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.
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 […]
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”
The Vocation of Sociology – Exposing Slow Violence
Much destruction of human potential takes the form of a “slow violence” that extends over time. It is insidious, undramatic and relatively invisible.
Postgraduate Study – A right or an opportunity?
There are all sorts of things from which we are excluded by limited means. Is postgraduate education really so different?
Antebellism: The Neoliberal Compromise of the Political
Why we need to pay closer attention to the President of Emory’s shocking comparison of University budget cuts with the three-fifths compromise, and what it says about America now, not then.
The Myths of Offender Profiling
Recent publications have encouraged me not to keep quiet about this any longer. Now is the time to explain why I find the term ‘profiling’ so problematic yet get stuck with using it.
