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 […]
Is COVID-19 Enabling Academic Disaster Capitalism?
This seems, writes Daniel Nehring, to be a good time to feel pessimistic about academia in the COVID world, and to turn this pessimism into meaningful debate and effective action.
Watch the Webinar: Deconstructing Neoliberalism in Higher Education
Higher education is striving to address problems such as access, inclusion, and elitism, but is a neoliberalist foundation undermining these efforts—or even the system itself? An online forum held on April 21, “Deconstructing Neoliberalism in Higher Education: How can we promote greater equity and re-professionalize the professoriate?” addressed this quandary.
2021: From Scholars to Disposable Labor in the Brave New World of Academic Capitalism
In terms of the organization of academic labor, higher education is ever more sharply divided between, on the one hand, an advantaged minority in full-time, long-term employment and, on the other hand, academia’s reserve army of labor.
Thinking of Taking an Academic Job in China? Let’s Talk About ‘De-coupling’ and the ‘China Bubble’
To what extent do the realities of social research in China live up to the favorable image created by job ads on academic recruitment sites?
Thinking of Taking an Academic Job in China? Better Plan Carefully
At their heart, Chinese public universities are deeply parochial bureaucratic structures geared towards the party-state’s priorities for socio-economic development. In response to national and international pressures, some universities have recently begun to internationalize, with notably different degrees of enthusiasm. Others have not. You would do well to determine, the author writes, into what category a prospective employer falls.
Thinking of Taking an Academic Job in China? Better Think Twice
China has become an increasingly attractive destination for Western social scientists, both for those doing research in and on China and for those looking to continue their careers with meaningful, long-term perspectives.
Not What It Used to Be: Academic Capitalism and Sociological Futures in the UK
Sociology today, argues our Daniek Nehring, is defined by a fundamental contradiction between its everyday labor practices and its imaginary ethos.
The Deskilled Academic: Bureaucracy Defeats Scholarship
Intellectual labor comes to be largely external to the objectives of the bureaucratic regimes that dominate universities, argues our Daniel Nehring, and academics whose careers were built on intellectual labor turn out to be deskilled workers in organizational settings indifferent to their concerns.
