How can a university’s professors and administrators help build a strong academic pathway for underrepresented students? Over the next few months, join Curtis Byrd and Rihana Mason of Georgia State University, and various pathway program directors as they join Social Science Space to explore what makes for a successful pipeline program.  

In their new title Academic Pipeline Project: Diversifying Pathways from the Bachelors to the Professoriate (published open access by Lever Press), Byrd and Mason utilize the THRIVE Index (Type, History, Research, Inclusion, Identity, Voice, and Expectation) they created to contextualize and compare pipeline programs across the United States. The webinar series will dive deeper into the title’s content, allowing for pathway representatives to expand upon their programs and allow for audience Q&A. Each session will focus on a different part of the academic pipeline, including precollegiate, collegiate, and postgraduate/faculty.

The first event, “Positioning Underrepresented Minority Students for College: Best Practices of Precollegiate Pathway Programs,” took place on June 30. It can viewed below. Joining Byrd and Mason were Johnny Ray James from the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) network of schools and Ariel Cochrane-Brown of the College Advising Corps to discuss best practices in positioning underrepresented minority students for success in college.

This one-hour webinar kicked off a series of three conversations with Byrd and Mason drawing from Academic Pipeline Programs while panelists will share best practices of their programs.

The second webinar, “Transitioning from Bachelors to the Professoriate: College and Graduate Pipeline Programs,” saw Ansley Abraham, Southern Regional Educational Board-Doctoral Scholars Program, and Taiese Bingham-Hickman, associate director of the Leadership Alliance, join Byrd and Mason. In the video of the July 22 webinar below, they discuss best practices in positioning students from diverse backgrounds for the progression from college to graduate school.

The last webinar was “Leveraging Academic Pipeline Programs into the Professoriate” and brought Freeman Hrabowski, president of the University of Baltimore County, into conversation with Jamal Watson, editor of Diverse: Issues In Higher Education. They joined Byrd and Mason to examine how academic pipeline initiatives are used, replicated, and promoted at the institutional level around the country.

SERIES HOSTS

Curtis D. Byrd  is the special advisor to the provost at Georgia State University (GSU). Dr. Byrd consults and provides leadership in GSU faculty and graduate student diversity and inclusion efforts. Most recently he served as a research associate and consultant for the HBCU STEM Undergraduate Success Center at Morehouse College. Prior to his time at Morehouse he served for eight years as the assistant dean of graduate studies and senior associate director of graduate enrollment at Clark Atlanta University. Before this he served as director of special programs (undergraduate research) and associate director of the McNair Scholars program at University of Florida and director of the McNair Scholars Program at GSU.  

Rihana S. Mason is a research scientist at the Urban Child Study Center at GSU. Prior to joining the UCSC, she served as an associate professor in psychology at Emmanuel College for several years where she helped to expand the undergraduate curriculum in psychology. She is the 2021-22 president of the Southeastern Psychological Association and a member of the Psi Chi Diversity Advisory Committee. 

SERIES GUESTS

Ariel Cochrane-Brown is regional director, Southeast on the national program team, leading and supporting College Advising Corps programs and special projects in three states and working in collaboration with colleagues who lead programs in the Southeastern region. Before taking her current role, she served for two years as an adviser with CAC at the University of North Carolina. Most recently, Ariel directed a signature retention program at GSU that assisted academically at-risk students with their transition into college. She also led innovative efforts to increase the retention, progression, and graduation rates of students at the university. 

Johnny Ray James, assistant principal of humanities, KIPP Soul Academy. James’ education career began in the department of First-Year Experience at Louisiana State University. Since then, he has taught and led in Clayton County and Atlanta Public Schools, and KIPP Metro Atlanta & KIPP New Jersey (Newark) Charter School networks. In Newark, he served as the school’s Director of Extended Learning and 8th Grade Level Chair.

Taiese Bingham-Hickman in the associate director of the Leadership Alliance. Before coming to the Alliance, she served as the assistant director of Biomedical Informatics Research and Operations at Brown University. Bingham is a member of the American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics and a published author in her field. She is an alumna of the Leadership Alliance Summer Research Early Identification Program at Harvard Medical School.

Ansley Abraham, director of the Southern Regional Education Board’s State Doctoral Scholars Program, joined SREB in 1985 as a research associate and became the founding director of the State Doctoral Scholars Program in 1993. A sociologist and psychologist, Abraham’s previous work at SREB covered perception of campus climate by minority- and majority-group students on historically black and predominantly white campuses and studies on statewide assessments and placement, college-level standards and the need for developmental education. He also worked as a program specialist in the Florida Department of Education and as a management analyst in the Florida governor’s office.

Freeman A. Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County since 1992, is a consultant on science and math education to national agencies, universities, and school systems. In 2012, he was named by President Obama to chair the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans. In 2012, he was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by TIME, and more recently he received the American Council on Education’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2018), the University of California, Berkeley’s Clark Kerr Award (2019), and the University of California, San Francisco’s UCSF Medal (2020). His most recent book, The Empowered University, examines how university communities support academic success by cultivating an empowering institutional culture.

Jamal Watson is editor at Diverse: Issues In Higher Education, the nation’s most prominent publication focused on access, diversity and inclusion across the higher education landscape. A veteran journalist, he has written and edited for the publication since 2005. Watson is also a member of the graduate school faculty at Trinity Washington University, where he teaches in and directs the Strategic Communication and Public Relations program and the Journalism and Media Studies program. He is the author of a forthcoming biography on civil rights activist and MSNBC host, the Reverend Al Sharpton.

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Racial/ethnic identity groups have endured racial profiling, are targets of hate crimes, and are often viewed not as individuals but as a faceless mass on a daily basis—even in classrooms. In this American Educational Research Association (AERA) Distinguished Lecture, Sylvia Hurtado at the University of California, Los Angeles will discuss the need for identity-based education, re-humanizing practices, and increased specificity to target racial equity aims in higher education. Hurtado’s work aims to personalize “facelessness” using research on campus racial climates and Latinx experiences, articulating how our tendencies for recognition bias are perpetuated and reinforced at the individual and institutional levels in education.

The lecture, “The Inevitability of Racial Bias and Exclusion: Implications for Identity-Based Education and Practice,” takes place on Thursday, September 30, at 6 p.m. ET. (The event was rescheduled from AERA’s virtual annual meeting in April.)

Attendees can register for this event here.  

Hurtado, a longstanding AERA Fellow and a professor at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA, grew up in San Antonio, Texas. As a first-generation Latina college student, she pursued sociology of education. Influenced by these experiences, her scholarship focuses on student educational outcomes, campus racial climates, and equity and inclusion in higher education.

She served as director of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA for over a decade and is past president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education. Hurtado served on the Board on Higher Education and Workforce of the National Research Council and was on study panels that produced several National Academy Press reports on STEM, student success, and mentoring. In addition to being inducted as an AERA Fellow in 2011, she was elected to the National Academy of Education and to AERA Council in 2019. Her current research includes case studies of departments that implement culturally aware mentoring among faculty with the University of Wisconsin; university organizational change after the replication of the Meyerhoff Scholars Program, funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; and another Spencer-funded project on organizing for student success at Hispanic-serving institutions.

The lecture will include a welcome from AERA President Na’ilah Suad Nasir and an introduction from AERA Past President Shaun R. Harper. It will be followed by a question-and-answer session with the virtual attendees. The event will be closed captioned and have ASL translation.

The post AERA Lecture: The Inevitability of Racial Bias and Exclusion appeared first on Social Science Space.

As we enter a second academic year with the coronavirus pandemic clearly here for the long haul, it is worth reflecting on how university faculty have been feeling. Academic staff have been working harder than ever, and after an incredibly tough 18 months they are now prioritizing their wellbeing as a top concern. What can academic publishers learn from this, as we think about our role in serving higher education faculty and their students?

Toward the end of 2020, I shared findings from our SAGE Publishing faculty survey which showed a high level of overwhelm among faculty. The survey had developed out of conversations with SAGE’s UK Pedagogy Advisory Board (PAB), as we were interested to further understand the feelings of academic faculty through the pandemic, and to uncover their key priorities, challenges, and resource needs. The information we received helped us to reflect on our own role as a publisher in this time of incredible change, and in the spring of 2021 we re-ran the survey, interested to observe any differences. (SAGE is the parent of Social Science Space.)

Our latest survey secured 888 respondents, the majority of whom are lecturers based in the UK or Europe, with other contributors from Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Here are some of our key findings.

Individual Wellbeing is A Top Priority

Understandably, faculty’s topmost priority back in 2020 had been ‘setting courses up online.’ Whilst this still remains a significant focus for half our 2021 respondents, the highest priority this year changed to a focus on individual faculty wellbeing, with 67 percent of respondents registering ‘my wellbeing’ as a high or top priority (and an additional 24 percent choosing wellbeing as a medium priority).  

Indeed, personal wellbeing was the only upward trending priority compared to last year, ranking higher than implementing best pedagogical practice, wellbeing support for students, and finding resources to use online. This feels understandable, with staff having already done so much work in these areas over the last year, despite the huge challenges faced (including research challenges to determining good pedagogy).

So Tired

The wellbeing theme is not a surprise. Our fall 2020 survey had seen 67 percent of respondents express high rates of feeling overwhelmed, concerned and tired, with understandably far fewer (22 percent) claiming to feel excited or welcoming of changes to teaching during the pandemic. That negative feeling has dropped to 59 percent in our spring survey. However, while feelings of overwhelm and concern were down, there has been an increase in the level of tiredness (up from 17 percent to 22 percent), which fits with our PAB members’ own experience and other reports of exhaustion and stress given the sheer amount of work that was required to speedily transition to virtual classrooms.

There was, however, a small uptick in the number of people welcoming changes in teaching, from 12 percent in fall to 16 percent in the spring.

Blended Learning Here to Stay

Across the fall and spring surveys we have seen a continued expectation that the pivot to online teaching or blended learning is here to stay. This was felt by 62 percent of fall 2020 and 63 percent of spring 2021 respondents, and chimes with feedback from faculty members on SAGE’s Pedagogy Advisory Board, who clearly feel that we shouldn’t ‘snap back’ to 100 percent face-to-face teaching, or equating contact time with quality. These findings are interesting in comparison to the recent student survey from the Higher Education Policy Institute in which students emphasized their dissatisfaction with online learning and a desire for more in-person contact and more communication — areas that seem lower on faculty’s priorities in our survey.

PAB member Wendy Garnham of Sussex University confirmed the need for balance: “The push to online learning has forced us to develop our pedagogy and re-think our teaching in ways we might not have done otherwise. It will be important to retain the good things we have developed going forward and not to just return to pre-pandemic methods, some of which were outdated and less fit for purpose.’’

Chris Headland of the University of Lincoln commented, “The lockdowns through the last two academic years have arguably been the largest disrupter to the sector in the past 50 years. For better or for worse, we know more about blended learning than we ever have before”.

It is interesting to see a decline in the percentage of respondents who felt e-book availability would be mandatory for course texts – the rate remains notable at 44 percent, but this is down from a high of 55 percent in fall 2020.

In both surveys, just under half (47 percent) of respondents expressed concerns about research funding as a result of the pandemic.

Biggest Challenges?

When we asked faculty about current challenges they are facing, over half mentioned workload, followed by conducting research. Other challenges continue to be those that the COVID experience has exacerbated, such as student engagement, online teaching, and communication with students.

The Role of the Publisher

Our final focus in the survey was to ask faculty about the resources they prefer to get from publishers, and here open educational resources and eTextbooks emerged as the two top priorities. Support for online teaching best practice and provision of case studies were the next most sought-after resources, followed by print textbooks and video. All of these had been the top responses in 2020, though the demand for print textbooks jumped significantly from 25 percent to 34 percent, perhaps as faculty start to expect some kind of return to normalization.

There is much for publishers to learn from these findings, and part of our response at SAGE has been to develop open access teaching resources, an online teaching hub, a new approach to the provision of eTextbooks via SAGE Catalyst, and refining our digital learning platforms with faculty’s needs in mind.  As the new semester gets underway, academic publishers must continue to work closely with faculty to provide the resources and support they need.

