Simon Hensellek of the Technical University of Dortmund discusses “Beneficial, Harmful, or Both? Effects of Corporate Venture Capital and Alliance Activity on Product Recalls,” which he, David Bendig, and Julian Schulte published in Entrepreneurship, Theory and Practice.

Can established firms successfully source innovation capital from external partners?

When looking at current numbers of external corporate venturing activities, one would supposedly say yes: Corporate venture capital (CVC) investments showed a more than tenfold increase over the past decade up to a record high of $169.3 billion in 2021. Similarly, 56 percent of CEOs in the annual KPMG CEO survey stated that strategic alliances are a fundamental part of their innovation strategy.

However, we also saw other numbers increasing to all-time highs in recent years: the number of failed products that were recalled from the market. In the US alone, the number of drug recalls reached an all-time high of 2,163 in 2019. This is of ample public importance because these products were potentially harmful for consumers’ health. Moreover, recalls can also severely negatively impact the recalling firm. A prominent recall example is Merck’s arthritis drug Vioxx. Taken by over four million Americans, Vioxx caused cardiovascular problems for many, leading to an estimated 140,000 heart attacks and 60,000 deaths. Merck’s market capitalization dropped $25 billion (nearly 27 percent) on the day the recall was announced.

In our study, we combined both observations through a resource-based learning perspective. Since knowledge and innovation sourcing via external venturing is a highly complex endeavor with many pitfalls, our idea was that external venturing might have downsides for the involved firms in the form of more product failure and thus a higher recall likelihood.

By considering firms’ CVC and alliance activities as potential root causes for product recalls, our study is among the first to investigate the relationship between external venturing in a more nuanced way beyond mere financial performance effects. Indeed, we believe that (drug) recalls might be one of the most meaningful dependent variables considered in the field of corporate venturing because they not only hurt the recalling firm but can harm the general public.

To test our idea, we used longitudinal data from 75 US drug producers and found that the number of firms’ CVC and alliance activities both have an inverted U-shaped relationship with the likelihood of experiencing a product recall in subsequent years. These findings imply that either no or rather bold external venturing strategies pay off more than small-scale “stuck-in-the-middle” initiatives. Hence, firms should either focus on their internal innovation activities or invest boldly into a strong external innovation strategy.

We further deepened our insights by investigating the role of different market environments. We found that high market turbulence makes it even more difficult for firms to benefit from external venturing. While the companies in our sample carried an average standalone recall likelihood of 15-16 percent (without any external venturing), our analyses showed that the recall likelihood increases up to a maximum of 67 percent with six CVC deals and 36 percent with one to two alliances in turbulent markets (versus 52 percent with eight CVC deals and 35 percent between three to four alliances in stable markets). The graph below shows the relationship between CVC and alliance activity with product recall likelihood under different levels of market turbulence.

Based on estimates by prior research about the value of CVC deals ($20.4 million) and strategic alliances ($44 to 65 million, as reported by Adegbesan & Higgins, Anand & Khanna, and Kale et al.) as well as the costs of an average recall ($23 million), we also calculated the economic impact of our findings: Firms might lose up to 36 percent of their CVC or 13–19 percent of their alliance deal value through product recalls. Under high market turbulence, this implies recall costs as high as $43.53 million resulting from six CVC deals or $16.74 million from two alliances. Notably, firms with many (six to eight) strategic alliances were able to reduce their recall likelihood to zero under all market conditions, emphasizing the value of a strong alliance strategy for product safety.

Finally, we were able to reproduce our main findings with an independent second sample from the US consumer goods industry, indicating the broader relevance of our findings for different industries as well as policymakers and enforcement agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration or Consumer Product Safety Commission. To identify and remove harmful products promptly, they could monitor firms’ CVC or alliance engagements more closely.

The post Stuck-in-the-Middle Venturing Strategies Can Hurt You and Your Customers appeared first on Social Science Space.

Why did some Polish and Ukrainian communities violently attack their Jewish neighbors while others did not during World War II? What local minorities assisted Jews in unexpected ways? How did the killing centers continue to affect economic and political behavior in their areas over time? And how does the Holocaust, both the events themselves and how they are remembered, affect policy and economics today?

All great questions for social scientists, but as Jeffrey Kopstein details in this Ina Levine Annual Lecture for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, these are questions the disciplines lagged in addressing. Individual social scientists had addressed the Holocaust, “but taken as a whole, as a research community, they came … very late to the question.” As an example, he notes that the first panel organized by the American Political Science Association on the Holocaust – which he describes as an “index case” for violence in the modern world — was organized only in 2011. “And I know that,” he adds, “because I organized that panel.”

While he cites the fear that such studies might have been “too Jewish,” and so career suicide, for many years, he continues by arguing that a new social science evolved that did take on the Holocaust. “Social scientists are generalizers,” he explains. “They like to theorize about things. But the Holocaust is one big thing, and how do you actually have a theory of one big thing?” And yet, as Lisa Leff, the talk’s moderator, points out, historians of the Holocaust were using social science insights in their own work before social science itself was directly engaging with the Holocaust.

What changed, Kopstein suggests, was an opening of sources as the Eastern European archives opened and citizens of authoritarian states were allowed to speak. More importantly, he continues were “big methodological changes” in social and behavioral science, changes which took the “one big event” and looked at the many smaller events – say Kristallnacht or the invasion of Poland – which allows researchers to assess factors across nations and time.

“These are separate instances which can be studied separately and compared with similar instances in different times and places both in Jewish history and in non-Jewish history, in the past and in the present,” he says.

The lecture, which took place on June 14, 2022, can be viewed here:

The Ina Levine Invitational Scholar Award, endowed by the William S. and Ina Levine Foundation of Phoenix, Arizona, enables the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to bring a distinguished scholar to the museum each year in order to conduct innovative research on the Holocaust and to disseminate this work to the public. The scholar in residence also leads seminars and lectures at the museum and throughout the United States.

Kopstein is the Ina Levine Invitational Scholar for 2022. He is a professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine whose research focuses on interethnic violence, voting patterns of minority groups, and anti-liberal tendencies in civil society. He pays special attention to cases within European and Russian Jewish history. His books include Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Progroms on the Eve of the Holocaust (written with Jason Wittenberg) and the volume Politics, Violence, Memory; The New Social Science of the Holocaust, co-edited with Jelena Subotić and the late Susan Welch.

Moderator Lisa Leff is the director of the Mandel Center. A historian of modern European and Jewish history, she served as a professor at American University and Southwestern University before joining the museum staff. Her books include 2015’s The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum hosts several series of academic-based lectures on issues around the Holocaust, its causes and cognates. For a full archive, click here.

The post Watch the Talk: Insights on the Holocaust from Social Science appeared first on Social Science Space.

We live in a culture profoundly influenced by the legacy of the Holocaust. More than seven decades after the fact, the Nazi extermination effort against the world’s Jews continues to provide the moral lens through which we judge political action. Debates about humanitarian intervention and foreign policy, democracy and authoritarianism, the politics of race, refugees, migration, and citizenship, and perhaps most importantly, our understanding of political violence have taken shape in the shadow of the destruction of European Jewry. The very categories we deploy to think about these matters—the most famous example being the concept of genocide—were developed in an attempt to understand the magnitude of what had occurred and to prevent anything like it from happening again. 

The Holocaust functions therefore as a “shadow case” of sorts, a yardstick against which to compare a broad range of contemporary social and political processes. And yet, despite the centrality of the Holocaust to the way social scientists think about today’s world, the study of the “event” itself and its aftermath has remained largely peripheral to the social sciences, such as economics, geography, political science, sociology, and psychology. Our recently published book, Politics, Memory, Violence: The New Social Science of the Holocaust (edited together with the late Susan Welch) aims to integrate the insights of modern social science with Holocaust studies.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, several social scientists wrote groundbreaking volumes on what we now term the Holocaust. Eugene Kogan (1950) trained as a sociologist and economist, published the Theory and Practice of Hell, an examination of Nazi concentration camps based on his own six years of imprisonment at Buchenwald. In 1961, Raul Hilberg, an Austrian-born American political scientist who had been stationed in Germany after the war, published The Destruction of the European Jews, a pioneering work that focused on the administrative and organizational structures that led to mass murder. Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria led the collaboration that resulted in The Authoritarian Personality, the influential work on the formation of antisemitism and individual-level authoritarian orientations that were understood to underpin the Nazi regime. That book by the sociologists and psychologists Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford has been cited nearly 20,000 times and remains influential today. Allport’s, Milgram’s, and Zimbardo’s classic works in psychology were also responses to the Holocaust and properly belong to this generation.

