Social Science Space

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.

In order to engage in real-time and have a conversation about thought-provoking approaches, MethodSpace is having a live series of webinars. The first one was Get Creative! Research with Pictures & Stories, watch the first one now.

The roots of sociology lie among a group of engaged, engaging and vibrant people who often risked their well-being, or even their lives, to advance their ideas. So what happened to suck much of the life out of the discipline?

Calling all social scientists. How were you trained? How are you keeping up (or not) with new developments in this rapidly changing digital world? How are you training your students? This was the subject of an event sponsored by SAGE Ocean as part of the ESRC’s 2018 Festival of Social Science. Comment on the post

Dr. Maxine Atkinson shares her thoughts and challenges on how application is a crucial step to teaching foundational concepts. “One of the challenges we all face when teaching a foundational concept is making sure that student comprehension is strong and that they will be able to apply the concept throughout the course.”

Increasingly, says Robert Dingwall, UK universities are taking a more paternal role in the lives of their students, taking — or perhaps resuming — more active roles in addressing their charges’ mental health, criminal conduct and self-care.

How do you teach someone to be entrepreneurial? That’s the challenge presented to Heidi Neck, the Jeffry A. Timmons Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Babson College and director of the Babson Entrepreneur Experience Lab, every day. We asked her some questions in the wake of her new textbook on those issues won an award.

The Gates Foundation is regrouping after its latest school improvement disappointment, but it’s not bowing out of the education reform business. As the philanthropic powerhouse led by Bill and Melinda Gates explained in their latest annual letter to the public, it ended its effort to overhaul teacher evaluation systems after determining that these efforts were failing to generate intended results.

The first-ever “Social Science FOO Camp” was held a couple weeks ago at the Facebook headquarters in California. What’s a Social Science Foo Camp? According to Tom Kecskemethy, director of the AAPSS, “its a hard-to-describe ‘un-conference,’ for the uninitiated.” Follow Tom in this post as he shares his perspective on the FOO camp and explains what he learned.

Academics have been disengaged, disengaged themselves, or never been engaged with the challenges of working in, and for, very complex organizations, says our Robert Dingwall. Their distaste for administration in its various forms is a liability.

How well do sociology departments in the UK teach sociology that originated in the UK? Asking that surprisingly hard question may produce usable insights for academic Britain, argues our Robert Dingwall.

As sociology has drifted further and further from any conservative touchstones, argues Robert Dingwall, it has become less and less able to understand the society that provides its subsistence.