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 […]
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.
Tina Basi and Mona Sloane argue that REF 2021 offers the opportunity to frame a discussion on the purpose of universities that is less focused on economics and more focused on people and public engagement, returning closer to the Humboldtian model of higher education.
In this debut interview conducted by Social Science Space’s Daniel Nehring, Audrey Verma explains her inspirations in organizing the forum, how her claims of the feminization and racialization of higher ed are borne out in academe, and why critiques of neoliberal impulses in universities have had so little traction in the past four decades.
In the coming weeks, Social Science Space will publish a series of interviews on academic capitalism and academic resistance. These interviews pertain to the event “Between the discourse of ‘resilience’ and death by committee – Reclaiming collective spaces for academic resistance,” organised by the Early Career Forum of the British Sociological Association and hosted by Newcastle University.
Increasingly, says Robert Dingwall, UK universities are taking a more paternal role in the lives of their students, taking — or perhaps resuming — more active roles in addressing their charges’ mental health, criminal conduct and self-care.
There is still a gender pay gap at nearly all Canadian universities, with especially big gaps at Canada’s 15 research-intensive universities, Megan Frederickson shows. It’s not accounted for by greater talent or solely the ghost of sexism past.
The former president of the University of Saskatchewan argues that freedom of expression is under attack in Canada’s universities through an accumulation of episodes that diminish its significance and through a vector of intellectual laziness accompanied by ideology and anger.
How can universities train our scientists, technologists and engineers to engage with society rather than perform as cogs in the engine of economic development? Author Richard Lachman asks for educational system to require STEM students to take art and humanities courses, not as an attempt to “broaden minds” but as a necessary discussion of morals, ethics and responsibility.