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 […]
What Makes Sociology Textbooks Original?
Currently, textbooks exist at the margins of the Sociology, summarising and recycling extant knowledge while fundamentally lacking in original contributions to sociological enquiry. This doesn’t have to be.
Textbook World
Textbooks now play a crucial role in teaching in the social sciences. Their importance is mirrored by their abundance; there is an enormous variety of textbooks on the most commonly taught subjects. The rise of the ‘textbook industry’ is not necessarily a good thing, though.
The Politics of Dissent
Recently, The Independent published a brief piece on the ‘slave-like’ working conditions of PhD students at UK universities. This sounds dramatic, but it’s hardly news – the problem has been around for years. The question arises why dissent did not emerge earlier and more forcefully.
What Do Higher Education Consumers Want?
The Guardian yesterday published a set of worrying facts. Even though consumers of higher education pay almost three times as much in tuition fees than they did six years ago, face-to-face with lecturers in class has barely increased
The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins is completely wrong.
A response to Sir Simon Jenkins’ article on the value of public universities.
Satan at work in the university…?
How an unholy alliance of arrogant scientists and self-interested federal bureaucrats came to widen the net of ethical regulation intended to deal with abuses in medical research to empirical investigation in the humanities and social sciences.
Global Sociology Without a Global Audience
I find it ironic that interesting current debates about sociology’s Eurocentrism and calls for a more truly global sociology take place in journals and books that are likely to be inaccessible at many, many universities around the world.
Conclusion: The New Common Sense
The connection between money, degrees, employability, and the ‘real-world’ relevance of academic work has been hammered so relentlessly into our minds that is has become virtually possible to eschew.
