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 […]
Sociology for Sale
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?
Software Is Not the Silver Bullet to Defeat Plagiarism
Turnitin and similar programs don’t deal with the causes of plagiarism. Rather, argue Amanda Mphahlele and Sioux McKenna, they allow institutions to claim they’re doing something without really tackling the issues that lead students to plagiarize.
Fast Professor: WeChat and Future Academe
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?
Whatever Happened to Conservative Social Thought?
In the wake of Brexit, Robert Dingwall asks a series of probing questions about the eclipse of Conservative Social Thought at universities, such as when did the social sciences last have a serious engagement with the institutions of the bourgeoisie, even though by income and status many of us would belong to that class?
Looking at Plan S From Down Under
Plan S focuses on making all publicly funded research immediately fully and freely available by open access publication. If Australia does not adopt Plan S, the authors argue, it could potentially restrict collaboration, publishing, and funding opportunities with research bodies who subscribe to this ambitious movement.
DARPA Aims to Score Social and Behavioral Research
The U.S. military’s innovation incubator, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has signed the Center for Open Science to create a research claims database as DARPA’s first step to assign a ‘credibility score’ to social and behavioral science research.
‘Detoxing from Academia’: One Black Scholar’s Journey
JeffriAnne Wilder, a sociologist and leading scholar specializing in diversity, race relations and women’s empowerment, has almost two decades of experience in higher education. In this interview, she details who influenced — from her mom to bell hooks — and why she left her tenured professorship to work for a non-profit.
Why is Social Theory So Boring?
The roots of sociology lie among a group of engaged, engaging and vibrant people who often risked their well-being, or even their lives, to advance their ideas. So what happened to suck much of the life out of the discipline?