Summary

Our two faculty surveys have been incredibly insightful alongside conversations with our Pedagogy Advisory Board. The feedback shows a consistent view that the pivot to online is here to stay, and that eTextbooks will remain a part of the pedagogical ecosystem, even if print textbooks are becoming front of mind again. But the biggest change we are seeing is faculty wellbeing, which our surveys show is of greatest concern. University leadership will need to pay attention to this general trend and ensure they are finding ways of supporting faculty as we get ready for the new academic year.

Our PAB member Danielle Tran of UAL had this to say: “As colleagues and students prepare for a new academic year, spaces for dialogue and reflection will be significant in supporting wellbeing as we navigate an environment of the familiar and unfamiliar. To ensure wellbeing remains a constant priority, it’s important to question how plans and delivery of work across and at all levels of a university are considerate of student and staff wellbeing.”

So, here’s to the start of a new academic year, wishing faculty and their students a positive return to campus, be it online or in person.

We are grateful to all those who contributed to our surveys, and hope these results are insightful. We’re interested to hear your own reflections in the comments below.

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National Hispanic Heritage Month, September 15 through October 15, celebrates the “histories, cultures and contributions of American citizens whose ancestors came from Spain, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America,” according to the official website.

To support those interested in the social and behavioral science related to this month, SAGE Publishing developed this collection to examine the experiences of Hispanic/Latine populations primarily located within the United States. (Read this post on the background of those terms.)  Drawing from a range of social and behavioral science disciplines and scholars, the insights and recommendations often transcend borders, with broad implications for education, healthcare, and public policy.

The articles in this collection are organized within four broad thematic categories: Intersectional Hispanic/Latine Identities; Education; Health and Wellness; and Discrimination, Politics, and Activism.

Below, you’ll find research on the ways that identities are constructed—both on and offline—and how different cultural values affect family ties, mental health, student outcomes, and political participation. Several authors examine colorism within Latine communities and research the mental and social impacts of discrimination under the U.S. educational, immigration, and criminal justice systems. Others discuss unique modes of resilience and resistance, from female artists in Spain subverting machismo through the appropriation of traditionally sexist musical forms to educators using Mexican American folklore to foster cultural competence in their students.

Intersectional Hispanic/Latine Identities

“‘Latino’ or ‘Hispanic’? The Sociodemographic Correlates of Panethnic Label Preferences among U.S. Latinos/Hispanics“ | Daniel E. Martínez and Kelsey E. Gonzalez in Sociological Perspectives

“The Complexity of the “x” in Latinx: How Latinx/a/o Students Relate to, Identify With, and Understand the Term Latinx” | Cristobal Salinas in Journal of Hispanic Higher Education

“Out of the Shadows, into the Dark: Ethnoracial Dissonance and Identity Formation among Afro-Latinxs” | Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman and Edlin Veras in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

“What Does It Mean to Be Mexican (American)? Exploring Youth Ethnic Identity” | Halleh Hashtpari, Karen W. Tao, Kritzia Merced, Joél Arvizo-Zavala, and James Hernández in The Counseling Psychologist

“Latinx Digital Memory: Identity Making in Real Time” | Melissa Villa-Nicholas in Social Media + Society

“Social movements as agents of change: Fighting intersectional food inequalities, building food as webs of life” | Renata Motta in The Sociological Review

“Finding Feminism through Faith: Casa Yela, Popular Feminism, and the Women-Church Movement in Chile” | Hillary Hiner in Latin American Perspectives

“Marianismo Beliefs, Intimate Partner Violence, and Psychological Distress Among Recently Immigrated, Young Adult Latinas” | Nicole Da Silva, Toni R. Verdejo, Frank R. Dillon, Melissa M. Ertl, and Mario De La Rosa in Journal of Interpersonal Violence

“Feminist Reggaeton in Spain: Young Women Subverting Machismo Through ‘Perreo’” | Núria Araüna, Iolanda Tortajada, and Mònica Figueras-Maz in YOUNG

“Intersectionality, Linked Fate, and LGBTQ Latinx Political Participation” | Julie Moreau, Stephen Nuño-Pérez, and Lisa M. Sanchez in Political Research Quarterly

Education

“Troubling the Essentialist Discourse of Brown in Education: The Anti-Black Sociopolitical and Sociohistorical Etymology of Latinxs as a Brown Monolith” | Christopher L. Busey and Carolyn Silva in Educational Researcher

“Resilience Through Family: Family Support as an Academic and Psychological Protective Resource for Mexican Descent First-Generation College Students” | Amber Jimenez, Brandy Piña-Watson, and Gabriela Manzo in Journal of Hispanic Higher Education

“Employing Mexican American Folklore as an Educational Tool to Teach Cultural Competence” | Leyla Feize, Denise A. Longoria, and Alfredo Fernandez in Journal of Hispanic Higher Education

“Experiences of Latino Children Attending Rural Elementary Schools in the Southeastern U.S.: Perspectives from Latino Parents in Burgeoning Latino Communities” | José A. Villalba, Maria Brunelli, Lucy Lewis, and Dean Orfanedes in ASCA | Professional School Counseling

“The Effect of Diversity Climate on Institutional Affiliation/Pride and Intentions to Stay and Graduate: A Comparison of Latinx and Non-Latinx White Students” | Monica C. Gavino and Ekundayo Akinlade in Journal of Hispanic Higher Education

“STEM Identity Development for Latinas: The Role of Self- and Outside Recognition” | Sarah Rodriguez, Kelly Cunningham, and Alec Jordan in Journal of Hispanic Higher Education

Health and Wellness

“COVID-19 Pandemic Among Immigrant Latinx Farmworker and Non-farmworker Families: A Rural–Urban Comparison of Economic, Educational, Healthcare, and Immigration Concerns” | Sara A. Quandt, Natalie J. LaMonto, Dana C. Mora, Jennifer W. Talton, Paul J. Laurienti, and Thomas A. Arcury in NEW SOLUTIONS: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy

“Discrimination and Latino Health: A Systematic Review of Risk and Resilience” | Nadia Andrade, Athena D. Ford, and Carmen Alvarez in Hispanic Health Care International

“Immigration Policy and Belonging: Ramifications for DACA Recipients’ Sense of Belonging” | Marie L. Mallet-García, and Lisa García-Bedolla in American Behavioral Scientist

“Mexican Traditional Medicine: Application of a Traditional and Complementary Medicine System to Improve Opioid Use Treatment in Latinos” | Tanya R. Sorrell in Journal of Holistic Nursing

“Anxiety sensitivity and acculturative stress: Concurrent relations to mental health among Spanish-speaking Latinx in primary care” | Michael J. Zvolensky, Jafar Bakhshaie, Justin M. Shepherd, Natalia Peraza, Andres G. Viana, Rheeda L. Walker, Monica Garza, Melissa Ochoa-Perez, and Chad Lemaire in Transcultural Psychiatry

“Exploring Why Adult Mexican Males Do Not Get Vaccinated: Implications for COVID-19 Preventive Actions” | V. Nelly Salgado de Snyder, Deliana Garcia, Roxana Pineda, Jessica Calderon, Dania Diaz, Alondra Morales, Brenda Perez in Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences

“Attachment and Wellness Among Latinx Immigrants: Meaning in Life, Belonging, and Hope as Mediators” | Andrew J. Shelton, Chiachih DC Wang, and Ivan Carbajal in The Counseling Psychologist

Racial Discrimination, Politics, and Activism

“Collateral Subjects: The Normalization of Surveillance for Mexican Americans on the Border” | Adriana C. Núñez in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

“Social Media Expression as a Collective Strategy: How Perceptions of Discrimination and Group Status Shape US Latinos’ Online Discussions of Immigration” | Alcides Velasquez and Gretchen Montgomery in Social media + Society

“How Social Ties with Undocumented Immigrants Motivate Latinx Political Participation” | Marcel Roman, Hannah Walker, and Matt Barreto in Political Research Quarterly

“Latino Immigrant Parents’ Experiences With Discrimination: Implications for Parenting in a Hostile Immigration Policy Context” | Cecilia Ayón and San Juanita García in Journal of Family Issues

“’Cops Only See the Brown Skin, They Could Care Less Where It Originated’: Afro-Latinx Perceptions of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement” | Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman and Angelica Loblack in Sociological Perspectives

“Predictors of Police Reporting Among Hispanic Immigrant Victims of Violence” | Dane Hautala, Kirk Dombrowski, and Anthony Marcus in Race and Justice

“How Race Counts for Latinx Homeownership” | Brandon P. Martinez and Alan A. Aja in Critical Sociology

“How Other Minorities Gained Access: The War on Poverty and Asian American and Latino Community Organizing” | Jae Yeon Kim in Political Research Quarterly

“Room for Discussion: An Examination of Political Discussion Amongst Latinxs in Various Social Contexts” | Matt Lamb in the Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences

“Toward a Psychological Framework of Radical Healing in Communities of Color” | Bryana H. French, Jioni A. Lewis, Della V. Mosley, Hector Y. Adames, Nayeli Y. Chavez-Dueñas, Grace A. Chen, and Helen A. Neville in The Counseling Psychologist

The post Hispanic Heritage Month Resource Collection appeared first on Social Science Space.

National Hispanic Heritage Month, which the United States observes between September 15 and October 15, was created by a 1988 law after Representative Esteban E. Torres and Senator Paul Simon each proposed bills to expand National Hispanic Heritage Week into a monthlong celebration. The observance period coincides with the Independence Day celebrations of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Chile, and Belize. Expanding the commemoration came soon after the U.S. Census Bureau decreed a new official label for people of Spanish and Latin American ancestry living in the U.S.

As Daniel Martínez and Kelsey Gonzalez outline in “‘Latino’ or ‘Hispanic’? The Sociodemographic Correlates of Panethnic Label Preferences among U.S. Latinos/Hispanics,” the Census Bureau introduced the category “Hispanic” in 1980 to denote people of “Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South America or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race.” The alternative term “Latino” rose to popularity in the 1990s, as activists criticized “Hispanic” for erasing Latin American, indigenous, and mestizo (mixed-race) identities by overemphasizing a colonial relation to Spain. But while “Latino” includes people from non-Spanish speaking countries in Latin America and sidesteps some of the colonial undertones of “Hispanic,” it excludes those of Spanish origin outside of the Western Hemisphere.

To this day, “Hispanic” and “Latino” are often used interchangeably in the United States. However, as Martínez and Gonzalez note, many within these communities prefer one term over the other for a variety of reasons, including citizenship status, language use, generation-since-immigration, national origin, education, and political affiliation.

In recent years, “Latinx” has become common parlance among academics and activists because of its capacity to pluralize people of Latin American origin into a pan-ethnic, gender-inclusive group. But, as with any catchall term, “Latinx” has several limitations, which Cristobol Salinas outlines in “The Complexity of the ‘x’ in Latinx: How Latinx/a/o Students Relate to, Identify With, and Understand the Term Latinx.” The term “Latinx” is related to access to higher education and as Salinas writes, a majority of the student participants in his study “perceived higher education as a privileged space where they only used the term Latinx to be inclusive. Once they returned to their communities, they did not use the term, as they did not want to be the voces de poder overshadowing the voces perdidas.” Salinas also argues that using “Latinx” as an all-encompassing term neutralizes gender and decenters the “x” from its original purpose of recognizing gender-nonconforming people.

Currently, “Latine” is rising in popularity as an alternative to Latinx. Advocates for “Latine” cite concerns that the “x” in Latinx is an anglicized imposition and argue that the letter “e” is easier for Spanish speakers to understand and accept, as it is used to end many masculine and feminine nouns in Spanish. Such varying terminology underscores the importance of recognizing individual community members’ own identity preferences.

Just as with Martinez, Gonzalez, and Salinas’ research demonstrates, social and behavioral scientists play a key role in addressing and amplifying key discussions, issues, and progress—ones that can help shape the future of not only how the U.S. marks Hispanic Heritage Month, but how policymakers and legislators create structural reform.

The post A Look at the Terminology Behind Hispanic Heritage Month appeared first on Social Science Space.

Would you like to challenge the established curriculum in your subject discipline and reclaim it for those who have been historically marginalized?

Knowing where to start is challenging. Much of the literature makes a great case for explaining why the curriculum must be decolonized, but says less about how. 

There is no blueprint for the liberation of learning in your subject discipline. Instead, deconstructing the content and approaches that have been used over the generations is a deeply personal – and at the same time, collective process.  

