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 […]
SSRC, Social Science One Name Social Media Research Grantees
As part of a pioneering effort to systematically use privacy-protected Facebook data to study the platform’s impact on democracy, the Social Science Research Council and its partner Social Science One have named the inaugural recipients of the Social Media and Democracy Research Grants.
Fast Professor: WeChat and Future Academe
Daniel Nehring describes China’s social networking platform WeChat as ‘Facebook on steroids,’ and notes it has long surpassed e-mail as the main tool of mediating communication at Chinese universities while obliterating boundaries between work and home. Is this a cautionary tale for academe outside of China?
Monika Krause on Humanitarian Aid
Humanitarian aid organizations often find themselves torn by reasonable expectations – to address a pressing crisis and to show that what they are doing is actually helping. While these might not seem at odds, in practice, says sociologist Monika Krause, they often do. Krause, is the author of The Good Project, an award-winning book from 2014, and guest of this Social Science Bites podcast.
Hate Speech on Social Media Undermines Important UN Declarations
Evidence suggests that one effect of the growing phenomenon of online hate speech is that it fosters varied forms of inequalities (e.g. class, race, gender, and place of origin) and, consequently, also (in)directly undermines important United Nations declarations promoting human rights.
What Can We Afford to Forget If Machines Do Our Remembering?
Outsourcing our memories — or actually forgetting once-vital skills that no longer matter in our daily lives — has always been with humanity. But how does the drift to artificial intelligence reflect what’s always been the case versus what should be a special case?
Thoughts on Gender in the 21st Century University Environment
In May 2017 a small band of researchers at Bournemouth University organized a workshop on “Gender and Sexuality in the 21st Century.” The participants’ openness to a discussion on sexuality, gender, and emotion began to expose this latest generation’s “ambivalence,” even “dissonance,” regarding concepts such as “gender” and “sexuality.”
Whatever Happened to Conservative Social Thought?
In the wake of Brexit, Robert Dingwall asks a series of probing questions about the eclipse of Conservative Social Thought at universities, such as when did the social sciences last have a serious engagement with the institutions of the bourgeoisie, even though by income and status many of us would belong to that class?
Might Campus Free Speech Laws Muzzle Some Speech?
Some language in campus speech legislation may be largely symbolic and not change what many colleges are already doing. But, argues Neal Hutchens, some provisions in legislation could change campus speech rules in important ways.
