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 […]
Arbitrary choices –all those political considerations that twist and constrain scholarship without adding to it in intellectually meaningful ways — are rife in contemporary academic sociology, says our Daniel Nehring. Tired of trying to pointlessly argue against them in hopes they disappear, he asks that we make these choices explicit and visible.
Graduate research candidates are the powerhouse of research in universities, yet many have reported feelings of isolation, burnout, and career uncertainty. Karen Barry reports on a study of Australian research candidates which found that increasing numbers are suffering from heightened levels of depression, anxiety, and stress, often citing reasons related to academia’s general work processes, such as writing or publishing research or maintaining motivation while working alone on a single topic.
The literature review is a staple of the scholarly article. But when reviews misrepresent previous studies or suggest there’s a paucity of information when there isn’t, doesn’t,this degrade the knowledge base? Richard P. Phelps argues that, given the difficulty of verifying an author’s claims during peer review, it is best that journals drop the requirement for a literature review in scholarly articles.
Drawing on their new SAGE book for students and academics “How to be a Happy Academic,” Alex Clark and Bailey Sousa share strategies for successful student-supervisor meetings.
A report from the National Association of Scholars takes on the reproducibility crisis in science. Not everyone views the group’s motives as pure.
Anthropologist and sociologist Mariya Ivancheva has viewed modern higher education from a number of global perches, whether in Eastern Europe or South Africa, the strapped Bolivarian University of Venezuela, and in Ireland and the UK. Her vantages have left her no fan of the neoliberal reforms — or perhaps, ‘reforms’ — that characterize western-influences higher education.
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.
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.