It begins with interrogating yourself and your own positionality. It involves questioning the ‘norms’ within your institution, including who stays and who is excluded. It necessitates knowing your students and whether they’re thriving in higher education or merely surviving.  

Finally, it’s about taking apart the content and approaches used on your courses. Whose knowledge is being taught and whose is not? What perspectives and world-views are being assumed? 

Decolonizing requires, in some cases, a complete up-ending of the epistemology on which a subject discipline is founded (geography, for example, is a discipline that arose from colonialism). However, this cannot happen overnight.  

Adding an author of color to the core reading list for your module is not an end in itself, therefore, but one tiny step in a journey that will endure for your entire career and far beyond. With this in mind, the examples suggested here are not a tick list at the end of which your curriculum can be rubber-stamped as DECOLONIZED. The work of decolonizing is messy and unending. 

The perspective assumed in this article is that of educators in European/North American countries who seek a less ‘Western-centric’ experience for their students (bearing in mind that the very notion of the ‘West’ itself is highly contestable), while acknowledging that the colonization and decolonization of curricula can take place anywhere in the world.  

There is a focus here on course content, but decolonizing applies to all aspects of the curriculum, such as teaching approaches, recruitment, student voice and institutional culture (including structural racism and ‘Whiteness’).  

Education 

This example is from a teaching and learning module on an education degree course. Aware that many teacher-training textbooks focus exclusively on learning theories by dead white men, we decided to include ‘alternative’ views on learning and education (using ‘alternative’ with caution as it can suggest a mainstream ‘Western’ view and other, less important, perspectives). 

To do this we looked beyond Eurocentric and North American theorists and included views of education and learning from other parts of the world, such as collectivist cultures that prioritize the needs of the community over individual ambition.  

We included content on embodied learning, holistic approaches that attend to mind, body, spirit and community, the role of emotion in learning and the importance of using the senses.  

We introduced the power and universality of learning through stories and examined the research evidence as to why this can be so effective. And we asked the students to analyse their current practice through all of these lenses. 

This did not happen overnight. Deconstructing and reconstructing the curriculum takes scholarship and the will to change one’s practices, one step at a time. 

Health 

So many of our subjects are taught as if the given knowledge is universal and eternal. Medicine and the allied healthcare professions are no exception. Here are some angles of inquiry that one could take when deconstructing the curriculum. You might think of others. 

The global history of healthcare and healing. Teach in a global context. For example, you could contrast Cartesian dualism with other philosophies of the relationship between body and mind, or compare notions and practices of ‘healing’ in different parts of the world.  

Views of ability and disability. Critique the medical model. Study how views of disability have changed over place and time, including perceptions of what is considered ‘normal.’ (Lennard Davis is a good place to start)   

Race and medicine. How and why do medical studies categorize patients into different ‘races,’ given that ‘race’ itself is a social construct? Why in some countries are Black women more likely to die in childbirth than white women? Why are Black men more likely to be sectioned for mental health conditions than white men?  

Culture and medicine. What barriers are experienced by service users from different cultural or religious groups? How might these be addressed? 

Patriarchy in medicine. Writer Alan Bleakley asks why research shows that female medical students evidence more empathy towards patients than male students, or why reflective practice in the sector foregrounds individualistic ‘mastery’ models instead of vulnerability and unknowing. 

Analyzing working culture on placements. Support your students to evaluate work culture and practice on placement. How are patients or service-users viewed by staff? How might services be made more inclusive (for example, regarding the use of equipment that gives more efficient readings for skin of lighter pigments)? How is racism manifested in practice? 

From this range of examples, it can be seen that ‘decolonizing’ has a broad and varied remit.  

The Sciences 

‘Western’ science is often presented as ‘universal.’ In fact, much indigenous knowledge was erased through European colonization, with Western science presented as the only way of knowing. 

The history of science. Focus on some of the scientific and mathematical advances made outside Europe, such as the art of navigation, discoveries in astronomy, the invention of algebra.  

Epistemologies. Explore ways of knowing the world that are different from those accepted as ‘standard’ in the so-called West, for example those of indigenous populations. Encourage students to investigate the idea that there are other ways of knowing than via the scientific method or deductive logic. 

Who are the scientists? It may sound tokenistic, but in fact representation in images goes a long way. Case studies of international collaborations or historical images of scholars from non-Western traditions can create a diversity of role models. 

Final thoughts 

As you read this you may be thinking: “But we don’t have time to include all this!” Of course. There are professional standards, benchmark statements and employer expectations to meet. However, decolonizing is not an ‘extra’ or an ‘add-on.’ It involves altering the way in which you think about the curriculum, so that it infiltrates every aspect of teaching and learning. 

Change can start small. It’s about asking questions, modelling lines of thought, planting the seeds of ideas. Tweaking assessment requirements to include a little more critical inquiry. Using flipped learning or finding spaces where you can introduce a little disruption, a hint of cognitive dissonance.  

Most importantly, it’s about developing your students to ask their own questions and challenge the ‘usual’ way of doing things. If you can give them the language and the self-belief to interrogate the status quo, then the work of decolonizing has truly begun. 

The post Decolonizing Your Subject Discipline: Where to Begin appeared first on Social Science Space.

Generational thinking is a big idea that’s been horribly corrupted and devalued by endless myths and stereotypes. These clichés have fueled fake battles between “snowflake” millennials and “selfish” baby boomers, with younger generations facing a “war on woke” and older generations accused of “stealing” the future from the young.

As I argue in my book, Generations, this is a real shame. A more careful understanding of what’s really different between generations is one of the best tools we have to understand change – and predict the future.

Some of the great names in sociology and philosophy saw understanding generational change as central to understanding society overall. Auguste Comte, for example, identified the generation as a key factor in “the basic speed of human development.”

He argued that “we should not hide the fact that our social progress rests essentially upon death; which is to say that the successive steps of humanity necessarily require a continuous renovation … from one generation to the next.” We humans get set in our ways once we’re past our formative years, and we need the constant injection of new participants to keep society moving forward.

Understanding whether, and how, generations are different is vital to understanding society. The balance between generations is constantly shifting, as older cohorts die out and are replaced by new entrants. If younger generations truly do have different attitudes or behaviours to older generations, this will reshape society, and we can, to some extent, predict how it will develop if we can identify those differences.

But in place of this big thinking, today we get clickbait headlines and bad research on millennials “killing the napkin industry” or on how baby boomers have “ruined everything.” We’ve fallen a long way.

Myth busting

To see the true value of generational thinking, we need to identify and discard the many myths. For example, as I outline in the book, gen Z and millennials are not lazy at work or disloyal to their employers. They’re also no more materialistic than previous generations of young: a focus on being rich is something we tend to grow out of.

Old people are not uncaring or unwilling to act on climate change: in fact, they are more likely than young people to boycott products for social purpose reasons.

And our current generation of young are not a particularly unusual group of “culture warriors.” Young people are always at the leading edge of change in cultural norms, around race, immigration, sexuality and gender equality. The issues have changed, but the gap between young and old is not greater now than in the past.

Meanwhile, there are real, and vitally important, generational differences hidden in this mess. To see them, we need to separate the three effects that explain all change in societies. Some patterns are simple “lifecycle effects,” where attitudes and behaviors are to do with our age, not which generation we are born into. Some are “period effects” – where everyone is affected, such as in a war, economic crisis or a pandemic.

And finally, there are “cohort effects,” which is where a new generation is different from others at the same age, and they stay different. It’s impossible to entirely separate these distinct forces, but we can often get some way towards it – and when we do, we can predict the future in a much more meaningful way.

There are many real generational differences, in vitally important areas of life. For example, the probability of you owning your own home is hugely affected by when you were born. Millennials are around half as likely to be a homeowner than generations born only a couple of decades earlier.

There is also a real cohort effect in experience of mental health disorders, particularly among recent generations of young women. Our relationship with alcohol and likelihood of smoking is also tied to our cohort, with huge generational declines in very regular drinking and smoking. Each of these point to different futures, from increased strain on mental health services to declining alcohol sales.

But lifecycle and period effects are vitally important too. For example, there is truth in the idea that we grow more conservative as we age. One analysis suggests that this ageing effect is worth around 0.35 percent to Britain’s Conservatives each year, which may not sound like a lot, but is very valuable over the course of a political lifetime.

And, of course, the pandemic provides a very powerful example of how period effects can dramatically change things for us all.

Reaching beyond the avocado

When there is such richness in the realities, why are there so many myths? It’s partly down to bad marketing and workplace research – that is, people jumping on the generation bandwagon to get media coverage for their products or to sell consultancy to businesses on how to engage young employees.

This has become its own mini-industry. In 2015, US companies spent up to US$70 million (£51 million) on this sort of “advice” according to the Wall Street Journal, with some experts making as much as US$20,000 an hour. Over 400 LinkedIn users now describe themselves solely as a “millennial expert” or “millennial consultant.”

Campaigners and politicians also play to these imagined differences. Our increasing focus on “culture wars” often involves picking out particular incidents in universities, such as the banning of clapping at events or the removal of a portrait of the Queen to exaggerate how culturally different young people today are.

Maybe less obviously, politicians such as former US President Barack Obama repeatedly lionise coming generations as more focused on equality, when the evidence shows they’re often not that different. These assertions are not only wrong, but create false expectations and divides.

Some have had enough, calling on the Pew Research Center in the US, which has been a champion of generational groups, to stop conducting this type of analysis. I think that misses the point: it’s how it’s applied rather than the idea of generations that’s wrong.

We should defend the big idea and call out the myths, not abandon the field to the “millennial consultants.”

The post Surely We Can Get Past This Toxic Boomer v. Millennial Mythologizing appeared first on Social Science Space.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has begun the search for a new executive director for the National Research Council’s Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Mary Ellen O’Connell, the current head of DBASSE, announced last month that she would be retiring in January. She has led the division since November 2016.

DBASSE is one of seven divisions of the National Academies and focuses on advancing the behavioral and social sciences and education and their application to policy and practice. As a job announcement for the position explains, DBASSE “sits at the heart of many areas of central importance to progress in a range of key policy areas —including national statistics, science education, education research, criminal justice, responses to climate change, human capital management, population change, and the well-being health of children, youth, and families.”

As O’Connell noted in an email announcing her retirement sent to social and behavioral science partners outside of DBASSE, “We have an impressive portfolio on topics like how the Census is conducted, addressing intergenerational poverty, calling attention to the need for a focus on quality science education, racial inequities in the criminal justice system, models to inform financing of climate change responses, and advancing diversity, equity and inclusion and anti-racism in STEM – how can it get more important and inspiring than that?” 

Created by Congress during the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, the National Academies’ mission has evolved to provide independent and authoritative advice to the nation on critical issues involving science, technology, engineering, and health. DBASSE focuses more explicitly on issues informed by behavioral and social science at the request of federal agencies, Congress, state and local decision-makers, private foundations and nonprofit organizations. Two-thirds of the DBASSE portfolio is supported by federal agencies, with private foundations accounting for the bulk of the remaining third. 

In a model that is standard across the National Academies, DBASSE programs are carried out by boards and committees comprised of volunteer committee experts, each board led by a director who is a senior DBASSE staffer.  O’Connell, for example, served as the acting director of the Board on Environmental Change and Society, as deputy director of the board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences and the Board on Human-Systems Integration, and as a senior program officer with the Board on Children, Youth and Families within DBASSE in the years before she was named executive director. Boards , which include members of the National Academies, the National Academy of Engineering, and relevant experts, all supported by DBASSE staff.

DBASSE boards have a variety of relationships with key sponsors including federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other agencies /offices within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Education, Commerce Department, Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Agriculture, Department of Defense, as well as a number of private foundations and non-profit organizations and professional associations.

The division itself includes approximately 60 full and part-time staff and about $20 million in activities. The National Academies as a whole are modernizing its infrastructure and processes, and the new executive director will define the strategic direction of the division. According to DBASSE, the new director “will shape and guide a modern vision that maximizes DBASSE’s impact in society. … [They] will evaluate emerging trends and identify new opportunities to serve the scientific and policy community. Key outcomes will include expanding the base of sponsors, growing funding and support for programs, enabling the division’s projects to maximize their potential for impact, and fostering innovation to meet changing sponsor needs.”