Sometime after 1960, however, social science contributions became scarce. What explains the reluctance of social scientists to write on the Holocaust during this period? Any answer to this is necessarily speculative, but we maintain in the book that a first factor was the reluctance among Jewish social scientists to pigeonhole themselves into a topic that was “too Jewish” and therefore of secondary intellectual interest to the “big questions” of development and democracy. Second, social science itself had become increasingly theoretical and technical, focused on empirical generalization, methodology, and prediction. What was the Holocaust a case of? “Genocide” was one answer, and several important works elaborated on this theme. But the label also had its drawbacks, not only because the number of genocides is thankfully small, which inhibits testing of competing hypotheses, but also because genocide at its very core focused attention on the endpoint, the mass killing, rather than on the multiple processes that led there. The Holocaust was a genocide, but it was much more than that.

An important break in the logjam came with the paradigm shift from seeing the Holocaust as “one big thing” to examining it as a series of events. By viewing the Holocaust this way, social scientists now compare across localities and nations, across time, across administrative structures, population types, historical patterns, and many other conditions. This approach has facilitated an understanding of the factors that exacerbated or mitigated violence and death and has provided a powerful tool in accounting for the variation in the long-term impact of the Holocaust in different communities.

Consider Robert Braun’s contribution to our volume, a study of the determinants of antisemitism in the Weimar Republic. A large body of work has examined the subnational variation in xenophobia. It frequently focuses on how political and economic threats posed by outsiders translate into xenophobia among insiders. The support for both of these factors, Braun notes, is mixed. Instead, he moves to the macro-level emphasizing the importance of geo-political fears, maintaining that spatial variation in antisemitism in Weimar Germany was driven in part by territorial loss due to military defeat. Two mechanisms provide the link between territorial loss and hostility to “outsiders.” First territorial loss hardens ethnic fault lines, unleashing aggressive forms of nationalism. Second, geopolitical decline activates a sense of loss that generates exclusionary responses. These feelings and fault lines provide the environment in which those residing in the state but considered outside the ethnic community become scapegoats for all sorts of social problems.

In order to develop and test this hypothesis, Braun offers us a new dataset that examines geographic and temporal variation in antisemitic attitudes using the research conducted by folklorists. He tracks antisemitism in over 19,000 localities looking for the prevalence of Jewish bogeymen in Kinderschreck (children’s fright stories), which adults deployed to induce obedience in children. Using spatial econometrics and a difference-in-differences design, Braun shows, even controlling for a remarkable range of confounders and controls, that the regions proximate to territories stripped from Weimar Germany became the genuine hotbeds of antisemitism. Apart from the original use of ethnographic data that should inspire students of historical political economy in other contexts, Braun’s analysis offers a fascinating solution to a tricky problem: how best to measure antisemitism? Some scholars measure it by counting the frequency of antisemitic violence (such as pogroms), but they usually then explain the occurrence of pogroms by antisemitism, a case of clearly circular logic. Others look for the vote for antisemitic parties in a given locality, but this too has its pitfalls because voters may vote for antisemitic parties for reasons that have nothing to do with Jews; likewise, voters who are otherwise strongly antisemitic may vote for non-antisemitic parties for other reasons. Braun’s insight and method opens up the study of historical xenophobia that others will surely emulate.

A second good example is the work of Daniel Solomon, showcased in his chapter “Pogrom Violence and Visibility during the Kristallnacht Pogrom.” A great deal of work in the social sciences has focused on riots, pogroms, and lynching in other contexts, but little has been done on the first mass case of violence and property destruction within Nazi Germany itself. Solomon begins with a puzzle: why did participants in the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938 refrain from damaging or destroying one-third of the active synagogues in Germany? The political context of the time would not have predicted restraint. On November 9, Joseph Goebbels called on state officials assembled in Munich to engage in widespread violence against Jews throughout Germany. Yet, about a third of German communities was spared. Why?

He first offers a set of competing theories that students of intercommunal violence in other settings will find legible and important for their own comparative work. Then, using a new dataset on Kristallnacht pogroms, Solomon demonstrates that violence was most severe and most likely in communities where the Jewish population share was largest, in other words, where Jews were socially visible. He also finds the greatest number of synagogues were attacked in those localities where there was also a high concentration of Weimar-era electoral support for the German Communist Party. The more Jews and communist support in a town, the worse the Jewish community fared. Such findings put the study of the Holocaust into direct dialogue with work on lynching in the American south and Hindu-Muslim Violence in India, to name only a few locations.

Volha Charnysh turns our attention to the memory of the Holocaust and its impact on contemporary politics in her chapter “Remembering Past Atrocities: Good or Bad for Attitudes toward Minorities?” Commemorating violence is often considered important for promoting reconciliation, improving attitudes toward (and treatment of) ethnic minorities, and, perhaps most crucially, preventing repetition of violence in the future. But does commemoration actually produce these results? Far-right parties often question the Holocaust and almost always downplay or deny their nation’s wrongdoing during the war.

Using a survey experiment, Charnysh addresses the Polish case of memory politics. During World War II nearly all of the country’s 3.3 million Jews were killed. The local Christian population sometimes took advantage of the Jews’ plight, turning violently against their Jewish neighbors and looting their property. In her online survey experiment, Charnysh’s respondents were randomly assigned to narratives of well-known episodes of violence and then answered questions about their affective attachment to the nation, attitudes toward outgroups, and minority protection. The control group read about the 1995 massacre in Bosnia. One of the treated groups also read about the 1943 massacre in Volhynia of Poles at the hands of Ukrainians, with a priming note that the Polish suffering received less publicity than Jewish suffering in Jedwabne (the massacre of Jews by Poles in 1941). This treatment mirrors the strategy of the Polish right, which elevates national victimhood to counter criticism of Poles during the Holocaust.

Charnysh’s analysis shows that referencing in-group wrongdoing in the past becomes less effective and may even backfire in combating xenophobia and discrimination in the presence of competing victimhood narratives. Priming that highlights in-group crimes (the massacre of Jews by Poles in Jedwabne) reduced ethnocentric beliefs and collective narcissism, yet introducing competing victimhood narratives (the massacre of Poles by Ukrainians in Volhynia) offset this positive effect. The victimhood narrative that is routinely used by Polish politicians to diminish attention on in-group wrongdoing, dampened support for minority rights. With these and other results, Charnysh contributes to the broader literature demonstrating that the past is not transmitted to the present in an unmediated fashion; the past is, above all, “how we remember it.”

Each of the chapters in this volume offers analogous sorts of evidence and similar sort of unexpected insights. Although much work remains to be done in order to integrate the study of the Holocaust—the index case of violence in the modern world–into the mainstream of social science, it is our hope that this volume brings the conversation to a new level by highlighting how new questions and new data can illuminate this tragic set of events.

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Citing as one example a Florida university’s sociology department canceling all its courses that focused on race, the American Sociological Association recently released a statement “urg[ing] public officials, educators, and lawmakers to avoid suppressing knowledge, violating academic and free speech, and prohibiting scholars and teachers from discussing and teaching about the roles of race and racism in society.”

The 117-year-old learned society at the same time released a 17-page “sociological guide for the public” on race and racism in the United States. the guide is based on the idea that “understanding systemic racism as a step toward eradicating it and working toward a more just U.S. society.”

The actions come amid a welter of culture war skirmishes on race and gender themes. The ASA argues that “many sociologists and sociology teachers are currently facing fear for their livelihoods and careers due to the suppression of discussions of race and structural racism.”

It points to two sociology professors at the University of Central Florida who cancelled their race-focused courses in the wake of Florida’s Individual Freedom Act. Jonathan Cox, an assistant sociology professor at UCF, told The Atlantic magazine and ProPublica, “It didn’t seem like it was worth the risk. I’m completely unprotected. Somebody who’s not even in the class could come after me. Somebody sees the course catalog, complains to a legislator—next thing I know, I’m out of a job.” So Cox canceled two undergraduate courses, “Race and Social Media” and “Race and Ethnicity.”

In announcing the legislation, also known as the “Stop W.O.K.E Act,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was quoted, “In Florida we are taking a stand against the state-sanctioned racism that is critical race theory. We won’t allow Florida tax dollars to be spent teaching kids to hate our country or to hate each other. We also have a responsibility to ensure that parents have the means to vindicate their rights when it comes to enforcing state standards.”

The Florida legislation isn’t the only anti-WOKE legislation focused on restricting what can be taught at state-sponsored universities or school districts appearing before state legislators. In a running tally of “educational gag orders,” PEN America has identified seven states with new laws limiting how or if critical race theory can be taught or used in trainings at public universities. At a more granular level, the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law’s CRT Forward Tracking Project to date has found 567 anti-critical race theory efforts to date from local, state and federal governments.

