Social Science Space

Ideologues vs. Science, young people on the search for soul mates, the decline of religion and more in your Weekly Overview of Social Science News

The English in full moral panic are never an edifying spectacle. The Jimmy Savile affair is no exception, as self-appointed experts on child abuse, BBC-bashing tabloids and ambulance-chasing lawyers have piled into the fray.

The unsettling truth about the Academic job market.

Beyond an economic analysis of the financial crisis

An evaluation of Missouri Department of Mental Health’s Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity Murder Acquittees.

A sociologist explains why Sikh temple shooter Wade M. Page’s white-power music scene is dying out, just as we’re all discovering it.

Sociology is arguably a global project. Significant approaches to the study of society have been developed in many parts of the world. Yet, students in the North Atlantic world do not learn about these approaches, as textbooks interpret the world in terms of scholars of the region.

Currently, textbooks exist at the margins of the Sociology, summarising and recycling extant knowledge while fundamentally lacking in original contributions to sociological enquiry. This doesn’t have to be.

The entire purpose of social science is to apply disciplined, logical, and serious analysis to of all aspects of contemporary social life. Whether ‘scientific’ or not, this process of exploration is intrinsically valuable.

Textbooks now play a crucial role in teaching in the social sciences. Their importance is mirrored by their abundance; there is an enormous variety of textbooks on the most commonly taught subjects. The rise of the ‘textbook industry’ is not necessarily a good thing, though.

Why do we punish and to what ends?

While parts of Aditya Chakrabortty’s recent piece in the Guardian were sensible and informed, its central claim was unfair – that social science disciplines have been unable or unwilling to explore, explain, and confront the ‘Great Financial Crash’ of 2007-9