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 […]
Ann Oakley on Women’s Experience of Childbirth
In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast sociologist Ann Oakley discusses her research into a range of questions about women’s experience of childbirth.
So Much Noise: Are Academics being Over-Branded?
The Ivory Tower has been toppled and academia has an impact in the ‘real world’. The problem is that this may have come at the expense of truly innovative and critical scholarship.
Open Access and the Privatisation of Knowledge
Is OA the flip side to privatisation of Higher Education? Is there a way in which OA is a means of justifying the economic inaccessibility of HE by providing a public good?
Will Social Science Research Cuts Affect the Human Rights Situation in the U.S.?
On social science, the sequester, and the need for a Human Rights Culture.
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.
Sarah Franklin on the Sociology of Reproductive Technology
New technologies have dramatically changed choices around reproduction. Sarah Franklin, Professor of Sociology at Cambridge University, discusses her research
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”
Science, Advocacy and Anthropology
Contrary to some loudly voiced claims, both advocacy and science are (and long have been) at the core of our discipline.
