Social Science Space

Creating a modern academic encyclopedia is a labor of love – years of effort that is both conceptual and physical, dozens or even hundreds of writers to corral and then try to control, the ever-present march of time threatening to date all your efforts before anyone see your work, and the possibility that even serious scholars might just Google their question rather than reach for a well-vetted volume.

After a rapid switch to distance education due to COVID-19, many universities will remain as virtual campuses in the coming fall semester. For many universities, the focus has been on mastering or refining techniques for remote teaching. But a larger challenge looms.

Ken Robinson, the revered and prolific evangelist for connecting education with the arts, died August 21 of cancer. He was 70. As Social Science Space prepares a full obituary, we repost an account of Robinson’s appearance to help mark SAGE Publishing’s 50th year in 2015; SAGE is the parent of Social Science Space.

For all the talk of social consciousness at academic conferences, personal wealth remains the imprimatur of business success par excellence. How then, we asked ourselves, can business schools expect their students to take ethics and social responsibility truly seriously?

As conversations around decolonization in universities are being afforded greater urgency, some key risks of this institutional capture or inertia to wider decolonization efforts are described by Rima Saini.

Women are facing additional constraints as a result of COVID-19. These range from the added burdens and responsibilities of working from home, through to the fact that fewer women scientists are being quoted as experts on COVID-19, all the way to far fewer women being part of the cohort producing new knowledge on the pandemic.

At their heart, Chinese public universities are deeply parochial bureaucratic structures geared towards the party-state’s priorities for socio-economic development. In response to national and international pressures, some universities have recently begun to internationalize, with notably different degrees of enthusiasm. Others have not. You would do well to determine, the author writes, into what category a prospective employer falls.

China has become an increasingly attractive destination for Western social scientists, both for those doing research in and on China and for those looking to continue their careers with meaningful, long-term perspectives.

Public sociologist Rodney Coates, a professor of critical race and ethnic studies and of global and intercultural studies at Miami University of Ohio, and author the SAGE Publishing text The Matrix of Race, will present a free webinar on “A 12-Step Program for Decolonizing the University” on July 30. While the webinar filled up with a few hours of being announced, a recording will appear here on Social Science Space. In the meantime, here is the 12-step program Coates first presented on social media this spring.

The University of Buckingham, in association with the Higher Education Policy Institute, in bringing the fifth festival of Higher Education […]

It wasn’t until I started doing a degree in gender studies that I was told it was OK to use […]

Around the world, face-to-face teaching has ceased, campuses are closed and empty, a sudden shift to pervasive online has generated little enthusiasm among students, travel restrictions have drained the lucrative flow of international students to a trickle, and many universities have reported significant financial problems. So what do I do with my freshly minted PhD?