A full description of the qualifications expected in the new director can be found on the DBASSE website, but key points include a background in a discipline related to social and behavioral science and education; 15 years of management experience in a complex organization; experience working with government, non-profits and social science stakeholders; and a track record of program development and management in two or more of the following areas: national statistics, science education, education research, criminal justice, the human dimensions of environmental change, human systems integration, population science/demography, behavioral science, child development and well-being.

O’Connell has been at the National Academies for 20 years, serving as DBASSE’s deputy executive director since 2012.  She has led studies on a wide range of topics including an evaluation of disability and rehabilitation program outcomes; home healthcare; prevention of mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders; ethical considerations for research; and an evaluation of international education programs.

Before joining the National Academies, O’Connell developed and led a variety of policy and program initiatives at the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Massachusetts Department of Public Welfare.  O’Connell received a B.A. from Cornell University and an M.S. in the management of human services from the Heller Graduate School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University.

The post DBASSE Director to Retire, Sparking Hunt for Replacement appeared first on Social Science Space.

Chinese society and politics are a frequent topic international news media these days, following China’s role in the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and increasing geopolitical conflicts between the country and a range of Western nations. Media and public debates have comparatively little to say about developments at China’s universities, academia, as ever, remaining a niche subject. By ‘developments’, I mean, first of all recent efforts at the internationalization of Chinese universities. This has involved significant efforts to attract foreign scholars, international students, and overseas Chinese academics to China’s universities, often funded with scholarships or generously endowed talent schemes. These schemes are intended to contribute to China’s socio-economic development, enhance the country’s standing in international scientific competition, and facilitate the rise of its universities in global rankings (see here and here).

By ‘development,’ I also mean, however, the increasing ideological regimentation of academic life in China. Academic freedom has never been available in China since the Communist Part of China took power in 1949. Both older and newly founded universities were incorporated into the bureaucratic regime of the party-state, to contribute to the social engineering of Communist society. Within Communist academia, scholarship is managed top-down to a significant degree, for the benefit of part, state and society, and independent research operates in the nooks and crannies that remain. In this institutional environment, independent public speech carries a considerable risk, as does, to an extent, independent thought.

This is not new. What is new is the depth and reach of ‘thought management’ at Chinese universities in the last few years. This includes measures such as:

1. Increasingly stringent indoctrination for both academic staff and students: A significant proportion – perhaps around a third – of the curriculum at Chinese universities consists of classes meant to develop loyalty to the Communist Party and nationalist sentiment in students. Academic staff, and in particular those academics who have studied abroad, are required to attend indoctrination events and take part in ‘self-study’ activities with considerable frequently. So, for example, academics who are also party members may be required to take daily lessons on Xi Jin Ping Thought on a smartphone app, which may monitor their engagement via facial recognition and eye tracking.
   
2. Enhanced censorship: Attendant measures apparently vary by university, but they may include ideological audits of conference papers to be presented abroad, tight checks on participation in international conferences, prohibitions on academic events involving international speakers in China, and the monitoring and recording of online meetings between scholars in China and overseas colleagues. University classrooms and lecture halls are monitored by cameras, and student cadres may report on any ideological improprieties in lectures and seminar discussions.

To all this, add the socio-cultural consequences of the Great Firewall, the stringent censorship of foreign books to be imported into China, and an apparently long-term border closure that has kept many foreign academics and most international students outside China since the beginnings of the pandemic in early 2020. The result is a clear trend towards an ideological and intellectual ‘China bubble,’ with little room for different ways of thinking about the world we live in. The construction of this China bubble can be usefully read as part of a broader effort on the part of the party-state to create a society that is ethnically, culturally, intellectually, and ideologically homogeneous.

As China transits from authoritarianism into neo-totalitarianism, the purification of society is becoming a more and more prominent political goal. Internationalism in the proper sense of the word fits ill with this goal. It may be suggested that academic internationalization in China has always to a large extent concerned scholars in economically beneficial fields in the life sciences and students from countries with which China has sought to build soft power. However, even this superficial form of internationalization now seems to be on the wane.

Why should this matter to readers outside China?

To begin with, while the Communist Party may be intent on isolating its universities in an intellectual bubble, its efforts at international scientific competitiveness are unlikely to cease, as are efforts to mold international public narratives about China. Therefore, the neo-totalitarian turn at Chinese universities is likely to have significant spill-over effects, from self-censorship among China scholars based outside China to active conflicts over the limits of academic freedom. At the same time, hostility to intellectual diversity and internationalism may hamper the Chinese party-state’s ability to understand the standpoints of its foreign interlocutors and arrive at constructive solutions to mounting international tensions. Therefore, the ideological closure and de-internationalization of Chinese academia should be viewed as a serious problem.

The post Some Thoughts on Academic Internationalization in China appeared first on Social Science Space.

The phrase “Never Forget” is often associated with the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. But what does this phrase mean for U.S. students who are too young to remember? What are they being asked to never forget?

As education researchers in curriculum and instruction, we have studied since 2002 how the events of 9/11 and the global war on terror are integrated into secondary level U.S. classrooms and curricula. What we have found is a relatively consistent narrative that focuses on 9/11 as an unprecedented and shocking attack, the heroism of the firefighters and other first responders and a global community that stood behind the U.S. in its pursuit of terrorists.

This narrative is in official curricula, such as textbooks and state standards, as well as in many of the most popular materials teachers report using, such as documentary films.

While honoring the victims and helping a new generation understand the significance of these events are important, we believe there are inherent risks in teaching a simple nationalistic narrative of heroism and evil.

Annual commemoration

In our survey of 1,047 U.S. secondary teachers conducted in late 2018, we found that the majority of the history teachers tend to teach about 9/11 primarily on the date of the anniversary each year.

Based on the topics being taught, teaching materials and their descriptions of lessons, the instruction emphasizes commemoration of the attacks and victims. Teachers also attempt to help students who were not alive on 9/11 to understand the experience of those who witnessed the events on TV that day. They report sharing their own recollections, showing news or documentary footage of the attacks, and focusing on the details of the day and events that followed.

The surveyed teachers view 9/11 as significant – and believe that teaching it honors the goal to never forget. However, they described the challenge of making time for discussing these events when the standards for their class do not necessarily include them, or include 9/11-related topics only at the end of the school year. As a result, the lessons are often limited to one class session on or near the anniversary. It is also taught out of historical context given that the anniversary arrives at the beginning of the school year and most U.S. history courses start in either the 1400s or the post-U.S. Civil War era.

Risks of a simple narrative

Teaching 9/11 as a memorializing event on the anniversary also generally avoids deeper inquiry into the historic U.S. role in the Middle East and Afghanistan. This includes, for example, arming mujahedeen fighters against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and aiding Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran also in the ‘80s.

A more in-depth approach, on the other hand, could explore how U.S. actions contributed to the formation of al-Qaida, which bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 and later carried out attacks on U.S. embassies in East Africa as well as on the USS Cole, a Navy ship fueling in Yemen, in the years leading up to 9/11.

Simplistic narratives do not help students reflect on the many controversial decisions made by the U.S. and their allies after 9/11, such as using embellished evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

And they potentially reinforce political rhetoric that paints Muslims as potential terrorists and ignore the xenophobic attacks against Muslim Americans after the 9/11 attacks.

Generational differences among teachers

Many teachers, however, do engage students in the complexities of these events. Middle school teachers report including 9/11 as part of their discussion of Islam in a world religions unit; world history teachers describe placing it in the context of the modern Middle East.

For U.S. history courses organized chronologically and using widely available textbooks, the move to standardized curricula and testing in many U.S. states can make it difficult to incorporate current events in meaningful ways. Teachers tell us they feel there is no room or time to deviate. Many end their course in the 1980s or rush through final decades superficially. Some get creative and tie 9/11 to other terror attacks like the 1886 bombing of a labor protest in Haymarket Square in Chicago.

Younger teachers in particular reported different goals for their students that go beyond commemoration or a focus on the shocking nature of the events of the day. They want young people to recognize how the events and policies that followed 9/11 impacted daily life in ways they might not realize. This reflects their own experience, which was less a vivid memory of the day of the attacks but perhaps constant reminders of the color-coded terrorism threat levels issued by the Department of Homeland Security from 2002 to 2011. They want students to understand the recent evacuation of U.S. personnel from Afghanistan in relation to both 9/11 and the U.S. role in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Or to examine provisions of the USA Patriot Act of 2001, which allowed greater surveillance of U.S. citizens.

Learning from 9/11

If the goal of teaching history is to develop citizens who use knowledge of the past to understand the present and inform future decisions, educators need to help students learn from 9/11 and the war on terror, and not just about them. This means going beyond the facts of the day and the collective memory aspects to also engage in inquiry into why they happened and how the U.S. and other nations reacted.

Teachers can use news footage from that day to commemorate and as a starting point for student inquiry. Students could question why Osama bin Laden’s image was presented within an hour and a half of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center, and how U.S. experts knew he was hiding in Afghanistan. They can explore the President’s Daily Brief from Aug. 6, 2001, which highlighted the threat of bin Laden planning an attack on the U.S., or the CIA memo from the late 1980s that outlined the dangers of abandoning the mujahedeen.

Many updated resources are available for teachers to draw from for lessons on 9/11. These resources include the perspectives of veterans, Afghan and Iraqi interpreters and refugees, Muslim and Sikh Americans and others not often included.

To “Never Forget” for students today may start with teaching them about aspects of 9/11 that seem to have been overlooked, erased or forgotten.

The post How Do America’s Teachers Teach 9/11 and its Aftermath? appeared first on Social Science Space.

In the two decades since 9/11, social and behavioral science responded with a wealth of research on the motivations — and the aftermaths — of the terrorist attacks. The collection of free-to-read articles drawn from journals produced by SAGE Publishing (the parent of Social Science Space) during those intervening decades demonstrates the breadth of that research and the various ways that these acts of violence still resonate in lives and in scholarship around the globe.

These articles are ultimately just a sample of the scholarship either directly or indirectly influenced by 9/11. Please include scholarship you’ve found important or helpful on the subject in the comments.

Memory

“Performing trauma: Commemorating 9/11 in downtown Manhattan” | by Ross Poole in Memory Studies
There are two memorials at the site of the World Trade Center: the above ground Memorial Park and the below ground Memorial Museum. They embody very different conceptions of how an event such as 9/11 should be remembered.

“Retroactive Edits: 9/11, Television’s Popular Archive, and Shifting Popular Memory“ | by Philip Scepanski in Television & New Media
After 9/11, shows including 24, Family Guy, Friends, The Simpsons, and others had full episodes and/or specific scenes cut from distribution. This demonstrates how television’s popular archive is mutable, popular memory acts as a site of social and political struggle, and production, ancillary markets, official and unofficial distribution, the cultural standing of television and its genres, and other factors interact to determine which aspects of television’s past are available to the public at different moments.

“Representing, commemorating, and memorizing terrorist attacks: Discussing the US and French experiences“ | by Alice M. Greenwald, Clifford Chanin, Henry Rousso, Michel Wieviorka, and Mohamed-Ali Adraoui in Violence: An International Journal
How do societies and states represent the historical, moral, and political weight of the terrorist attacks they have had to face? Having suffered in recent years from numerous terrorist attacks on their soil originating from jihadist movements, and often led by actors who were also their own citizens, France and the United States have set up—or seek to do so—places of memory whose functions, conditions of creation, modes of operation, and nature of the messages sent may vary.

“From the Editors: 9/11 A Commemoration“ | by the editors of Sculpture Review
Since the fateful events of September 11, 2001, over 700 memorials have been erected around the world of the 9/11 terrorist attack and the senseless loss of thousands of innocent lives.

“9/11 – A New Pearl Harbor? Analogies, Narratives, and Meanings of 9/11 in Civil Society“ | by Brian T. Connor in Cultural Sociology
Through examining specific analogies, narratives, and metanarratives, I show how the comparison of 9/11 to the attacks on Pearl Harbor has led to varying meanings of 9/11 based on the employment of various genre based narratives and metanarratives of the events and the nation.