Efforts to fight back against these sorts of actions — which appear to be increasing — have provoked even more explicit attempts to limit academic freedom, such as calls to abolish academic tenure at Texas universities that followed statements from Texas academics similar in nature to the ASA’s statement.

In its statement, the ASA says it “firmly opposes any efforts to prevent educators from teaching and sharing sociological knowledge. As experts in the study of social life, change, and the causes and consequences of human behavior, sociologists recognize that race is a socially constructed concept, not a biological or natural one. We understand race as a dynamic classification system that has been used to create hierarchies and determine access and opportunities for different people based on factors such as color, culture, heritage, and location.”

The post American Sociological Association Statement, Guidebook Back Teaching about Race and Racism appeared first on Social Science Space.

The opening of this blog post was generated by GPT-3 itself, after being instructed to ‘[w]rite the first paragraph of a blog post about students using GPT-3 to generate academic essays.’ Indeed, GPT-3 is being used by students to produce convincing academic essays and, while the quality often leaves much to be desired, the technology is rapidly improving.

Discussions about how to respond to the proliferation of these systems in higher education are ongoing. Some argue that text generation systems ‘democratize cheating’ as students are able to generate essays about virtually any subject in a matter of moments, while others (often the producers of text generation software) contend that these systems may actually contribute to democratization of education for students of varying abilities. What happens, however, if we momentarily set aside the question of cheating and reflect on the broader implications of these systems for educational practice? As new technologies often require people to reorganize their practices and approaches, software that can write student essays or scientific papers can encourage us to reflect on what is, or should be, distinctive in academic writing.

Machine creativity and the Lovelace Effect

In our research, we wanted to find out why people perceive computers to be creative, not by asking how algorithms can achieve creativity and originality, but by focusing on how creativity is attributed by users. We proposed calling situations in which humans perceive the behavior or output of a machine as creative, as the “Lovelace Effect,” nodding to computing pioneer Ada Lovelace. Specifically, we wanted to know what elements facilitate attributions of creativity. Using the example of software programmed to generate art, we showed how the emergence of the Lovelace Effect depended on a mixture of cultural ideas of creativity, actual software or hardware functionality, and the circumstances of presentation. For instance, if a computer-generated image is placed in an antique frame and exhibited in an art gallery, viewers may be more compelled to think of it as art, and its generating system as creative.

The Lovelace Effect recognizes that any attribution of computational creativity is informed by historical and geographic factors. That is, different social circumstances lead to different social responses to ‘creative’ machines. Transposed into the debate about computer-generated essays, this means that while essay-writing systems change and improve over time, so too will our definitions of what constitutes a good and original academic essay. The ongoing development of these systems means that we should be regularly reviewing our expectations for academic writing, and striving to prevent educators falling into the Lovelace Effect.

Automatizing academic writing

Although recent conversations about essay generation have been many people’s introduction to AI authorship, these systems have long been applied in journalism. Among the first genres of journalistic writing that were widely automatized were reports of sport results and market values. This is because it is relatively easy for machines to write fact-based texts that laconically report on football matches or changes in stock prices. If you ask a human journalist to write texts like these, they might produce very similar articles to the ones generated by software. If you ask the same journalist to write an editorial, though, the difference will be much more obvious.

Just as these tools call for reflections on journalism, tools like GPT-3 require a rethink of the kinds of skills that students should demonstrate in their assignments. Academic writing that follows more rigid structures, for example, may be more likely to be reproduced by a machine; these systems continue to struggle with maintaining consistent ‘trains of thought’ across longer terms, potentially making them less useful in more free-form disciplines like English literature or history.

Regardless of the kind of text being generated, though, any application of the Lovelace Effect necessitates acknowledgment that qualities such as creativity and originality are projected by the receiver of a work. For example, a dramatic jump between two topics could reflect a generating system’s inability to maintain a global narrative, or it could be interpreted as a deliberate rhetorical choice that encourages the reader to reflect through juxtaposition. Creativity may be a process, but it is a process recognized by a creator who is recognizing their own work as creative. Even if a creator does not recognize a process as creative, another receiver of the output in question may deem the work creative. Reflections on how precisely academic writing is creative and original can help us better understand how our academic writing can be moved away from undesired automatization. It can also help us better identify where automatization may be useful, and where it may not.

The automatization of academic writing should prompt us to reframe what we aim for in our writing and in the writing we train our students to do. As an additional benefit, such reflection will provide us with keener eyes to distinguish what has been written by a machine from what has been written by a human. Considering that automated writing will impact professional fields such as journalism, marketing, and academia, learning to write in a distinctive fashion may ultimately help students and educators better navigate the future that lies ahead.

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What can German history since 1871 tell us about the relationship between nationalism, democracy, and authoritarianism, both in Germany and in Europe at large? And how can historians and social scientists cooperate in dealing with basic challenges to liberal democracy in the past and present?

These questions lie at the heart of a panel discussion hosted by the Holberg Prize and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities on January 27. The discussion, part of a year-long series of events marking the 20th anniversary of the Holberg Prize, will be held live in Berlin and also appear on a YouTube livestream.

Panelists (fuller bios below) include the 2011 Holberg laureate, Jürgen Kocka, with Hedwig Richter and Michael Zürn, in a discussion moderated by Christoph Markschies, president of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy. 

The splash page for the event offers context for the discussion:

The discussion, which is free and open to the public, takes place at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Leibniz Hall, Markgrafenstraße 38, 10117 Berlin on Friday, January 27 starting at 18:00 CET. Register here for that live event. It will also livestream on YouTube.

Panelists and Moderator

Jürgen Kocka is a professor emeritus of Free University Berlin and the Berlin Social Science Center. He is the author of numerous studies of modern, European, and comparative history and an advocate of social science approaches to history. Kocka received the 2011 Holberg Prize.

Hedwig Richter is a professor of modern history at the Bundeswehr University Munich. In 2020 she received the Anna Krüger Prize from the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Her most recent publications are 2020’s Demokratie – eine deutsche Affäre and 2021’s Aufbruch in die Moderne.  Reform und Massenpolitisierung im Kaiserreich.

Michael Zürn is director of the global governance unit at WZB Berlin Social Science Center and professor of international relations at the Free University of Berlin. He is director of the DFG-funded Cluster of Excellence “Contestations of the Liberal Script” and a member of the Berlin–Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Academia Europaea.

Christoph Markschies is professor of ancient Christianity at Humboldt-University in Berlin and currently serves as president of both the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities as well as Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities. Among other awards and honors, he has received the Leibniz Award of the German National Research Council.

The post Holberg Prize Panel to Examine Challenges to European Liberal Democracy appeared first on Social Science Space.

Born in South Africa and exiled to neighboring Eswatini, Regina Twala was one of southern Africa’s most important intellectuals: a pioneering writer, academic, political activist and feminist. Why, then, has she been all but forgotten? That’s the question a new book sets out to answer. In the process, Written Out: The Silencing of Regina Gelana Twala aims to restore Twala to her rightful place in history. The Conversation South Africa spoke with the book’s author, historian Joel Cabrita.

Who is Regina Twala and why is she important?

Regina Gelana Twala was a writer, anthropologist, social worker and political activist who lived in both South Africa and Eswatini (then Swaziland). She died in 1968 at the age of 60.

Twala broke the mold of what black women were meant to represent. She was just the second black woman to graduate from Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand (in 1948) and the first to graduate in social science in South Africa. In a period dominated by male intellectuals, she was a formidable writer and thinker. One of few female contributors to southern African newspapers, she wrote hundreds of articles.

Her prolific output includes as many as five book manuscripts, almost all lost as Twala struggled to be published due to the racist gatekeeping mechanisms of apartheid-era South Africa.

Twala stood at the forefront of politics in both South Africa and Eswatini. She spoke out loudly, braving the censure of men who preferred women to be quiet and in the home.

Her personal life was as noteworthy as her public persona. Twice married, she bucked the shaming conventions of the day that stigmatized divorced women. She rejected her unfaithful first husband and sought a love union with sporting figure Dan Twala. Disillusioned after 20 years of marriage, she chose to live separately as an independent woman until her death from cancer.

Twala, moreover, left a uniquely intimate record of her life. She exchanged hundreds of love letters with Dan over 30 years, one of the most remarkable collections of letters in African history. They are filled not only with personal details but also political commentary. She was close to figures like former South African President Nelson Mandela, who represented her in her divorce.

Can you tell us about her time in South Africa?

Twala was born in 1908. The Natives Land Act was passed in 1913, dispossessing black South Africans of their land and forcing an exodus to towns and cities. She herself followed a similar pattern, moving from rural Natal to Johannesburg in her 30s to work as a teacher.

