Social Science Space

The recent and on-going reforms of higher education are enforcing an individualisation of academic labour. That academics would gamely play along with such a system is astonishing.

Federal surveys have been getting more expensive to administer, in part because the number of people who actually respond to surveys has been progressively declining.

There is no inevitability in the rise in homicide, domestic and acquaintance violence in the coming year. Sadly, though, it would be more surprising if they did not increase than if they did.

Around the educational mission we are now spinning a web of ‘accountability’ that has little to do with explaining or justifying our activities, and much to do with obscuring our responsibility through the creation of elaborate processes.

Tom Wolfe, Miami, and the shallowness of our image-driven modern life.

Ziyad Marar argues that greater funding of the social sciences is needed, not less

I have argued repeatedly that Social Scientists have a lot to offer sectors outside of the Ivory Tower and it is time we stopped associating this with negative words like failure and selling out.

The Ivory Tower has been toppled and academia has an impact in the ‘real world’. The problem is that this may have come at the expense of truly innovative and critical scholarship.

On social science, the sequester, and the need for a Human Rights Culture.

Even within its own narrow terms the Iraq war was appallingly costly. A bad decision to invade was compounded by shambolic and ineffective leadership of the warfighting itself. Why? The answer seems to lie in the ways in which contemporary large organizations behave

Much of the current confusion about crime trends is born of the tendency to bunch together a whole range of different harms and actions under the abstract category of ‘crime’. This blinds us to where the significant problems are.

Some criminal investigations resonate over the years. Even if you’ve only had peripheral involvement with them, as in my case, […]