Social Science Space

The COVID-19 pandemic has surfaced the potential and risks of linked real word datasets to accelerate and produce new improvements in public health. In this post, the authors outline the opportunities and challenges of using real world data as part of the ‘Unlocking data to inform public health policy and practice’ project.

Associate professor Siouxsie Wiles and professor Shaun Hendy have become well known for their work explaining the science behind COVID-19 and guiding the public and government response. Is their home institution doing enough to protect them from bad actors?

Engineer and psychologist Carlotta M. Arthur, currently director of the Henry Luce Foundation’s Clare Boothe Luce Program for Women in STEM, has been named the new executive director of the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education at America’s National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Cst Philip E. Rubin, whose extensive resume includes leadership roles at the National Science Foundation and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, is the new president of the board of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

In her new book, “Politics and Expertise: How to Use Science in a Democratic Society,” Zeynep Pamuk outlines new directions that she believes the relationship between science and politics might take, rooted in the understanding that scientific knowledge is tentative and uncertain.

The incoming president of the Linguistic Society of America reflects on his own primary education and how public education across the nation tends to perpetuate the class structure.

A year ago the potential impact of COVID-19 on precarious early career researchers (ECRs) looked bleak. Reporting on findings from the longitudinal Harbingers 2 project, David Nicholas suggests the effects of COVID-19 on ECR researchers have been varied internationally. Where pressures from the pandemic have been felt most acutely, particularly in the UK, US and France, it has often aligned with perceptions of ongoing structural issues within academia.

First Amendment law in the United states generally prohibits the government from restricting individuals’ right to speak freely. But the First Amendment rules that apply to the government when it limits the speech of its own employees are much more government-friendly, allowing greater restrictions of those workers’ speech.

A report from the Brookings Institution finds, at least in the case of economists, the U.S. government is roughly at the same place as academe when it comes to diversity.

At a time when there are so many concerns being raised about always-on work cultures and our right to disconnect, email is the bane of many of our working lives.

A new report on supporting the big data infrastructure needs of universities offers a variety of real-world recommendations for improving the research environment.

Robert Dingwall asks if claims about the effectiveness of face masks in stopping COVID consistent with current standards of research integrity.