She moved in the highest circles of Johannesburg’s intelligentsia, mingling with politicians, academics, philanthropists and social workers. She was part of the pioneering class of the Jan Hofmeyr School of Social Work (political leader Winnie Madikizela-Mandela would graduate from there too). She established her reputation as one of Johannesburg’s most popular columnists. Among her topics were racial disparities and the misogyny of her society.

Twala’s life exemplifies the fortunes of an elite black class in South Africa whose aspirations were squashed as the century wore on.

For a brief period, unable to find employment, she worked as a domestic servant in a white household. When the racist apartheid government was voted into power in 1948, Twala became involved in anti-apartheid politics. She joined the African National Congress and was arrested in 1952 for her part in the Defiance Campaign, a non-violent resistance movement. Two years later she exiled herself to neighboring Eswatini (Dan Twala was from there).

What impact did she have in Eswatini?

Twala moved to Eswatini at a key moment in the country’s life. She had received a prestigious Nuffield Fellowship that allowed her to pursue anthropological research into how women were responding to the country’s massive cultural shifts. The monarch Sobhuza II was increasing pressure on Britain for independence.

Swaziland’s middle class (in whose company Twala found herself) allied with Sobhuza. The country’s first political party, the Swaziland Progressive Party, was formed by them in 1960. Twala was a founding member and its first women’s secretary. She attended pan-African gatherings in Ghana with then-president Kwame Nkrumah. Her career reminds us that women were also key players in early anti-colonial politics.

Beyond formal politics, she advocated for women’s education and self-help, starting a crafts organization and founding the first library for black readers in her hometown. Eswatini has one of the largest gender disparities in the world and Twala’s vision remains as sadly relevant today as in the 1950s.

As an anthropologist, she was critical of those who weaponized African culture to keep women in their place. Her relationship with Sobhuza soured in the 1960s as she became disillusioned with his suppression of the democratic process. She used her pen for scathing critiques of the powerful and wealthy in Eswatini, mobilizing the press to advocate for ordinary people – most of all women.

Why has history forgotten her?

Twala’s radical politics undoubtedly contributed to her erasure. Her criticism of the Swati monarchy meant she was steadily sidelined from politics. On her deathbed, she pushed hard to have her final work – a study of Swati women – published to coincide with Eswatini’s 1968 independence. Figures close to the king blocked it. Eswatini became – if anything – even more repressive and outspoken anti-royalist women weren’t going to be celebrated as pioneering anti-colonial figures.

She’s also been forgotten due to the gatekeeping exercises of territorial white academics. Prominent anthropologists and historians taught and mentored her but were less supportive once she outgrew their patronage.

A case in point is renowned anthropologist Hilda Kuper. Their close relationship soured as Twala became increasingly critical of white liberal academics and their pretensions to “own” their research sites and subjects. After Twala’s death, Kuper effectively squashed the publication of Twala’s final manuscript, declaring it of little intellectual value. It gathered dust in Kuper’s archives in the United States until I discovered it 60 years later.

Swedish historian Bengt Sundkler paid Twala to research African religion. Her work on indigenous Zionist churches was diligently sent. Two decades later, Sundkler would publish these notes as his own in an act of plagiarism. He is remembered as a leading scholar; her contribution was erased.

Why is it important that we remember her?

Twala reminds us that we should not take the seeming absence of women from the historical record at face value. Silences have their own story to tell. The story as to why women are not numbered among the luminaries of their times is complex and deserves careful unpacking.

Finally, Twala was the author of her own life. My hope is that my biography paves the way for her work to finally find a publisher. The next step is for Twala to speak for herself, to the world.

The post Restoring Regina Twala, Southern Africa’s Erased Activist and Anthropologist appeared first on Social Science Space.

It has been almost a decade since I began thinking about academic publishing and learned societies. My team and I spent four years digging through the minute books, correspondence and reports held in the archives of the Royal Society of London, and almost as long again processing, analyzing, writing and revising our history of scientific journals. The book is out at last, and now there is some space to reflect.

We originally set out to investigate the history of scientific journal publishing, but, immersed in the archive and history of the Royal Society, we couldn’t help noticing the changing relationship between journals and learned societies more generally.

Most often, when I’m asked about learned societies and journals, the context is economic. It’s easy to see why, as many society treasurers or journal directors are currently worried about the likelihood of journal publishing being a source of income for societies in the future. For those people, our historical findings are, perhaps, not initially reassuring. It’s clear that, for most of their history, scholarly research journals have not been money-making enterprises. As one commentator in 1895 put it, the publishing expenses for research papers are “in very many cases, very heavy” but “the public which buys any particular scientific publication is very limited.” (Lord Rayleigh, secretary to the Royal Society, writing to HM Treasury; see Fyfe 2015 and 2022)

Some magazines with a more newsy approach to science have found enough paying customers to cover their expenses, but research journals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries depended upon subsidies from learned society members, royal patrons, wealthy donors or, more recently, industrial sponsors and research funding agencies. It was only in the 1950s and 1960s that the development of an international market of library subscribers made it possible for research journals to find enough paying customers to cover their expenses, let alone to generate net income. But, the ability of library budgets to support the growing number of increasingly expensive journals was short-lived, as the Royal Society subscription numbers below demonstrate.

In historical terms, the profitability of research journals in the third quarter of the 20th century appears as little more than a blip. In the long period before library subscriptions, journals were sustained by building a portfolio of multiple smaller income streams to support the cost of journal publishing. Similar approaches are being used in the transition to open-access publishing.

It’s important to realize that the older approach to journal sustainability was grounded in a non-commercial understanding of ‘circulation.’ The circulation and dissemination of their journals did matter to learned societies and academies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but not for financial reasons. The Royal Society gave free copies of its journals to its fellows, to the libraries of other learned societies, to the libraries of universities, and to a variety of learned institutions across Britain, Europe and (some of) the rest of the world (see below). This was a practical way of ensuring that its journals reached the scholars, and scholarly communities, most likely to be interested. Some organizations reciprocated, sending their own journals to the Royal Society’s library. But, it was not cost-neutral. An internal review in 1954 revealed that the society spent around £3,300 each year on the production and shipping of these copies, and only received around £900-worth of journals for its own library in return.

This approach to circulation proved to be economically unsustainable as the output of scientific research expanded in the 20th century, and as the post-war internationalization of science increased the number of learned institutions needing access. A technological solution has been dreamed of since the 1950s, but it is only recently that electronic distribution might make a non-commercial, mission-driven approach to the circulation of knowledge affordable for some learned societies once more.

But money – whether as subsidy or income – is not the only thing that connects learned societies and journals. Both are associated with communities of scholars: the members of societies, and the authors, readers, reviewers of journals. The overlap between these communities explains why many societies run journals and why some journal communities ended up establishing societies to support them. Less commonly noted, however, is that the relationship between a journal community and a society community is not single or fixed.

When the Philosophical Transactions was founded in 1665, the fellows of the Royal Society were not initially central to its authorship or its editorial/reviewing processes. But, at a time when the number of English-speaking scholars interested in the sciences was tiny, they were its core intended readership. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the journal became closely associated with the Royal Society, and the fellows of the society came to be the major source of content (either as authors themselves, or by communicating papers from their own networks). As editorial and reviewing processes became more complex, the fellows’ involvement in (and control of) these processes marked another way the Transactions had become a journal of, rather than for, the Royal Society. The intended audience of readers now stretched far beyond the fellowship of the society.

Over the course of the 20th century, the changing scale and nature of the scientific enterprise has shifted the relationship between the fellows of the society and the communities associated with the journal. Fellows came to be just a tiny proportion of the authors and readers of the journals, and by the 1990s, they had ceased to be the sole source of editorial and reviewing expertise. In 1995, a publications review surveyed the fellows about the journals, and revealed little willingness to “‘publish their own (or their younger colleagues’) papers” there; nor did the fellows admit to reading the journals more than “occasionally.” The fellows may still have expressed ‘goodwill’ towards the journals, but the mismatch between ‘the society community’ (small, British) and ‘the journal community’ (large, international) meant that the fellows lacked the sense of ‘ownership’ of the journals they had once had. For some of the fellowship and staff in the 1990s, the journals’ main function for the society seemed to be to generate income.

There are undoubtedly still academic journals, likely in small specific fields, which remain tightly associated with a specific society, whose members comprise the majority of the authors, reviewers and readers of the journal. But, there are also many journals that fall somewhere in between that model, and the one exemplified by the big, modern scientific societies.

I begin to wonder whether our existing societies are in fact the best organizational structures to support scholarly communications in the future. Many of the functions of learned and professional societies (from research meetings, to policy and education work) seem to me to work best at the national or regional level, and when there are substantial shared intellectual and social values among the members. But societies with a distinct local or national identity may not be the best structures for managing a future of scholarly communication that should be open, diverse and equitable, and operate on a global scale.

