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 […]
Making Sense of Crime Trends
Much of the current confusion about crime trends is born of the tendency to bunch together a whole range of different harms and actions under the abstract category of ‘crime’. This blinds us to where the significant problems are.
We Aren’t the World
Joe Henrich and his colleagues are shaking the foundations of psychology and economics—and hoping to change the way social scientists think about human behavior and culture.
Undercover Pressures
Some criminal investigations resonate over the years. Even if you’ve only had peripheral involvement with them, as in my case, they still […]
In praise of Sociology! Speech by Pierre Bourdieu
In the February edition of Sociology, a previously unpublished translation of a speech given by Pierre Bourdieu. Here is an excerpt and introduction.
The Politics of Attacking Political Science
As a political scientist, I find it curious that my discipline has been singled out as being particularly wasteful of federal research dollars. How did we join welfare queens and spotted owls as convenient punching bags, things that must not be aided by taxpayer money during lean times?
One Step Closer to Restoring Government Chief Social Scientist Post
The Campaign for Social Science has welcomed a Government announcement on the 4th of March, 2013 that it will set up the post of What Works National Advisor to oversee six evidence centres for areas of social policy.
Why Study Social Science
We study social science because social phenomena affect people’s lives in profound ways. If you want to start with Cantor’s focus—physical illness and death—then social phenomena are tremendously important.
Social Science’s Dangerously Low Profile, and How to Fix It
“We are now in a situation where science, technology, engineering and maths – the STEM subjects – were about 15 to 20 years ago….there was a lack of public understanding of what they contributed to society and its development”
