Social Science Space

With a little luck, nunchi — billed as ‘the Korean secret to happiness,’ might just become the next mindfulness, spawning a decade-defining self-help trend and sparking a lasting media debate.

Our study, Doing Research Assessment, shows Indonesian policy-making is predominantly informed by research with poor theoretical engagement, with no strong tradition of peer review and with legal threats to academic freedom.

Science journalist Hope Reese speaks with Naomi Oreskes, author of the new book ‘Why Trust Science?’ about how to trust science that may conflict with our moral or religious values and what we can do to prevent bias in scientific communities, and methodological fetishism, among other topics.

Funders from private industry — which represent two-thirds of funding in medical research, for example — can go great lengths to suppress the publication of findings which appear unfavorable. How can academic freedom be protected with this monumental funding shift?

I had no reservations about conducting research in the UAE. And I underwent a rigorous ethical and fieldwork assessment and was sure to follow established protocols before and during my trip. Yet I was imprisoned for nearly seven months …

Academic freedom is under threat everywhere. Not only do some countries perpetrate direct attacks on students and scholars. But the internationalization of higher education has also created new global threats for both scholars and students. Here is how to defend academic freedom.

New bans and restrictions of research and teaching on topics such as constitutionalism and civil society have impeded independent scholarship in China. How should universities and academics outside of China react?

In the last 20 years or so there has been much excitement, particularly in science and technology studies, about Actor-Network Theory. One of its most distinctive features is the way in which it ascribes agency to material objects. Perhaps we should not be crediting Bruno Latour or Michel Callon with the original insight – but an English humourist, Paul Jennings.

Today, and into the future, consulting archival documents increasingly means reading them on a screen. This brings with it opportunity — imagine being able to search for keywords across millions of documents, leading to radically faster search times — but also challenge, as the number of electronic documents increases exponentially.

Mengwei Tu, a lecturer in sociology at East China University of Science and Technology, describes her encounters with two postgraduate students from Pakistan. They highlight both China’s potential to become an attractive destination for international students and the difficulties involved in the internationalization of a society that was isolated from the outside world for much of its recent history.

The popularization of mindfulness, write Daniel Nehring and Ashley Frawley, cannot just be understood as a recent response to public perceptions of a mental health crisis. Rather, it is the result of developments in academic psychology, in its clinical uses in psychotherapy, and in its growing commercial exploitation from the 1980s onwards.

The U.S. National Science Foundation has followed other research-based government agencies in trying to ring-fence American research from collaborative and acquisitive foreign actors. Could they mean China?