I still believe that (as the Royal Society argued in 1963) research journals need the support and oversight of communities of researchers, but reflecting on the changing relationship between the Transactions and the fellowship of the Royal Society leads me to suggest that we should pay closer attention to quite how the communities associated with journals and societies benefit from the relationship, and that we should ask that question in terms that are broader than finances.

The post Rethinking the Link Between Learned Societies and Academic Journals appeared first on Social Science Space.

Academic research is not always abstract or theoretical. Nor does it take place in a vacuum. Research in many different disciplines is often grounded in the real world; it aims to understand and address problems that affect people and the environment, such as climate change, poverty, migration or natural hazards.

This means researchers often have to interact with and collect data from a wide range of different people in government, industry and civil society. These are known as research participants.

Over the last 50 years, the relationship between researcher and participant has fundamentally changed. Previously, research participants were viewed merely as objects of study. They had little input into the research process or its outcomes. Now, participants are increasingly viewed as collaborative partners and co-creators of knowledge. There are also many ways in which they can engage with researchers. This shift has been largely driven by the need for research that is relevant to today’s world as well as greater recognition of the diversity of people and cultures, and the internet, social media and other communication tools.

In this context, ethical research practices are more important than ever. However, guidelines and standards for research ethics vary between country and institution. Expectations may also vary between disciplines. So, it’s a good time to identify the key issues in human research ethics that transcend institutional or disciplinary differences.

Issues to consider

I am a long-time chair of one my institutions’ research ethics committees, and I do research ethics training for researchers and managers across southern Africa. I have also published on research ethics. Based on this experience and drawing from other work done on the topic, I suggest there are five critical ethics issues for researchers to consider.

Managing vulnerability: Research participants, especially in the developing world, may be potentially vulnerable to coercion, exploitation and the exertion of soft power.

This vulnerability may arise because of systemic social, economic, political and cultural inequalities, which are particularly marked in developing countries. And it may be amplified by inequalities in healthcare and education. Some groups in any society – among them minors, people with disabilities, prisoners, orphans, refugees, and those with stigmatized conditions like HIV and AIDS or albinism – may be more vulnerable than others.

This issue can be managed by considering what the participant group is like and by making sure that the data collection process does not increase any existing vulnerabilities.

Obtaining informed consent: This is a key precondition for participation in any study. Potential participants should first be informed about the nature of the study and the terms and conditions of their participation. That includes details about anonymity, confidentiality and their right to withdraw.

The researcher then needs to ensure that the potential participant understands this information and has the opportunity to ask questions. This should be done in a language and using words that the person can understand. After these steps are taken, the participant can give informed consent. Informal (verbal or any other non-written) consent is more appropriate if participants are not literate or are particularly vulnerable.

Protecting people: The overarching principle of protecting research participants was articulated in the landmark Belmont Report. The report emerged from a national commission in the United States in the 1970s to consider research ethics principles. It called for researchers in any study to demonstrate non-maleficence (the principle of not doing harm) and ensure that they protect both participants and their data.

This can be done at different stages through the research process: by decreasing the potential for risk or harm through careful study design; by providing support or counseling services to participants during or after data collection; and by maintaining confidentiality and anonymity in data collection and reporting. Finally, personal data must be protected or de-identified if they are being stored for later analysis.

Managing risk: Potential sources of risk or harm to participants should, as far as possible, be identified and mitigated when the study is being designed. Risk may arise in any study, either at the time of data collection or afterwards. Sometimes this is unexpected, such as when data collection becomes more dangerous due to civil unrest or under COVID-19 restrictions.

It is important that researchers provide the details of support or counseling service for participants in case these are needed. Any trade-offs between risk and benefits can be considered through a risk-benefits analysis. But researchers should be realistic about any potential benefits that may result from their study.

Championing human rights: Researchers have responsibilities: to their disciplines, funders, institutions and participants. This means they should not merely be passive analyzers of data. Instead, they should be positive role models in society by seeking solutions, advocating for change and upholding human rights and social justice through their actions.

Research activities, especially those involving participants, should address and find solutions for local and global problems. They ought to result in positive societal and environmental outcomes. This should be the context for all types of research activities in a 21st-century world.

Making it happen

Increasingly, there are national and international codes of research ethics, guiding researchers in different fields. An example is the 2010 Singapore Statement on Research Integrity. It emphasizes the principles of honesty, accountability, professional courtesy and fairness, and good stewardship of data. These are the characteristics not just of ethical researchers, but of good researchers too.

These principles and processes should make research less risky and protect the rights of participants by building trust between researchers and participants. These principles can also help in making research more transparent, accountable and equitable – critical in an increasingly divided and unequal world.

The post Five Steps to Protect – and to Hear – Research Participants appeared first on Social Science Space.

A new five-year program funded by Britain’s Economic and Social Research Council aims to harness social science to address vital environmental concerns. The Advancing Capacity for Climate and Environment Social Sciences, or ACCESS, Leadership College is tasked with “provid[ing] insights to find fresh thinking and new solutions to support the transition to a sustainable and biodiverse environment and a net zero society,” according to a description hosted by the University of Exeter.

ACCESS is headed by Patrick Devine-Wright, a professor of human geography at the University of Exeter, and Birgitta Gatersleben, a professor of environmental psychology of the University of Surrey, as deputy director.

The interdisciplinary initiative is currently looking for 20 interested individuals from academic and non-academic sectors to be fellows for four-year cohort expected “to work, learn and grow as leaders together.”

“The social sciences,” explained Exeter geography professor Saffron O’Neill, a member of the ACCESS leadership team, “offer essential insights that are needed to effectively tackle the major environmental challenges – from the biodiversity crisis to climate change – facing us today. Yet often these insights are overlooked in favor of, for example, technological fixes: which might seem initially appealing, but which underestimate the social dimensions of policy and practice interventions. The ACCESS Leadership College will focus on and invest in developing this crucial next generation of social science innovators and leaders across academia, the public sector, NGOs and charities, and the business sector.”

The program will center on four work packages underpinned by the themes of ‘Knowledge Co-Production,’ ‘Equality, Diversity & Inclusion,’ and ‘Net Zero Sustainability.’

•  Map, Assess and Learn from the past experiences of social scientists to catalyze change in policy culture, institutions (e.g., civil service), businesses and civil society.
•  Empower environmental social scientists at different learning and career stages by providing tailored training and capacity building.
•  Innovate by creating new ideas and testing new approaches that enable social scientists to play influential, leading roles in addressing environmental challenges.
•  Champion and coordinate environmental social scientists across the UK and internationally by providing an accessible knowledge/data hub and innovative public engagement tracker.

The first of four Leadership College events, focusing on Health, Well-being and the Environment,’ will be held April 26 through 28 at Dartington Hall in Devon.

In addition to Exeter and Surrey, the core team behind ACCESS includes the universities of Bath, Leeds and Sussex and the Natural Environment Social Research Network (Natural Resources Wales, NatureScot, Natural England, Environment Agency and Forest Research). Partners include Strathclyde University, Queens University Belfast, Cardiff University, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, Manchester University, Plymouth Marine Laboratory, and the University of Sydney.

The post ESRC-Funded Initiative Aims to Harness Social Science to Address Environmental Issues appeared first on Social Science Space.

Data visualization and exploratory data analysis have been recognized in recent decades as important parts of statistics and, with the development of tools to routinely produce high-quality infographics, they have become central public-facing aspects of statistics and data analytics. Visualization is important for a few reasons: communication of data and research findings; exploration that reveals anomalies and unexpected patterns in data; and evaluation of complicated models. In short, statisticians and analysts use visualization tools to not just sell their work with pretty pictures, but to find problems with their models and construct new procedures as part of data-analysis workflow.

But visualization excludes people with visual impairments, an increasingly important issue as the population gets older. How can statisticians and analysts provide some of the benefits of the dataviz revolution? There have been some direct steps, such as the use of colorblind-friendly palettes and screen-manipulation tools that allow images to be magnified at will so users with weak vision can navigate an image to see details. Awareness of the natural range of visual acuity can motivate statisticians, and graphic designers more generally, to consider principles of communication and information transfer. For example, there is no reason why all the information in a data set needs to be crammed into a single graph. A grid of plots can show patterns more clearly, and a person with weak vision can first see the big picture on the grid and then focus on individual plots.

Just as sidewalk curb-cuts can improve the daily commute of pedestrians and cyclists, as well as people who transport themselves using wheelchairs, steps motivated by the need to communicate with people with low visual acuity can result in broad-based design improvements. In addition, awareness of this one dimension of diversity within the communities of statistical analysts and users can help them think about dimensions of variation in these populations.

