Many PhD graduates are forced into the troubled world of unemployment while, at the same time, being denied a public voice. How is it that extremely narrow standards of professional legitimacy are used to judge young scholars who simply cannot meet them?
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.
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.
Recently, The Independent published a brief piece on the ‘slave-like’ working conditions of PhD students at UK universities. This sounds dramatic, but it’s hardly news – the problem has been around for years. The question arises why dissent did not emerge earlier and more forcefully.
The Guardian yesterday published a set of worrying facts. Even though consumers of higher education pay almost three times as much in tuition fees than they did six years ago, face-to-face with lecturers in class has barely increased
A response to Sir Simon Jenkins’ article on the value of public universities.
How an unholy alliance of arrogant scientists and self-interested federal bureaucrats came to widen the net of ethical regulation intended to deal with abuses in medical research to empirical investigation in the humanities and social sciences.
In recent years there has been an increased focus on how research papers and supplemental data can be preserved openly. Andy Tattersall, Liz Such, Joe Langley and Fiona Marshall argue equal attention should also be paid to curating communication outputs aimed at engaging non-academic audiences.
Michael Burawoy, whose embrace of public sociology and the public at work lead him to describe his influential academic niche as “industrial […]
To address research credibility issues, we must reform the role of metrics, rankings, and incentives in universities.
In recent years there has been an increased focus on how research papers and supplemental data can be preserved openly. Andy Tattersall, Liz Such, Joe Langley and Fiona Marshall argue equal attention should also be paid to curating communication outputs aimed at engaging non-academic audiences.
A new people has emerged in the digital age, that of ‘internet famous’ celebrities. And that new people has a class of […]
Xenotransplantation is a fascinating subject – for obvious reasons, as it involves transplanting organs or other body parts across species boundaries (in […]