“Tragedy, Theodicy and 9/11: Rhetorical Responses to Suffering and Their Public Significance“ | by Robert Pirro in Thesis Eleven
Two general sorts of responses to the suffering caused by the 9/11 attacks are distinguishable in the statements of public officials, journalists, and citizens: one manifests a tragic sensibility, another takes the form of theodicy. Each response entails a distinctive set of expectations about the nature of political agency and solidarity in a democracy

“When press freedom meets national interest: How terrorist attacks are framed in the news in China and the US“ | by Ying Roselyn Du and Lulu Li in Global Media and China
This cross-nation, multi-event study examined 142 news stories from CCTV and CNN on two major terrorist attacks in China and the United States. It aimed to unveil how press system and national interest come into play in influencing media coverage of terrorism.

Critiques

“Psychodynamics of imagination failures: Reflections on the 20th anniversary of 9/11“ | by Amy L. Fraher in Management Learning
Analyzing the findings of The 9/11 Report, the author theorizes that two forms of macro-level hubris—America’s “hubris of empire-building” and Al Qaeda’s “hubris-nemesis complex”—amalgamated in a uniquely generative manner leading to events on 9/11.

“Washington View: From conflict to cooperation: 9/11 Day“ | by Maria Ferguson in Phi Delta Kappa
In a time of great political division, the 9/11 National Day of Service and Remembrance stands as an example of how Americans can turn tragedy and conflict into an opportunity for collective action. Maria Ferguson reflects on what she has learned from her work with the organization that established what is now the largest national day of service in the United States.

“9/11 changed everything’: an intertextual analysis of the Bush Doctrine“ | by Patricia L. Dunmire in Discourse & Society
This article presents an intra- and inter-textual analysis of the ‘Bush Doctrine,’ the security strategy response to 9/11 which sanctions a policy of preventive war.

“After the Fall: The Changing Experiential Conditions of Post-9/11 New York and Their Political Implications“ | by Karen Albright, Courtney B. Adams and Aaron L Panofsky in American Behavioral Scientist
This article documents the significant, though now largely forgotten, shifts in the cultural experience of living in New York City to trace the eventual construction of “normalcy” and its attendant hegemonic and political meanings.

“The Situated Contexts of American Terrorism: A Conjunctive Analysis of Case Configurations” | by Jeff Gruenewald, Grant Drawve, and Brent L. Smith in Criminal Justice and Behavior
The authors ask, “What combinations of terrorists’ ideological and situational factors are associated with terrorist outcomes in the United States?” While our findings generally show that the simplest forms of terrorism, including combinations of lone actors using unsophisticated weapons against nonhuman targets after little preparation, are associated with successful outcomes, there is heterogeneity in situated opportunities for preparing for and committing terrorism across terrorism movements.

Echoes

“The Impact of 9/11 on the Self-Employment Outcomes of Arab and Muslim Immigrants“ | by Chunbei Wang in International Migration Review
This paper finds that the Arab and Muslim immigrants are less likely to enter self-employment after 9/11, especially into industries that require higher levels of capital investment. However, there is no evidence that 9/11 has negative impacts on their exit decisions or earnings.

“Data measurement and the change in persistence of tourist arrivals to the United States in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks” | by James E. Payne and Luis A. Gil-Alana in Tourism Economics

This research note examines the change in data measurement for international tourist arrivals to the United States due to the requirement that all tourists must complete the INS I-94 entry form and its impact on tourist arrivals in the aftermath of the September 2001 terrorist attacks.

“Terrorism and Voting Behavior: Evidence from the United States“ | by Leonardo Baccini, Abel Brodeur, Sean Nossek, and Eran Shor in Research & Politics
Using an exhaustive list of terror attacks between 1970–2016 this article examines the impact of terrorism on voting behavior in the United States. Overall, the results indicate that terrorism has less of an influence on voters than is usually thought.

“Terrorism before and after 9/11 – a more dangerous world?” | by Meagan Smith and Sean M. Zeigler in Research & Politics
Was 9/11 the opening salvo in a new age of terrorism? Some argue that this act ushered in a more chaotic world. Others contend an increased focus on terrorism in the past 15 years is the result of conflating terrorist activity with insurgency. This paper sheds light on these claims by analyzing data on domestic and transnational terrorist incidence from 1989 to 2014.

The “Exotic Other”: A Poetic Autoethnography of Two Muslim Teachers in Higher Education | by Samah A. Elbelazi and Lama Alharbi in Qualitative Inquiry
Considering the current political climate and the terrorist attacks associated with few Muslims around the world, being Muslim females in the United States is challenging. The authors present their experiences of living a non-white existence when teaching at a white institution in higher education in the United States. To voice these experiences, they use poetry as a research method.

“Varieties of American Popular Nationalism“ | by Bart Bonikowski and Paul DiMaggio in American Sociological Review
Sociologists have devoted surprisingly little attention to the phenomenon in the United States, and historians and political psychologists who do study the United States have limited their focus to specific forms of nationalist sentiment: ethnocultural or civic nationalism, patriotism, or national pride. This article taps an unusually broad set of measures to explore national identification, ethnocultural and civic criteria for national membership, domain-specific national pride, and invidious comparisons to other nations, thus providing a fuller depiction of Americans’ national self-understanding.

“The Managed Heart Revisited: Exploring the Effect of Institutional Norms on the Emotional Labor of Flight Attendants Post 9/11“ | by Marlene Santin and Benjamin Kelly in Journal of Contemporary Ethnography
This article examines the emotional culture of flight attendants 32 years after Arlie Hochschild’s 1983 study, The Managed Heart. Using data collected by participant observation and informal interviews, the authors argue that flight attendants are empowered by post-9/11 institutional changes in security policies and as a result are using more discretion in how they perform courteous emotional labor.

“Transnational terrorism, US military aid, and the incentive to misrepresent“ | by Navin A. Bapat in Journal of Peace Research
This study proposes a strategic explanation for the United States’ continued provision of military aid to host states with problems of terrorism, despite its poor empirical record. The provision of military aid provides a disincentive for host states to reach a negotiated settlement with terrorist groups, and therefore prevents terrorist organizations from altering the status quo that is favorable to the USA. This suggests that while military aid may not be effective at actually disarming terrorist groups, it can be effective at keeping terrorist groups out of power.

“The Significance of the September II, 2001 Terrorist Attacks for United States-Bound Migration in the Western Hemisphere“ | by Christopher Mitchell in International Migration Review
The economic and political effects of the September 11 terrorist attacks weakened Latin American and Caribbean economies, reduced employment among Western Hemisphere immigrants living in the United States, and hindered new migrants’ access to U.S. territory. Thus, the 9/11 events probably increased long-term motivations for northward migration in the hemisphere, while discouraging and postponing international population movement in the short run.

The post Social and Behavioral Science Responds to 9/11: Some Readings appeared first on Social Science Space.

When medical sociologists or anthropologists write about alternative or complementary medicine, some readers inevitably assume that this is done in a spirit of advocacy. This is sometimes true. Some graduate students and colleagues are indeed motivated by a desire to celebrate a particular way of thinking about health and illness. Occasionally, and this is ethically questionable, graduate students are seeking the right to use the title ‘doctor’ on the basis of the PhD. For the most part, though, we study systems of medical thought either because they are major institutions in other societies or because they illuminate features of our own societies’ approach to health and illness. For a sociologist or anthropologist of medicine, scientific medicine is the folk medicine of modern societies. We are trying to understand its place in the culture and social structure of our own nations. Studying how others think about health and illness, recognize healers and create institutions may help to make our own ‘anthropologically strange’ and to notice things that we would otherwise overlook because they are so familiar to us.

I have written this preamble because I am sure that a bunch of Twitter users will jump on a blog about the place of Chinese Traditional Medicine (TCM) in Covid-19 pandemic management as yet further evidence that sociologists are a credulous bunch who cannot be trusted to say anything sensible about biomedicine or public health. I want to be clear that I am not making any claims about the efficacy of TCM or about the desirability of integrating it into Western practice. What I do want to highlight is that the Chinese state and people take TCM very seriously, that it has played a significant role in their pandemic response, and that you would really not know this from the mainstream Western media. Our understanding of the pandemic in China is framed by our own conceptions of medicine and the social networks established by our scientists with their opposite numbers in China.

China has a long independent tradition of medical thought which has not been subject to the radical discontinuity introduced in Western societies and colonies during the nineteenth century by scientific approaches. Its analysis of the Covid-19 pandemic draws as freely on 16th and 17th century writings as Western science draws on last month’s journals. This tradition has been nurtured by the Chinese state which supports TCM medical schools and practitioners alongside education and practice in Western scientific traditions. The leadership expects that professionals working in these traditions will collaborate to produce an integrated model that combines the best features of each.

When we consider the response to crisis in Wuhan, then, it is important to recognize that this was not solely confined to scientific medicine. An emergency TCM hospital was set up and TCM practitioners were seconded from all over China. The TCM hospital mainly dealt with relatively mild cases but TCM professionals were also to be found in conventional intensive care settings working alongside professionals trained in the scientific tradition. Around ninety per cent of the treatments given in Hubei province, including Wuhan, had some contribution from TCM. If we only look at the contributions from scientific medicine, which are familiar to us, we are missing something that is important in the Chinese response to this novel virus.

TCM operates with its own nosology, reflecting its own theories about the workings of the body (Zhang Boli et al Handbook of Diagnosis and Treatment for COVID-19 in Chinese Medicine China Press of Traditional Chinese Medicine: Beijing, 2021). These revolve around the notion of qi, the life force, which may be threatened in various ways. TCM looks either to reinforce qi against challenges or to find ways of expelling them from the body. Covid-19 fits a recognized category of ‘pestilence’, first defined in the 11th century, and has been more specifically labelled as ‘lung pestilence’, reflecting the organ that feels its impact most strongly. Pestilences are different from other categories of disease in that they stem from a specific pathogen or ‘malign qi’ rather than an imbalance within the patient’s body that has disrupted their own qi, caused by one of the ‘six excesses’. The ‘malign qi has entered through the mouth and nose but its reception reflects the current state of the patient’s qi. If this is weak, the malign qi can take hold. Treatment begins by seeking ways to expel the malign qi and then strengthening the healthy qi to promote recovery.

It has been reported that 564 people were treated in the Wuhan TCM emergency hospital, without any deaths among patients or staff. In these cases, TCM was effectively containing the progression from mild to severe disease. For critical patients, the TCM guidance is clear that they should be in Western-style intensive care units, where scientific medicine leads in ventilation and life support but TCM assists in strengthening the patient’s qi to resist the infection. In effect, in a situation of great medical uncertainty, each set of intensive care doctors reached for their own tradition to deal with the adverse effects of admission to their units. Where Western doctors turned to allopathic medicine and its pharmacopeia of antibiotics and antivirals to attack the agents of opportunistic infections, Chinese doctors turned to TCM and its pharmacopeia intended both to expel malign qi and to reinforce healthy qi. The latter seems in practice to have been more important. We will, no doubt, eventually be able to compare the outcomes, assuming that admission criteria were comparable.

It is not the purpose of this post to advocate for either system of medicine as a response to the Covid pandemic. It is rather to underline that any commentary on the management of the pandemic in China should not be framed purely through the parts that are familiar to Western medical or scientific journalists. Chinese health care operates under strong pressures from the national leadership to combine both medical systems in the empirical treatment of patients. Writing purely about the parts that are recognizable to Western readers risks misleading them about how the Chinese response actually operates and about what is contributing to reported outcomes. Studies of medicine in China must not neglect Chinese medicine.

The post Traditional Chinese Medicine and the Covid-19 Pandemic appeared first on Social Science Space.

Molefi Kete Asante, the chair of the Department of African American Studies at Philadelphia’s Temple University, has long been at the forefront of developing the academic discipline of  Black studies and in founding  the theory of Afrocentrism, “the centering of African people in their own stories.” In this Social Science Bites podcast, Asante offers an insiders view of the growth of the Afrocentric paradigm, from the founding of the Journal of Black Studies a half century ago to the debates over critical race theory today.

“Afrocentricity,” Asante tells interviewer David Edmonds, “is a paradigm, an orientation toward data, a perspective, that says that African people are subjects, rather than objects, and that in order to understand narratives of African history, culture, social institutions, you must allow Africans to see themselves as actors rather than on the margins of Europe, or the margins of the Arab culture, or the margins of Asian culture.”

