Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
What are the prospects for global sociology?
For there to be some sort of global sociology there would need to a recognition of socio-culturally disparate forms of knowledge and institutional settings.
Research Integrity in the UK – the Spawn of Satan?
A document drops into my inbox that purports to be a draft Concordat between the major UK funders and university managements on research integrity – a publication that has already been set for July 2012, but someone belatedly thought that it might be a good idea to get disciplinary associations on board.
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.
Better Drowned than Duffers…?
Last Saturday, I went to the theatre to a see a touring production based on Arthur Ransome’s novel, Swallows and Amazons…. it prompted a number of thoughts about risk and risk management in the contemporary world.
Informant Confidentiality in the Corporate University
UK newspapers have belatedly picked up on a troubling precedent that is crystallizing in the US courts. Boston College has been ordered to disclose recordings from an archive of interviews with former IRA members to the Police Service of Northern Ireland…
Polar Bears and the Ethics of Representation
There was a stir in some sections of the UK media just before Christmas when it was revealed that a sequence of […]
How far should we go?
This summer, I have been reading one of the most impressive ethnographies that I have seen for a long time: Playing on […]
