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 […]
Literature Reviews Are Already Broken, So Let’s Kill Them
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.
How to Have the Best Possible Student-Supervisor Meeting
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 Remedy for Broken Science, Or an Attempt to Undercut It?
A report from the National Association of Scholars takes on the reproducibility crisis in science. Not everyone views the group’s motives as pure.
Mariya Ivancheva: ‘At Stake is the Future of Public Higher Education’
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.
Ewan Mackenzie: ‘A Sense of Hope for Achieving Broader Change’
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.
Research Must Try to Influence Change
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.
Impact Still Helping Higher Education; But at What Cost?
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.
Audrey Verma: ‘A Clean-up Crew for the Messes and Excesses of Neoliberalism’
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.