The next step beyond making statistical graphics more accessible is to go beyond visualization entirely and consider “sensification,” or “vivification,” using senses other than sight. This is a wide-open area. To start with, we want to go beyond traditional notions of the five senses and consider other forms of perception, including the muscular resistance sense (haptic feedback) and balance and kinesthetic senses (as with Wii technology), as well as sound and touch, which are the most obvious alternatives to visual communication.

Direct mapping from vision to these other senses will not be possible: there is no obvious way to convert a scatterplot, for example, to a “readable” sonic signal. A pinboard would be able to translate an image to something that can be felt, but at a much lower resolution than most people’s vision. On the other hand, communication can be dynamic, and voice dialogue can be applied so users can ask questions to zoom in and get the distinguishing details they need. The nonvisual senses convey much less information per second, but they do have unique advantages in human communication. Sound perception, unlike much of vision, does not require conscious attention, which is why we can listen to the news or to music while we clean the dishes. This suggests the possibility of data sonifications that run in the background while we work. Sound also has a time dimension that could make it a natural choice for monitoring iterative processes, which are characteristic of much modern statistical computing. The clash of timbres can represent poor mixing of processes, with different sorts of pings corresponding to places in which algorithms are getting stuck or yielding questionable results.

Music can also reach us on an emotional level in a different way than visual images. Marina Koren, in The Atlantic article “The Spookiest Sound in Astronomy,” gives an example of a sonification in astronomy produced by data perception researcher Kimberly Arcand that engages the emotions (“a spooky, cosmic wail”) in a way that maps to underlying “wavelike movements” arising from the pulsing of a black hole. As with other examples of exploratory data analysis, this pattern was not originally anticipated but made perfect sense once it was vivified.

From a different direction, the muscular resistance sense offers the possibility of immediate feedback, which is not easy to do with visual displays and could be useful for exploring model fitting to the extent that challenges in the fit could be represented by physical resistance in the haptic controller. Indeed, visual mouse-based drag-and-drop tools can be considered a crude and not very effective imitation of the two-way engagement characteristic of muscular resistance and body movement, similar to the way infants interact with the world around them compared to the capabilities of adults.

The goal is to understand the advantages of the different senses and optimize them within a statistical workflow, not to simply try to replace visual cues with other senses—or vice versa. For example, we are so paper-based as a culture that music, our cultural organization of pleasing sound, is communicated on paper and we have not updated that because of errant backward compatibility.

Again, new ideas of sensification are appealing in part for their direct potential in making quantitative data analysis and modeling tools available to the visually impaired, and also as an example of the way in which efforts to improve inclusion can potentially yield benefits to the general population. That said, this is all research—that is, as noted in the article “Delivering Data Differently.” But we have to start somewhere.

Right now, there is already sophisticated hardware and software available that could allow new sensification tools to be developed, tools we hope will allow vision-impaired researchers and consumers to make more effective use of statistics and broaden traditional visualization so it is more effective (e.g., sonifications that can keep us informed while running in the background and voice dialogue and haptic feedback that allow us to interact directly with data and models). We also should consider how these tools might be assessed once they are developed.

Many open questions remain with visual displays. For example, in what settings is exponential growth best presented to the general public on a log scale? As statisticians, our ideas about evaluation and communication develop in tandem with new methods.

The post Showing Real Vision: From Data Visualization to Data ‘Sensification’ appeared first on Social Science Space.

Recently, a research paper entitled “Financially secure and less ethical: Understanding why and when financial security inhibits ethical leadership,” written by Yuanmei (Elly) Qu (Rowan University), Mayowa T Babalola (Royal Melbourne Polytechnic University), Chidiebere Ogbonnaya (Kent University), Shuang Ren (Queen’s University Belfast), Lu Chen (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China), and Mengxi Yang ( University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), was published online in the journal Human Relations. Today, on behalf of the research team, Mayowa T Babalola, Yuanmei Qu, and Lu Chen, answer some questions about their paper. Their answers appear just below the paper’s abstract.

What motivated us to pursue the research?

Times are getting more challenging nowadays. Many workers across the globe are experiencing financial insecurity (i.e., a situation whereby individuals perceive themselves to have insufficient financial resources to achieve their goals) amidst recession fears, interest rate hikes, mortgage crises, and increasing cost of living. People who occupy leadership positions (e.g., front-line supervisors) are included. Ethical leadership can effectively improve subordinate well-being and performance by demonstrating and promoting normatively appropriate conduct through personal and interpersonal relationships. Thus, organizations call for ethical leadership in a crisis. This leads to a question, does financial insecurity promote or inhibit ethical leadership?

In what way is your research innovative, and how do you think it will impact the field?

Our new research paper shows that being financially insecure creates anxiety in leaders, ultimately inhibiting ethical leadership behaviors. Fortunately, we found that leaders who perceive their pay as fair were less susceptible to the anxiety resulting from financial insecurity. In other words, organizational pay fairness helped mitigate the negative impact of financial insecurity. We advise organizations to reinforce their commitment to pay fairness this year and beyond, as doing so can help forestall potential damage financial/economic insecurity may cause in their organizations.

The post Rethinking Organizational Crisis Management: How Financial Insecurity Inhibits Ethical Leadership appeared first on Social Science Space.

Right now, for technological, ethical and political reasons, the world’s archivists are suddenly very busy.

Advances in digital imaging and communications are feeding an already intense interest in provenance, authorship and material culture. Two recent discoveries – a woman’s name scratched in the margins of an 8th-century manuscript, and John Milton’s annotations in a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio held in the Free Library of Philadelphia – are examples of how new tools are revealing new evidence, and how distant scholars are making fascinating connections.

At the same time, and even more importantly, the holdings of archives, libraries and museums – “memory institutions” – are being scrutinized as the world grapples with legacies of racism, imperialism, slavery and oppression. Some of the holdings speak to heinous episodes and indefensible values. And some of them were flat-out stolen.

The so-called “post-truth” era is a third cause of the burst of archival activity. Politicians and activists, mostly from the political right, have attacked facts and science. Archives have come under pressure to rewrite history, or have done so on their own initiative. The decision of the US National Archives to obscure anti-Trump slogans in a 2017 image of the Women’s March is a case in point.

Post-truth narratives pose all sorts of archival conundrums. In Australia, for example, people raised eyebrows when the National Library began collecting the posts of anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists, as part of its effort to document the COVID-19 pandemic.

Buffeted by strong and competing forces, archivists are in a tough spot. Their ability to navigate a path forward, moreover, is made more difficult by non-archivists’ foggy and unrealistic expectations of what archivists actually do, and what they might do in the future.

What to save?

In principle, every detail of every kind of object is useful and valid as historical evidence. Two recent examples of this fractal property: the field of biocodicology – the study of biological traces in books and manuscripts – is turning library dust into valuable data, while the field of fragmentology is looking inside old book bindings for hidden pieces of even older texts.

But this is not enough to justify keeping everything. And even if we wanted to, we couldn’t. In his story “The Library of Babel,” Jorge Luis Borges imagined an infinite library, but here on earth there are limits.

Despite the rise of e-books and online periodicals, publishers still produce millions of physical books, journals, magazines and newspapers every year. Then there are amateur publications, along with personal, official and commercial documents, multitudes of flyers, catalogs, posters and other ephemera. We can’t keep everything in this bulging pile of paper.

Non-textual objects are also part of the story of humanity, but we can’t keep all of them, either. Not only do we lack the room and money and curators to keep it all, for reasons of civilizational self-preservation we need to recycle as much of it as we can. And for reasons of civilizational sanity, we shouldn’t even attempt universal preservation, which – the moral of Borges’s story – is a sure-fire path to madness.

The physics of digital storage are different to those of physical archives, but ultimately the same rule applies: we can’t keep all the corporate and news sites, social media posts, blog posts, computer games, AI mash-ups, YouTube videos, messages, comments, selfies, porn – all of it growing by the second.

Keeping a single, static copy of the internet at any given moment is a Google-scale task. Now imagine what would be involved in preserving all the previous copies simultaneously, not just as static versions but dynamic ones, meaningfully accessible and covering every corner of the internet. That task is beyond even the imagination of Borges.

The minefield of decision-making

The work of archivists, therefore, necessarily involves decisions about what to preserve and for how long.

Those decisions are a minefield. Libraries, for example, are regularly criticized when they refuse donated books. “Why won’t you take our 19th-century Bible,” the donors ask indignantly, “or our set of old racing guides, or Encyclopedia Britannica, or Funk and Wagnalls?”

Libraries and museums are criticized even more loudly when they are caught removing items from their collections. Every good curator knows the value of a regular cull, but patrons and funders have romantic conceptions of collection practices. Senior librarians get into trouble when people see, ’round the back of the library, the skips full of “deaccessioned” books.