While that might seem a mild prescription, it’s one that has been often ignored. Asante offers the example that the waterfalls between Zimbabwe and Zambia had a name (Mosi-oa-Tunya for one) before European explorer David Livingstone arrived and dubbed them Victoria Falls.

“Livingstone is operating in the midst of hundreds of thousands of African people – kings and queens and royal people – yet the story of southern Africa turns on David Livingstone. The Afrocentrist says that’s nonsense; here’s a white guy in the midst of Africa and that you turn the history of Southern Africa on him does not make any sense to us.”

Asante then details some of his own efforts in centering the stories of Africa and the African diaspora in their own narratives, including the founding of the first academic journal focused on doing so. He details how as a PhD student in 1969, he and Robert Singleton started the effort to create the Journal of Black Studies as a forum for the nascent academic discipline. (The story sees SAGE Publishing, the parent of Social Science Space, and its founder Sara Miller McCune taking an important role as the one publisher that embraced Asante’s proposal in 1970.)

“The journal survives,” he explains in its 50th year, “based on its relevance to contemporary as well as historical experiences.”

At the time the journal was founded, Asante directed the University of California Los Angeles’ Center for Afro American Studies from 1969 to 1973. He chaired the Communication Department at State University of New York-Buffalo from 1973 to 1980. After two years training journalists in Zimbabwe, he became chair of the African American Studies Program at Temple University where he created the first Ph.D. Program in African American Studies in 1987. He has written prodigiously, publishing more than 75 books, ranging from poetry on Afrocentric themes to high school and university texts to the Encyclopedia of Black Studies.

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click HERE and save.

For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.

The post Molefi Kete Asante on Afrocentrism appeared first on Social Science Space.

Join SAGE for a webinar on new ways we can look at and measure the societal impact of research within Business & Management. This hour-long webinar takes place Friday, September 17, starting at 10 am ET / 3pm BST.

In this webinar, Financial Times journalist Andrew Jack will lead a discussion with Renate Meyer, Maura Scott, Usha Haley, and Mike Taylor as they analyze metrics within academic business and management disciplines as part of a larger effort to inspire and change the current measures and find new ways to recognize societal impact.

Panelists will discuss what impact is, why we should strive for it, how to achieve it, and how to measure it. The intention is to spark discussion and debate, introduce the Financial Times’s plans for an upcoming “hackathon” on this topic, and ultimately develop new ways of discussing and measuring research impact in line with the many largescale challenges that the world must address, from inequality and inequities to climate change and the environment.

This free, one-hour webinar will be recorded and shared with all registrants.

Moderator

Andrew Jack is global education editor for the Financial Times, writing on educational issues around the world and editorial lead for the free FT schools program. He was previously head of curated content, deputy editor of the big read section, pharmaceuticals correspondent, and a foreign correspondent in France and Russia.

Panelists

Usha Haley is W. Frank Barton Distinguished Chair in International Business, and professor of management at Wichita State University. She is also director of the Center for International Business Advancement and elected chair of the World Trade Council of Wichita. She has over 300 publications and presentations on non-market economies, subsidies, multinational corporations, emerging markets, trade, strategy, and scholarly impact, including eight books. Her latest book is Impact and the Management Researcher.  Her research on Chinese subsidies has been incorporated into federal trade regulation in the USA, EU, Australia, and India. Competitive research grants include from the National Science Foundation.

Renate Meyer is professor and chair of organization studies at WU Vienna. She is also co-director of the Research Institute for Urban Management & Governance at WU, professor in institutional theory at Copenhagen Business School, and visiting professor of management at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. Renate is co-founder of the Institutional Theory Network and is currently the editor of Organization Studies and past division chair of the OMT Division of the Academy of Management. Her current research interests include the institutionalization of new management ideas, processes of translation of management knowledge, institutional renewal, multimodality, collective action in crises, as well as governance structures and governance gaps mostly in urban contexts. 

Maura L. Scott is the Persis E. Rockwood Professor of Marketing at Florida State University. She studies consumer behavior at the intersection of consumer and societal well-being, and public policy. She is the joint editor-in-chief of the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing and serves as associate editor at the Journal of Consumer Research and area editor at the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. She is the president-elect for the American Marketing Association’s Academic Council. She also serves on the Board of Directors for the Association for Consumer Research. Prior to her academic career, Scott held marketing positions at 3M Company, Dial Corporation, and Motorola.

Mike Taylor is head of metrics development at Digital Science, where he specializes in quantitative and qualitative analyses of academic trends using Dimensions, Altmetric and other data sources. Before joining Digital Science, he had a long career at Elsevier, working in various groups. He is on Twitter @herrison.

The post Webinar: Measuring Societal Impact in Business Research: From Challenges to Change appeared first on Social Science Space.

What are the three biggest challenges Australia faces in the next five to ten years? What role will the social sciences play in resolving these challenges?

The Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia asked these questions in a discussion paper earlier this year. The backdrop to this review is cuts to social science disciplines around the country, with teaching taking priority over research.

One Group of Eight university, for example, proposes to cut the number of anthropology and sociology staff from nine to one. Positions across the social sciences are to be reclassified from teaching and research to teaching-only.

In addition, research funding is increasingly going to applied research. The federal government wants research that has greater engagement with industry and can be shown to contribute to the national interest.

The confluence of funding changes and loss of revenue from fee-paying international students comes on the back of other ominous long-term trends. Since the 1980s, successive federal governments have undermined perceptions of the importance of the social sciences compared with science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

The latest policy involves a major shift in the purpose of Australian universities — to produce “job-ready graduates,” with more emphasis on industry engagement. The restructuring of funding is touted as an investment in the sciences. Fees have increased for social science students.

Today’s problems call for social science expertise

All this is happening at a time, during a pandemic, when the social sciences could not be more relevant and necessary. The challenges we face make it vital that the sciences work in partnership with the social sciences.

The pandemic has highlighted issues such as attitudes to vaccination and behavior change, fake news and the politics of science, the vulnerability of people in care, roles and responsibilities of the state and the citizen, and gender disparities of the pandemic’s impact, to name a few. To tackle such issues we need to understand the social and cultural diversity underpinning people’s beliefs and values and how these interact during a global emergency. That’s the work of social scientists.

For example, gender analyses of the impacts of COVID-19 have revealed:

• women are 22 percent more likely to lose their jobs
• 20 million girls worldwide will never return to school
• a paltry 23 percent of emergency aid targets women’s economic security.

These impacts are likely to be long-lasting due to systemic gender inequality. But to remedy such impacts we need to understand the context of cultural and social structures.

It is social science research that reveals how the pandemic is compounding the precarity and inequality that women face. Around the world cultural norms restrict women’s independence and mobility, and burden them with unpaid care work and unequal access to resources. Women are disproportionately concentrated in the social, care and education sectors that have been hit hardest by the pandemic.

Beyond the pandemic, the social sciences equip students to tackle the complex problems we face in the 21st century. Social sciences provide the skill set to:

• understand the nature of individuals, communities and cultures (the human condition)
• gain a broad comparative perspective on questions and concerns of the world today
• appreciate how the crises of this century impact how we live.

Fields of study include development studies, sustainability, anthropology, sociology, gender and race, Indigenous studies, human security, political science and economics. This makes the social sciences directly relevant to countless pressing issues. These include the pandemic and vaccine hesitancy, climate change, race and gender relations, inequality and poverty, mass migration and refugees, and authoritarianism.

Events in the news give us a sense of the complex social phenomena that require social science analysis to be fully understood. Examples include Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, March 4 Justice, the aged care royal commission, community support for the Tamil asylum-seeker family from Biloela, and the Federal Court victory for a group of teenagers that means the environment minister has a duty of care to protect children from the harms of carbon dioxide emissions.

Anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists provide the evidence that enables us to apply the solutions to globally important issues in local settings. For example, we have the science to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and create vaccines. But how do we achieve the social and behavioral change required for sanitation, vaccine uptake, mask-wearing, social distancing and so on? In short, how do we translate that science into good public policy?

In another example, it’s one thing to understand climate science, but how do we then ensure people know what they can do about it in their everyday lives? Expert analysis and translation by social scientists gives us insights into why certain social change occurs or doesn’t.

Job-ready? Social science graduates are

Social scientists have perhaps never been in greater demand. They are employed across public and private sectors, in environmental sustainability, community and international development, refugee and humanitarian agencies, health and education services, business and social enterprise, minerals and resource development, agriculture and land management, politics and policy. Employers value social science graduates for their analytical skills, cultural awareness, effective communication and language skills.

Indeed, arts, humanities and social science graduates are more employable than science graduates.

The pandemic should have reminded us why we need the insights from the social and behavioral sciences to help align human behavior with the advice of experts. We have become acutely aware that pandemics are complex social phenomena. Divestment from the social sciences at this precarious moment in time is remarkably short-sighted.

The post With COVID and Climate Change Showing Social Science’s Value, Why Cut it Now? appeared first on Social Science Space.

Almost everyone can agree communication is important. There is much less agreement about what, exactly, communication is or how best to develop skills in it.

Communication today is more multi-modal than ever, but we still tend to give and receive the most training in writing. Our national survey of introductory communications courses in 2020, just published in the journal Communication Research and Practice, found more than 70 percent of assignments in the sample evaluated only a single communication mode. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 85.7 percent of these were in written form.

Less than a third of the assessment pieces were multi-modal. And only 11 percent enabled students to practice their spoken, written and visual communication skills in an integrated way.

While writing is certainly a critical communication skill, it’s not the only one. We make and receive messages in spoken or visual form every day. We sometimes seem to believe just by using these modes we’ll naturally get better at them over time.

Sadly, anyone who’s sat through a typical PowerPoint presentation or unending Zoom meetings knows even senior professionals and heads of government often are unaware of or ignore best practices for crafting an effective message in written, spoken or visual form.

And with these three modes being increasingly bundled together, it’s time to stop studying them in isolation. We need to start learning how to thoughtfully integrate them.

A growing field but writing dominates

Universities are a prime training ground for students to learn what communication is. It’s here they should be able to hone communication skills in all its forms before entering the workforce. Despite this, universities have a long history of privileging the written word over other communication types.

English departments, for example, have existed for more than 250 years but not until 1974 did Australia’s first communication degree enter the scene. Interest in communication has grown since then – 86 percent of Australian universities now offer a degree in this field.

However, the ways communication is defined and taught vary widely across the country. In part, this reflects the diversity of where communication degrees are housed. They can be found everywhere from faculties of arts to education, social science, law, business and even health.

Our survey of first-year undergraduate courses found class sizes ranged from as few as 16 students to as many as 1,000 or more. The average was 343.

Such large classes make it hard to achieve consistency across the large teaching teams required to staff these units.

The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced new challenges and increased existing ones related to catering to students from potentially many time zones. In our survey, 20 percent of universities did not provide synchronous tutorials, where students and teaching staff meet in real time.

Asynchronous learning opportunities, where learners and teachers aren’t meeting in real time, can be convenient for students. However, they don’t allow them to hone the dynamics of real-time conversation and communication.

When assessment tasks are pre-recorded or pre-prepared, are we modelling real-world communication to our students?

The challenges of holistic communications teaching

Another challenge relates to the background and skills of the teaching team. More than half the universities surveyed had only a single lecturer for the unit. Expecting one person to be able to adequately support the very different modes of written, spoken and visual communication is unrealistic.

A co-taught lecturing approach might better position these programs to define and teach communication more holistically. Our survey found the most popular way to support learning was through student group work. This team-based approach mirrors how much of the professional workforce operates and deserves a closer look.

Shrinking university budgets and reduced teaching teams mean much of the work of providing feedback in large units is relegated to group work and peer critique. This can be valuable but shouldn’t substitute for expert feedback.

Encouragingly, unit co-ordinators surveyed are keen to experiment with more innovative assessment types and to consider communication more holistically.

To achieve these goals, significant barriers need to be navigated. These include:

1) the length of the semester or degree program, as only so much can fit into a few months and Australia’s degrees are shorter than those in the United States

2) the disciplinary background of the teaching team

3) workload and marking considerations

4) university bureaucracy, as universities sometimes require a year or more to make changes to how classes are taught, which doesn’t encourage innovation and allow co-ordinators to be nimble.

