Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
November 12, 2019
Analysis: Indonesia Needs Quality Research to Inform Policy-Making
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More Must be Done to Preserve the Freedom to Research
I had no reservations about conducting research in the UAE. And I underwent a rigorous ethical and fieldwork assessment and was sure to follow established protocols before and during my trip. Yet I was imprisoned for nearly seven months …
Should Academics Offer Support to Student Protesters?
Despite warnings from universities (under government pressure), thousands of students in Indonesia protested controversial bills. What role, if any, should academics play in the support and encouragement of student protesters?
Book Review: Will China Democratize?
In the shadow of the 25 year anniversary of the Tiananmen square crackdown, the recent Hong Kong protests have generated interest in how […]
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 State of Social Science: only itself to blame?
Both society and government rely on social science a great deal, and those who criticise it for what they see as its failure to predict events have misunderstood the nature of the knowledge it can produce.
The Importance of Studying the Obvious
Everyone has experience being human, and so findings in social science coincide with something that we have either experienced or can imagine experiencing. The result is that social science all too often seems like common sense.
SAGE opposes the Flake Amendment
Recently, the US House of Representatives passed off an amendment offered by Representative Jeff Flake (R-AZ) that would prohibit funding for the Political Science Program with the National Science Foundation. If enacted into law, this amendment would set an extraordinary and disturbing precedent in which Congress chooses which scientific disciplines should be funded and not funded within the NSF’s research portfolio.
Informant Confidentiality in the Corporate University
UK newspapers have belatedly picked up on a troubling precedent that is crystallizing in the US courts. Boston College has been ordered to disclose recordings from an archive of interviews with former IRA members to the Police Service of Northern Ireland…