In the global shift towards digital resources, libraries have been so trigger-happy in retiring physical holdings of newspapers and magazines, that some mastheads may no longer exist at all in physical form, their non-digital properties forever lost to research. Physical newspapers are not the only ones in trouble. Late in 2022, the National Library of Australia announced that funding for its hugely popular online newspaper archive Trove would likely run out in mid-2023.

Just as dangerous for librarians is the offloading – sometimes sheepishly, sometimes flagrantly – of valuable items via suave, big-city book dealers and auction houses, such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s.

In the 1980s, for example, at a time of tight budgets and financial austerity, the John Rylands Library in Manchester auctioned 98 of its best books on the grounds that they were “duplicates.” But a closer look revealed many of the books were unique in important ways. The sale sparked an outcry; author Nicolas Barker likened the disposals to the sale of a trilith from Stonehenge.

The benefits of hindsight

Librarians get in trouble when books leave – and when books arrive.

At the start of the 17th century, Sir Thomas Bodley revived one of the great Oxford libraries. He had firm ideas about what constituted “worthy books” for the revitalized collection. They certainly did not include “such books as almanacks, plays and an infinite number, that are daily printed, of very unworthy matters.” When Dr. Thomas James, Bodley’s librarian, allowed such volumes into the collection, he earned a sharp rebuke. After Bodley’s death, James collected them with gusto.

With 400 years of hindsight, we can see Bodley’s definition of a worthy book was biased and fallible. His definition left out the first published works of Shakespeare, as well as many other early modern works of exceptional cultural and literary interest.

With our super-powered hindsight, we can also see that his 17th-century value judgments reflected explicit and implicit prejudices about class, gender, nationality, ethnicity, religion, high and low culture, and politics.

Of course, the same is true about curatorial judgments today. There is no such thing as an apolitical archive. Even an archive that is assiduously bipartisan or multi-partisan will still reflect choices about the scope and balance of the represented perspectives.

Right now, at our strange social moment, in which “woke” – a synonym for (racial) respect – is wielded as a politicized insult, archival work is even more political than usual.

Danger areas

How things leave and how they arrive are just two of the danger areas for archivists. Archives are full of hazards, including light, air conditioners, thieves and careless handling.

Fakes are another danger. Bogus Socratic scrolls famously infiltrated the ancient Library of Alexandria. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Wrenn Library (subsequently in the University of Texas) and the British Library accumulated large holdings of Thomas Wise editions in the years before he was exposed as an audacious forger.

How should today’s archivists chart a course through this perilous terrain?

Most archival mistakes are the result of a failure to do something that is right but difficult, or doing something that is wrong but easy.

In the “easy but wrong” category, simple mistakes have led to the preventable damage of art, artifacts and books. The photo modification at the US National Archives was a grave dereliction of archival duty, but it was an easy path to follow, and technically a simple thing to do.

For an example of “difficult but right”, we need only consider that for much of the 20th century, Western “memory institutions” largely reflected a white and chauvinistic view of worthy items. It was hard for archivists to retain evidence from the cultural fringes. But many forward-looking archivists and institutions swam against the official and political tide, assembling collections focused on women, civil rights, banned books, queer literature and “low” literature, such as the cheap magazines known as “pulps.”

With hindsight, we can see that retaining and conserving those collections was emphatically the right choice. Banned and marginal texts are essential to several grand human projects, including filling in silences and erasures, and building foundations for a fairer and more inclusive society.

There are still obstacles to representation and inclusion, but the argument has largely been won. Recovering women’s history, decolonizing the archive, queering the archive – these have all rightly become mainstream endeavors.

Contentious material

One of the most difficult frontiers for archivists today is whether and how to record social and political phenomena that progressive people would rather did not exist.

We have just come through the Trump era (or phase one of the Trump era) and we are still going through the COVID era. Both eras have spawned populist, sometimes militant and incendiary literatures and discourses.

In Melbourne, the State Library of Victoria is collecting pandemic-era imagery, including photos of anti-vax graffiti and anti-government protests. With the help of that library and other institutions, the National Library of Australia is keeping anti-vax, “pro-freedom” websites and social media posts.

Holding this kind of material is a challenge and a paradox for archives. The anti-vax sites are symptoms of anti-truth forces that are anathema to archives’ truth-telling goals. In the 19th century, the forger Thomas Wise relished the credibility that came from the British Library holding his publications. Now, the anti-vaxxers celebrate the official preservation of their material as a similar badge of legitimacy.

But no matter how obnoxious or fantastical, these records are historically relevant. They are part of the full story of politics and activism in Australia. For future scholars looking to understand the COVID era, the records will be invaluable.

Archivists cannot and should not blind humanity to its own mistakes. But the best archivists also know the importance of context when conserving and presenting difficult material. The records from the COVID fringe need proper and honest framing.

Such framing would acknowledge that the anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists did not represent a majority view, or even a significant minority one. It would also acknowledge the influence of misinformation and conspiracy theories beyond the fringe: on vaccine hesitancy, for example, and on the tactics of mainstream political parties that flirted with and even courted the anti-vax vote.

The value of archives

Preserving the story of humankind: that is the noble goal of archives, libraries and museums. It can sometimes seem like an abstract luxury, but it is actually very tangible, and essential. Without evidence, there can be no history. And without history, we can’t understand ourselves or chart a good course into the future.

The clichéd image of archival work as dusty, dull and benign is a long way from the truth. Archivists are continually making hard decisions at the sharp edges of politics and social change.

What can society do to help? We need a wide conversation to better understand the nature and value of archival work, and the limits of what archivists can do. We need to give archivists an explicit license and the necessary resources to continue to make difficult decisions.

For that to work, the community needs to protect archivists from politicians and narrow interests. Only then will archivists feel safe to be transparent about what they are keeping, why they are keeping it, and the judgments they are applying in order to put the holdings in their proper context.

Looking back over the past two millennia, archivists have made every kind of curatorial mistake. They have rejected worthy items, let in unworthy ones, mishandled objects in their care, and fallen prey to fakers and frauds. But only rarely have they lost sight of their core purpose.

On the big issues of our time, we should trust archivists to make the right calls. And we should give them our understanding and protection so they can do their work in peace.

Stuart Kells, Adjunct Professor, College of Arts, Social Sciences and Commerce, La Trobe University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Archivists Are Being Tasked With Ever-Tougher Calls With Far-Reaching Consequences appeared first on Social Science Space.

In September 1957, the New Yorker published an article called ‘Orientals are Stoic’. The author, Andre M. Tao-Kim-Hai, was a Vietnamese diplomat working for the United Nations. He described his experiences after surgery in a New York hospital and how he was constantly stereotyped by the medical and nursing staff:-

‘One interne said that he had been surprised when I giggled during the surgeon’s examination in the afternoon. “Orientals are Stoic, ” he stated sententiously.
I decided that by “stoic” he meant tough (…) and I took it to be a compliment. But I wondered about “Orientals” and asked him for his interpretation of the word.
“Chinese, of course,” he said.
I asked him if he thought the whole Orient – whatever geographical limits he gave to that word – was peopled by Chinese. To my astonishment, he said that he took it for granted that I was Chinese, and anyway all yellow people were the same. I asked him if he thought all white people were the same…’