In this age of lockdowns and remote working, being able to present a message in written, spoken and visual forms is more critical than ever. We need holistic training in all three modes so we can become more effective, empowered and responsible communicators.

The post Most Universities Don’t Keep Up With Changing Communication appeared first on Social Science Space.

The COVID-19 has brought unprecedented changes in multiple facets of our existence; teaching sociology to the students in times of pandemic, adjusting oneself and the students to the online medium of instructions was something a novel task. Confined to homes, unsettled students life ratcheted during these times of uncertainty. Teaching sociology in these times of pandemic was to inculcate the students with the values of the era like promoting students hopes, ambitions, bringing up self-understanding, making sense of the sociological imagination and to a wider audience, online education during the pandemic generates more distance and that distance somewhat creates a safety net for them from the catastrophic virus.

Education in Uncertain times

As a teacher, I miss the presence of my students the atmosphere of classrooms which can never be found in an online classroom, but as a sociology teacher I tried to theorize and contextualize the alien movement to compress the global occurrences within the sociological framework. The essence of offline classrooms gets missed in the online classroom. The pandemic has forced the educators and students to switch new modes of teaching and learning, in the midst of the pandemic students engage themselves in their own pace providing the flexibility of time-zones need to decide when, where and how to learn, with careful planning, asynchronous learning can eliminate distance and time barriers to allow and cater individual learning. In order to achieve academic continuity in these times of pandemic online education is the new norm, but students’ different socio-economic backgrounds can affect online education. The preconditions of virtual education are interrupted by electricity slowdown and a lack of good internet connectivity. Estimates by National Sample Survey 75^th Round report suggest that 15 percent of rural and 42 percent of urban households in the country have access to internet and 11 percent of the households (rural and urban) have less availability of computer (desktop, laptop and tablet etc. excluding smart phones). This leads to a culture of rote learning, gaps in gender education and harm to students with disabilities.

Sociology includes a lot of issues ranging from understanding people, their lives, their social situations and how we can get rid of those constraints; somehow students have been participating in the classes, doing online assignments despite barriers. We must understand students from their different social perspectives.

Pandemic Exacerbates Inequalities

From the point of view of sociological enquiry there are multiple forms of structural inequalities, an unprecedented setting to discover the social phenomena, quarantine and social distancing has created mental health crisis and social stress, anxiety and many more sad moments with the loss of near and dear ones have affected their educational levels, gendered and family lives. A sociological lens is a requirement to equip the students and analyze the roles of different institutions in times of pandemic. The student’s sociological imagination can help to cope with the situations of the pandemic. The COVID catastrophe has exposed the realities and how sociology can be an important element to understand that how the virus affects different socio-economic groups differently.

While we adjust to teach online but there are several gaps in online form of teaching and learning like scarcity of relationship building through verbal and nonverbal interactions, loss of human factor in learning, adjusting to the wide range of learners from different socio-economic backgrounds, negotiating personas of the peer-groups or class mates. With India’s pervasive digital divide many students have been denied the education online basically students belonging to the remote areas where internet is a dream to be sought as its limited to inclusivity and access for the students. As the situation in India is quite alarming as far as access or availability students belonging to the households of low bracketed incomes cannot afford a smart phone. The omnipresent equality of campus is substituted with domesticity of homes which presents a very contrasting way of learning with the rural-urban divide in access to education.

Pandemic Teaching and Challenges

Teaching sociology helps to understand the social realities, as a teacher and learner, its becomes quite feasible to understand the realities of life and the pandemic crisis. The epidemics and pandemics give a source of sociological enquiry. The social world and teaching has encountered a major shift in these times. The lines of sociological inquiry evolve with the pandemic by evaluating the marginalized, those belonging to the lower strata of society as well as differences on the basis of caste, class and gender orientations. As sociology has got a plethora of sociological theory and tools to understand social phenomena, the teaching process itself during pandemic was witnessed from the sociological lens. An opinion poll conducted among some 25 students whom I teach and 25 teachers in this profession reflected enormous problems ranging from lack of internet, where they cannot access the education, family problems related to finance and other problems like death of family members with COVID pandemic as well as families affected with the pandemic crisis so students lacked the motivation to study. The transformational shift from physical to digital classroom was in itself a major challenge to adapt.

From the above table it’s clearly predicted that teachers as well as students suffer from the challenges confronting teaching and learning process in sociology and sociology as a discipline has empowered them as they have been trying to adapt it by applicability of new methodology.

Sociology in Teaching

As sociologists have observed that physical distancing is the only key of getting through COVID-19 pandemic and decelerating its spread so there is a high need to connect to the people by adopting technologies in their social and cultural lives. As COVID has impacted the educational institutions and pandemics have been one of the researched topics by the sociologists, while the students can easily adapt to the pandemic as they could understand from the sociological gaze the inbuilt socio-economic and structural inequalities within this time period. The rampant educational inequalities, norms of the day social control in the form of social distancing and masking were some of the societal aspects that are taught by the sociological curriculum.

Pandemics are epochal events and they reshape the society, perhaps the most significant impact will be our relationship with technology, it’s very essential to teach and research on sociological implications of this pandemic while the crisis is moving in phases. Therefore sociological knowledge is vital in understanding the crisis situation along with medical knowledge and logical insights. As we enter the uncertainty of classrooms there is a dire need to empower the students, identifying the social supports and develop strategies to make the online class quite debatable and interesting. The subject of sociology has been an important element in framing the complex social structure dynamics of the pandemic, helps in rebuilding the class structures virtually, managing emotional and psychological well-being by addressing the anxieties and mental health concerns of the students.

The post Teaching Sociology in India During the Time of Covid-19 appeared first on Social Science Space.

The Public and their Platforms: Public Sociology in an Era of Social Media is a timely collection of eight essays that explore the relationship between public sociology and social media. The concept of ‘the public’ has been widely theorized in the social sciences. However, it is also important to understand its relationship with new forms of social media, particularly in the contemporary context. For example, with the emergence of the novel coronavirus globally, almost all educational activities have shifted to online. As such, how do disciplines like sociology adapt to these new circumstances? Mark Carrigan and Lambros Fatsis’ book tries to answer this question.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the social sciences have been under attack from populist and neoliberal regimes worldwide. For instance, in 2015, there was a call to downsize social science and humanities departments in Japan by the education minister in favor of ‘more practical and vocational training’. With the pandemic, this attack has become even more concerted, with questions again being raised about the relevance of the social sciences. As another example, the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) administration in New Delhi has decided to offer Masters-level programs online in subjects that ‘do not require technical expertise’ in the near future. This decision questions the validity of the social sciences as they are reduced to disciplines that have no ‘technical knowledge and application’.

In this context, Carrigan and Fatsis’ book is a critical intervention. Sociology as a discipline has always been interested in understanding human life and how personal issues become public ones (C. Wright Mills, 1959). In his 2004 presidential address in the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Michael Burawoy gave an institutional term to it – public sociology. It was increasingly felt that sociology should engage with the broader public and contribute towards enhancing the human condition. However, Carrigan and Fatsis argue that it is not enough to just ‘study’ public sociology; it must also be put into practice.

The book begins with the recognition that the concept of public life has vastly changed today – it is now largely online (1). The authors also acknowledge the influence that being part of public spaces has had on the book – public discussions in cafes, bookshops, etc, as well as Twitter discussions and blog posts. The authors argue that the public is not a ‘given’ space but one that is created by interactions between people and their environment (28).

One must also recognize that platforms like social media have become a critical part of how the publicness of disciplines like sociology gets shaped. But platforms like Facebook and YouTube are themselves marred in controversy for manipulating the data of their users. This means that the public is manipulated, multilayered and tangled. Thus, a question can be raised regarding the effectiveness of these platforms for public sociologists to reach out to people as user content is shaped by the platform’s interests. There is uncertainty about who the information would reach and how it will be used (83). There is instant access, but unequal knowledge.

However, one must add here that platforms like blogs and Twitter have definitely helped in connecting academics. For instance, the use of hashtags like ‘soctwitter,’ ‘PhDchat’ and ‘academictwitter’ help like-minded people to connect with each other. These online platforms have become ‘sources of knowledge’ and ‘modes of networking’, and even established platforms like journals are recognizing this. Many journals nowadays have an Altmetric score for every article, which measures the attention and engagement that each article gets on various sites. Many publishers have also recognized the importance of open access publications. Thus, public sociologists should also take note of the changing notion of the public and how to use these platforms.

The need for a public sociology is particularly heightened by the growing privatization and marketisation of education. At the same time, it’s also a huge challenge for sociologists to overcome as it is on university premises that most of this public sociology is undertaken. Once again, this is where social media’s role comes in – as it provides an alternative platform that can be skillfully used for disseminating knowledge. Compounded with the COVID-19 crisis, these online platforms have become even more important.

The authors also draw the reader’s attention to the debate between sociology that is considered professional and one that is seen as public in character. Research published in peer-reviewed journals is seen as rigorous academic work (professional sociology), whereas working with communities and social movements is viewed as non-serious, popular, public sociology. Burawoy has critiqued this elitist division (110). Carrigan and Fatsis argue that the online mode and social media have further blurred this distinction.

While there have been many theorizations of public sociology, the authors argue that now is the time to practice it, to ‘do it’. It is critical to break the binary between the activist and the academic, which has plagued public sociology. However, this does not mean that theoretical frameworks and/or conceptual discussions should be abandoned. What, in fact, needs to happen is that these theories and concepts should be executed in practice to improve human life (107).

The authors argue that it is not just that we need a public sociology, but a much humbler public sociology (177). There is a need to see the public as an equal, with a voice as important as that of the sociologists. Thus instead of existing approaches, Carrigan and Fatsis suggest that there is a need for public sociology that challenges the existing hierarchies between sociologists and the public (178). This would be the true essence of public sociology.

In a world in which neoliberal regimes are using social media platforms in innovative ways to reach out to the public, it is critical that sociologists make use of the same to disseminate knowledge. What the authors offer is an alternative understanding of public sociology where the public is much more participatory. This new and alternate sociology in public should emerge from interactions between sociologists, publics and platforms.

However, one concern that I would like to raise is about regional differences. One cannot be certain if the kind of public sociology that works in the Global North would also be effective in the Global South. It is important that we understand the disparities that exist in several parts of the world that different publics face in accessing resources. Recognition and working towards mitigating this inequity should also be a primary focus of sociology in public.

The post Book Review: The Public and their Platforms: Public Sociology in an Era of Social Media appeared first on Social Science Space.

It is a truism in psychology that old ideas die hard and even educated minds are hard to change, but it is still distressing to see the phenomenon displayed in medicine, where open-mindedness is formally celebrated as a virtue. Recent events in the United Kingdom, however, establish once again that settled opinions can be difficult, if not impossible, to dislodge, even when the consequences to patients are severe.

In 2015, the United States Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) recognized chronic fatigue syndrome as “a serious, chronic, complex, and multisystem disease,” rather than a psychological condition. Since then, U.S. agencies, including the National Institute of Health and the Centers for Disease Control, dropped their previous treatment recommendations for psychological and behavioral interventions such as cognitive behavior therapy and graded exercise therapy, which many patients had found harmful. Progress has come much more slowly in the United Kingdom, where a group of psychiatrists and other physicians have stuck tenaciously to CBT and GET, on the theory that the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome (sometimes called myalgic encephalomyelitis or ME/CFS) are due to dysfunctional “illness beliefs” and consequent “deconditioning.”

The situation in the UK appeared to be on the brink of change last fall, when the influential National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, or NICE, issued a draft revision of its 2007 guidelines, which had endorsed CBT and GET. The final version of the new NICE clinical guideline was scheduled for release on August 18, but it was abruptly “paused” on the eve of publication following heated objections from powerful and entrenched professional interests.

NICE’s delay caused great dismay among patients and patient advocacy groups. It was greeted approvingly, however, by prominent members of the medical establishment who hold fast to the psychological view of ME/CFS, although with more enthusiasm than coherence. 

As reported in The Guardian, Dr. Alastair Miller, a retired infectious disease specialist, explained the need to maintain the old recommendations: “Importantly, without CBT and GET, there is nothing,” he said. “No new therapies or approaches have emerged since 2007, so in practice one needs to question whether there was ever a requirement to have a new guideline.”

