Social Science Space

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.

Universities are starting to look like the behemoths of the US auto industry of the 1980s, with highly-paid CEOs buried in their offices looking only at numbers.

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.

Is OA the flip side to privatisation of Higher Education? Is there a way in which OA is a means of justifying the economic inaccessibility of HE by providing a public good?

We study social science because social phenomena affect people’s lives in profound ways. If you want to start with Cantor’s focus—physical illness and death—then social phenomena are tremendously important.

As even liberal arts colleges continue to turn their back on the liberal arts, where will the technocrats produced by higher education hone their thinking skills to address the current crisis in governing?

Emory’s recent decision to shut down or suspend various academic departments and programs has rightly generated campus-wide and national attention.

Just as it is insufficiently recognised in public debates, the emotional side of forced flexibility in academic labour does not appear to be a major topic of conversation among established sociologists

Why we need to pay closer attention to the President of Emory’s shocking comparison of University budget cuts with the three-fifths compromise, and what it says about America now, not then.

If we don’t discuss the job search as anything more than a painful memory, we add to the mystique of gaining academic employment, isolating ourselves in the process.

The authors of “Why Does College Cost So Much?” take a look at the root causes and determine that we can reduce the price of higher education, but not dramatically.

All criticism of the genre notwithstanding, textbooks do have a central role to play in turning sociology students into sociologists. Sometimes I do wonder, however, whether it is time to re-invent the textbook.