments or vaccines?
The Coffin Cure: Why Vaccine Regulation Matters
Robert Dingwall cites a short story from 1957 which highlights why the development of a vaccine needs to always keep an eye on its safety, no matter what the pressures are for its immediate release.
Should Doctors Be in Charge of Pandemic Policy?
or 30 years, social scientists have been trying to educate scientific elites in the value of taking ordinary people with them rather than dismissing skepticism about science-based actions. This work has just gone out the window, argues Robert Dingwall.
Coronavirus UK – Patrician Policymaking
The management of the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the hollowness of that alternative in policies that have been made by people with very narrow life experiences and imposed on others with whom there is, as Disraeli once said, ‘no intercourse and no sympathy’.
Coronavirus UK – Is COVID-19 a Disease?
Having locked ourselves into a particular way of thinking and acting in relation to COVID-19, argues Robert Dingwall, it is very difficult for this to be questioned – but it must not go unchallenged if we are to balance the moral goals of medicine with the other moral goals that make up a good society.
Coronavirus UK – A Nasty Infection But Let’s Have a Sense of Proportion
Of course the government should have a Plan B for a second wave. But this might also be a moment to ask where pandemic management is taking us.