Unfortunately, Miller does not appear to realize that something is not always better than nothing. “First, do no harm” is not actually in the Hippocratic Oath, but it is still an important precept in medical practice. Therapies that have proven harmful, as has been the consequence of GET for many patients, should not be continued, whether or not there is something to offer instead.

Even CBT, which is more useless than dangerous, is hardly without cost. Perhaps it has not occurred to Miller, but there is a reason for the lack of “new therapies” since 2007. The CBT advocates – sometimes called the biopsychosocial school – had so thoroughly dominated approaches to ME/CFS that virtually no biomedical research regarding the condition was pursued for many years. Fortunately, that situation has improved, especially in the U.S., where research is moving forward at major universities and medical centers, which would of course be further encouraged by publication of the NICE revisions.

Not to be outdone on the fallacy scale, Dr. Andrew Goddard, president of the Royal College of Physicians, told the BBC,

There is reasonable evidence, for example, that graded exercise therapy helps a group of patients with ME/CFS and, while not without risk, our experts strongly support its ongoing use as an option in this condition.

As Goddard should well know, individual clinical observations – that is, anecdotes – must at some point give way to actual data. Randomized controlled trials and meta-studies are conducted for a very good reason. As professor Brian Hughes (my friend and coauthor) has explained, “Every clinician has great confidence in their own judgement. And therein lies the problem. Objective assessment is always required to combat the conceit of personal wisdom” (italics original).

But Goddard’s statement is even more wrong than that. Once he recognizes that GET is “not without risk,” the requirement of informed consent comes into play. Patients must be informed of the likely harms and potential advantages of the proposed therapy, which are not mentioned in NICE’s 2007 guideline. That alone would be reason enough to require its rescission, notwithstanding Miller’s lament that no new therapies have “emerged.” Moreover, the justification that GET “helps a group of patients” is hollow, in light of the acknowledged risks, given that there is no way to identify such a subgroup before administering the therapy.

The defenders of CBT and GET – the critics of the revised NICE guidelines – ultimately make the same tired excuses that are always raised by last-ditch practitioners whose careers and reputations have been built on unsafe, antiquated therapies. One could easily imagine George Washington’s doctors, in 1799, arguing that without bloodletting “there is nothing.” Or perhaps President James Garfield’s doctors, in 1881, extolling the “reasonable evidence” in favor of probing a gunshot wound with their unwashed fingers. Or maybe a psychiatrist in the 1950s explaining that no new therapy better than lobotomy has “emerged.”

The proposed NICE revision is accompanied by a 356-page evaluation of all clinical studies purporting to support CBT or GET as treatment for ME/CFS. The great majority of them were deemed “very low quality,” though a few achieved the somewhat better level of merely “low quality.” Unsurprisingly, the arguments for continuing to recommend such discredited practices turn out to be as poor as the therapies themselves.

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Micah Vandegrift works to grab hold of two of the biggest threads in modern scholarship – openness and impact – and twine them together. This task — “imagin[ing] and creat[ing] new and better ways to connect (not just make accessible) the outcomes of research with our neighbors’ lived experiences,” as he puts it below — has been a driving goal for the inaugural open knowledge librarian at North Carolina State University Libraries. Now, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has named Vandegrift as a visiting program officer in the Scholars & Scholarship program for July 2021–July 2022.

ARL explains that in that role, Vandegrift will design and deliver a pilot program, Accelerating the Social Impact of Research, for nine ARL member libraries already focused on advancing open research practices at their institutions. Coordinating with the initiative are the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science and the academy’s Board on Research Data and Information.

Vandegrift’s interests cover a wide swath, but the themes of open scholarship and impact pop up repeatedly. Shortly after coming to North Carolina state in 2018, he was named the lead principal investigator for Immersive Scholar, a three-year digital humanities project grant funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He also studied open science policy and infrastructure in The Netherlands and Denmark as a Fulbright-Schuman Research Fellow in 2018-2019, and previously worked as the director of digital scholarship at Florida State University.

Social Science Space caught up with Vandegrift by email a few weeks into his ARL project to find out more about open scholarship, research impact, scholarly communication and the modern librarian.

Before we get to the meat, perhaps you could tell me a little about yourself and how you became a librarian.

I am one of those accidental librarians you might have heard about. I was planning to be a cultural historian, and after being turned down for all the PhD programs I applied to, a mentor advised me to apply to library school, saying “we need folks with a critical studies/anthropological background in librarianship.” The first course I took was called “Digital Media Concepts and Production” and from then on I couldn’t see anything else other than this field. My sweet spot in librarianship is somewhere between strategic innovation, organizational development, and hair-brained big ideas. I’ve been lucky to have the support of organizations like Florida State and North Carolina State to let me explore this field. 

Now let’s start at the very beginning: What do you mean when you talk about open research and open scholarship? How does it fit in with some of the other ‘opens’ circulating, like open science or even just open access? And is it new or is this a new way of talking about something that’s been around?

When I use words like open research, open science, and open knowledge, I am usually referring to the ongoing evolution in research processes, products, and principles. Most of my inspiration and the background behind that comes from what I have observed while working on increasing access to scholarly literature from a library perspective, what we’ve called scholarly communication and digital scholarship. 

More recently, after spending time in Europe studying open science policy, I’d describe it all this way:

Open Science is the big umbrella over all the other opens (access/publishing, education, data, software, peer review), and in the United States it would probably make the most sense to call it “Open Research and Scholarship.” What seems or feels new is not that how we make and share knowledge is evolving, but that, because of our technological moment and our socio-global moment, we can talk about knowledge making and sharing in new ways, with many new voices, in new modes and molds. Open science is a helpful phrase idea to describe the forces and impacts of digital transformation on academic research, teaching, and learning. 

More of what’s behind my definition is in this post. 

Now let’s get a little narrower: And what does it mean to a librarian, and to you as an ‘open knowledge librarian’?

In many research libraries, we approach mega ideas like “open science” with our standard set of tools – outreach, training, and consultations. Bring me any topic (e.g. ethical AI, modular research, scholarly annotation) and I can coordinate the hell out of an event, host a workshop or two, and write up an email reply with resources, related ideas, and threads to follow. That’s the great strength of libraries. My work in this “open knowledge” space, which I wrote about when I received the title back in May 2018, has been focused at a tangential angle. 

Affecting open, in real, meaningful, demonstrable ways, for me, has meant deep work flitting across affinities in other fields (publishing, tech, philanthropy), scratching at the door of advocacy and public policy, and dissecting “the sets of services, protocols, standards and software that the academic ecosystem needs in order to perform its functions throughout the research lifecycle” aka infrastructure. Day to day, that looks really different than outreach, training, and consultations, although I am diligent in those areas as well. 

What is the nexus with the idea of impact? And in a broader sense, what is the library role in the quest for impact?

These questions are the exact purpose of the ARL ASIR program, so I’ll give you my beta reply as we dig into the work. Most of what I think right now is captured in this post I put up recently, but to summarize: I believe that open (science, knowledge, research) facilitates impact (access to stuff, using the stuff, and benefiting from using the stuff), IF the academy can imagine and create new and better ways to connect (not just make accessible) the outcomes of research with our neighbors’ lived experiences. The library’s role, then, is to be a space between the public and the academy to co-curate, translate, and amplify the knowledge we can all benefit from. Practically, I think that looks like some of what libraries already do – hosting events on important topics, making multimedia, fighting for open access – but there is still more to be done. 

Tell me, please, some about what you’ve done in open research at the North Carolina State University Libraries already?

One thing I’m proud of in the community-building frame is conceptualizing and launching our OPEN Incubator. OPEN (Open Project Engagement Network) Inc. is a cohort-based research development program that facilitates a researcher or research group identifying ‘open interventions’ in their work, and getting to a proof of concept for what that might look like in practice. We’ve run the program three times, two fully-virtual, and are preparing one for this fall on the topic of data equity. 

Another example bridging policy and infrastructure was Immersive Scholar, a three-year multi-faceted project to advance and cement good practices in the production, sharing, and validation of large-scale visual scholarly works. The project was funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and concluded in Oct. 2020 with a guidebook, six new creative works, a bunch of technical frameworks/tools, and lots of questions about what “publishing” and “credit” mean in open research for non-science-y academic knowledge. All the things are openly accessible online and we are still conceptualizing creative ways to push those boundaries. 

Examples of other open research work I’ve done are listed on my website under Projects, including OER, public science communication, and monthly Twitch streaming on open science topics. 

Let’s talk about the program you’ll be working with for the Association of Research Libraries. Since your program is presented as a pilot, perhaps we should establish how widespread is the concept among librarians?

As a pilot, some of our hope is that the very existence of the program will increase understanding and knowledge within our field about all things open research and their impacts. The pilot cohort includes nine research libraries from across the US and Canada, with a nice representation from different kinds of universities from different regions. Generally, I would happily and proudly argue that most research libraries are engaging in some way with open; I tend to point to my friends in Dutch libraries as being at the forefront of open science, and I’d love it if after this pilot a few North American research libraries were nipping at the heels of Utrecht, Maastricht, and TU Delft. 

Perhaps you could detail what the Accelerating the Social Impact of Research, or ASIR, program is and what you expect to see it accomplish?

ASIR is designed to be a cohort experience where research libraries convene, share, build and advance a model for research libraries who want to increase activity in open research and scholarship. To start, we’re looking at what we’re already doing, assessing the opportunity landscape in the middle of open research and societal impact, and coordinating with the National Academies Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science. Some of our big questions are: if open is constricted by the academic reward system, what role can libraries play in campus tenure and promotion policies? If open science is a set of principles employed through practices within the research lifecycle, how can libraries strategically invest our advocacy and programmatic efforts? As research culture and behaviors change simultaneously, where do we apply grease and where do we apply pressure?

Our goals are:

• To understand the landscape where open connects with social impact, and the relationship between funders, publishers, societies/associations, and government/policy makers
• To examine the opportunities for libraries to move within that landscape
• To sketch a map for libraries to activate local action toward open science for social impact

Presumably  the member libraries in the pilot are enthusiastic. But beyond those, do you anticipate any resistance to the precepts (or implementation) you advance?

To be honest with you, I never anticipate any resistance to anything because my default mode is blind optimism! I think that the concept we will settle on at the conclusion of the pilot is meant to be generic enough that any library that is excited about advancing openness on their campus will find something valuable there. Like many other higher education initiatives and pockets of society, we are carefully considering how to move the program forward while inviting, including, and valuing a diversity of perspectives. Some of my early work will be spending one on one time with each member library in order to listen to their local needs and concerns, and working diligently to design the cohort experience and any outcomes with that in mind. 

In the open research space, I am anxious to see on the near horizon less disagreement about core beliefs (yes, open will continue to be a thing, more and more) and more agreement about tactics and collaborative processes. This is new for me, but I am more curious now than at any previous time in my career about partnering with Big Publishing to find a path forward. It would help my feeling of goodwill a lot if Big Publishers would knock off the shady business practices of yesteryear (requiring author copyright transfer, non-disclosure agreements with libraries, data surveillance of researchers and students, etc.) but that’s a conversation for another interview. 

It doesn’t seem directly related, perhaps, to the ARL program but you’ve been associated with projects like Fermentology and some visualizations like Tally Tracker and Tess-Celestial. Might you share some details about your involvement. Did this arise from your day job or from you own personal interests?

Actually, in my brain everything I’ve worked on, from HackLibrarySchool to the Virtual Martin Luther King Jr. Project, is directly related to the heart and soul of the ARL-ASIR program — research libraries are evolving and some responsibility is on us to reshape perceptions of what we do, what we want to do, and what power, leverage, values, and skill sets we bring to every table. My work with Fermentology (Lead Imagineer and Workflow Coordinator), Tally Tracker Explorer (Financier and Provocateur), and Tess-Celestial (Hypeman and Momentum-Keeper) was always about modulating, re-presenting, and then amplifying academic knowledge in non-academic modes (a working definition for “Communicated Scholarship”, a term I’m refining). Bottom line, opening the door to what we do in the University, for me, is about building trust in the institution of higher education. I will feel successful if ASIR, Coded Glass, and the Next Generation Library Publishing project all make it more possible for my neighbors to be excited and interested in what the University of tomorrow could be, an Open Knowledge Institution. 

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