Ethics

Photo: melting glacier.

‘Optopia’ and the Politics of Hope

Having read Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Ministry for the Future” and reflected on it in the context of the managerial literature around the climate crisis, we set out to imagine a middle ground between utopia and dystopia; an optimum scenario which can still leave us with a livable future.

5 months ago
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Ethics on scrabble board_opt

Setting the Norms of Internet-based Survey Research

A decade ago, Elizabeth Buchanan and Erin Hvizdak set forth, in the Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, some of the key elements that have since guided guiding ethical academic use of internet research methods.

4 years ago
4251

Leon Redbone, Fact Checking, and Ethnography

In recent popular music, there have been few if any performers as enigmatic as the late Leon Redbone, who died on May 30. With a vintage repertoire featuring tunes from ragtime, blues, vaudeville, and Tin Pan Alley, and always appearing in dark glasses and a Panama hat, he looked like a figure straight out of the 1920s.

4 years ago
4270

The Civic Responsibility of Ethnographers

What duty do social scientists have to report illegal activity that they witness as part of their fieldwork? If you answered quickly, you may not have thought about the issue all that deeply.

5 years ago
1774
No drones sign

How Do We Head Off the Collateral Damage of Big Data?

Hamish Robertson and Joanne Travaglia argue that big data quantification is now not only a mechanism for extracting information but has become an idea with social and political power in its own right. The lack of critique of quantitative methods and their application contributes to the existing and potentially coercive power of digital information systems and their attendant methods, and enhances the potential for collateral damage.

6 years ago
1457

Sexual Harassment and Universities

Developing an effective response to sexual harassment in the academic industry — by no means a new phenomenon, notes Robert Dingwall — requires us to consider questions about institutional memory, occupational cultures, and organizational silos, rather than badly behaved individuals.

6 years ago
1758