Tao went on to tell the interns how he had been hired by Canadian TV to read some French for a film soundtrack. At the end, the producer had complained that his accent was too French – he had spent more than 20 years living in France. Could he not read the text in an Oriental accent? “Which Oriental accent”, Tao replied – and explained that there were dozens of languages in India, as well as Japanese, Chinese, Laotian, Cambodian, Malay, Siamese, Burmese and whatever they spoke in Afghanistan, Tibet and Inner or Outer Mongolia. The interns switched to religion, where the author enlightened them on the differences between Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism – and why none of these was a religion in the Western sense, and food, where he described the different culinary traditions of Japan, Korea, Indonesia and Siam…
Almost seventy years later, it would be nice to think that the biomedical and public health elites in the UK and North America thought in a more nuanced way about the “Orient”, not least because of the wide influence of Edward Said’s critique of such thinking. We should, however, be used to disappointment when it comes to pandemic measures. For some time before 2020, and certainly afterwards, there has been a regular chorus of complaints about how British and American people just will not wear face masks in the winter, like “the Asians” do.
Set aside the question of whether community use of face masks does impact on the transmission of respiratory viruses. What is going on here? Public health and biomedical leaders have plucked a single intervention out of its social, historical and cultural contexts and urged it upon recalcitrant British and American populations.
What, of course, is missing is any sense of those contexts. Historians, sociologists and anthropologists tend to work on slow publication schedules. However, East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal has published the papers from a forum of regional specialists convened in late summer 2020 to discuss “The Socio-Material History of Masked Societies in East Asia”.
One contributor, historian Akihisa Setoguchi, notes that the question “why Asians do wear masks” is vague, and its culturalist answers are unverifiable. It reproduces Orientalism by treating Asia as if it were a single entity sharing a homogenous culture and uniform history. The diverse stories of the artifact, science, culture, politics, and society that have shaped mask-wearing by region and country are invisible. The forum’s participants challenged this traditional narrative by tracing the varied national histories of mask-wearing.
Much of the value of this collection of papers lies precisely in its diversity. As the Japanese sociologist, Mitsutoshi Horii, observed in earlier publications, mask wearing has significant ritual elements. It is bound up with notions of gender and modernity, and experiences of colonial medicine. In China, masks should be considered alongside the history of the handkerchief and attempts to eradicate traditional practices of nose clearing and spitting as part of strategies for the control of tuberculosis. At different times and places, masks might be worn for the supposed protection of others or as personal protection from others. The studies of contemporary South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore discuss how masks were reworked from previous usage into new, and different, technological systems in the governance response to the Covid pandemic. In Japan, on the other hand, there has been little involvement of government in presenting masks as a tool of public health policy. This systemic approach also underlines the ways in which masks form part of packages of interventions, including quarantines and disinfection, that complicate any assessment of impact. As the editors stress, the striking thing about face masks is their diversity of functions rather than their homogeneity.
As these careful empirical studies emerge, they should prompt new questions about the Orientalism of British and American public health and biomedical elites – and about their networks with scientists in various Asian countries. When our leaders declare with confidence that they are assured of the effectiveness of masks as public health interventions, what socio-material network is at play here? Is it comparable to the story of the development economist flying out of Peru who asked the pilot to make another circuit over Lima because he was short of material for his book? Surely public health policies should be based on something more than scientific tourism and chats with “locals”?
A concern for Orientalist thinking should also lead us to ask what British and American elites are doing with their representation of this imagined “Asia”. Is this coded advocacy of a society where populations are more docile and deferential to elite pronouncements, whether from the ‘left’ or the ‘right’? Some leading medical sociologists and behavioural scientists are indistinguishable in this respect from senior figures in public health agencies or the honoured scientists in research-intensive universities. Eminence-based declarations define ‘social justice’ as much as ‘population control’.
History and the social sciences have played little part in Covid pandemic management. This is another illustration of the costs that come with that exclusion.

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In response to this proposition I argue simply, yes. We should engage in activism and civil disobedience, especially when our own survival and civilization are at stake. What may surprise some readers, however, is that in doing so we should and would NOT lose our neutrality. Because, we are not neutral in the first place. Some colleagues, while stating that “all knowledge is ‘worldly’ and, in this sense, political,” consider it “perilous to conflate” the roles of researcher and activist.” I defend instead the view that these roles are conflated by design and it is rather perilous not to be aware of our (implicit) activism and the values that guide it. Moreover, in the present extreme times, when we are crossing several planetary boundaries, realizing impact and third mission for universities may be better achieved through radical civil disobedience, than through the more appeasing forms of stakeholders’ engagement.

Weber and the legacy of value neutrality

Perhaps the weakest argument I advance to defend the need to show our emotions and take a clear position in societal debates is that of Max Weber himself.  The proponent of value-free science, engaged directly in politics, running (unsuccessfully) for office, and vehemently advocated for his political positions. Max Weber is often misunderstood, his (questionable) position on value-free science has been all too frequently interpreted as passion-free science, as if researchers should be completely detached from and agnostic about what they study, as if a researcher studying the effects of tipping points in the climate system could simply, coldly and without compassion calculate the billion deaths that would follow.

However, Weber asserts, passion and commitment are central features of our calling: “[…] the contention that the university teacher should be entirely devoid of ‘passion’ and that [s/]he should avoid all subjects which threaten to arouse over-heated controversies constitutes a narrow-minded, bureaucratic opinion which every independent teacher must reject” (Weber, 1917, Der Sinn der „Wertfreiheit“ der soziologischen und ökonomischen Wissenschaften). For him, the most insidious form of militantism is that exerted by “pseudo value-free prophets” that introduce “tendentious elements” pretending to be dispassionate but advancing very specific “material interests” (p. 457-60). And as a professor in a university of business and economics, I am acutely aware of whole sub-disciplines more or less implicitly taking the side of specific societal classes and conservative interests – interests that become (involuntarily) reactionary if they deny science and its practical transformative implications.

The stronger argument, however, follows Weber’s critique of the ‘pseudo value-free’ academics, but goes against his contention that value-free science is possible. Contemporary philosophical thinking has clarified that scholars, as anybody else, cannot be other than advocates of certain values and ideals, referring these values to scientific progress, societal enlightenment, technical domination of nature, or what else. Hence, we should reflect on and decide which values we endorse, and openly act upon them, instead of sneaking them into our studies in disguise. As we “cannot not communicate” (Watzlawick, 1969, Menschliche Kommunikation), also avoiding to advocate can be a form of disguised activism. Not to mention the higher responsibility to speak up that we have as academics, due to our relatively higher status in society (despite its erosion in the so-called managerial university) and also having more time and resources to better inform ourselves and a higher chance of being heard.

What values should we follow? I doubt that many of us would oppose the statement that the very legitimacy of (social) science is rooted in pursuing a better life for a society made aware of ignorance, prejudice and exploitation in order to overcome them. Indeed, since the Enlightenment, and although aberrations are always possible (eg. the Manhattan project), science is, ideally, an activist endeavor to promote these values against obscurantism and fundamentalist religious prescriptions. Furthermore, we can also observe progressive values being increasingly put at danger by developments like algorithmic manipulated public discourse, increasing economic inequality, and the re-emergence of quasi-feudal predatory and techno-oligarchs. In addition, Enlightenment values reaching back to the Renaissance are themselves rightly criticized for fuelling some of humanity’s grand challenges. Hence, we risk drifting into dangerous waters, where our scholarly praxis may become more a force for preserving an unquestioned status quo than a force for good.

For these reasons, I contend, that we as scholars are activists, i.e., advocates of certain values and ideals, given that we cannot avoid being such. The question then arises of what kind of activists/advocates we want to be. As a professor of organization and management studies, I wish we would finally take clearer positions on corporations that act immorally in front of the global challenges humanity is facing and pretend they can exist outside of politics. And let me add, this problem only gets worse if we pretend ourselves to be outside of politics and untouchable by ethics beyond our responsibility to be rigorous and trustworthy in our research procedures. Let’s understand our responsibility in broader terms, following the philosopher Jonas’ (1984) ethics of responsibility aimed at addressing the risks inherent in the economic-industrial system that emerged from the Enlightenment, which has the potential to destroy the basis of our survival on earth. Speak up, join a movement, or engage creatively with the existential challenges we are confronting: you will be no less ‘neutral’ than a colleague hidden behind the political shield of the ideology of value-neutrality.

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In the previous two blog posts I have reflected on the space(s) within social science for psychogeographical thinking. During the 1950s and 1960s, there was an artistic and political mission that propelled Guy Debord and his associates. Their mission did not sustain, but a renaissance occurred in Britain a couple of decades later with a literary angle. In this article, I explain how practices such as the dérive have been simplified and used by a wide variety of people. Moreover, the lockdown(s) of 2020 encouraged people to think differently about how to use technologies. The practices discussed here will line us up for the fourth piece, which shows how the internet has helped psychogeography spread from Europe and establish roots wider across the world.

Finding a way into psychogeography

Before going deep into psychogeography for my PhD research I had a limited knowledge. I had read the work of writers such as Iain Sinclair and W G Sebald. Inherently I knew what this approach was about through group walks in 2017 and 2019. However, a big part of my education started when I traveled up to Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, for the 2019 edition of the 4th World Congress of Psychogeography (4WCOP). The three-day event included university talks on Friday coupled with two days exploring villages and towns nearby on Saturday and Sunday.

I learned a great deal from attending the Friday event. For example, two academics explained how they had found a space for psychogeography: Tina Richardson’s Schizocartography and Alex Bridger social psychology angle. Alongside shows of photography (see above) there was a mesmerizing live performance from Patrick S Ford as he wheeled a suitcase around a square in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Whilst it was morning in a Huddersfield lecture theatre, he was thousands of miles away and it was dark. Beyond the artistic approach, I realized that the free public wi-fi in Ho Chi Minh City must be pretty extensive. This started to make me think about how the internet could allow many people to join a live walk in a different place. This thought thoughts to exploring how the internet become prominent in 2020.

How the pandemic brought online psychogeography to the foreground

The pandemic locked people down across the world from spring 2020. In Britain, we were sometimes restricted to one hour outside a day. And lots of time either alone or with people in our household. For my part it was a good opportunity to write my PhD thesis, having gathered all the interviews and run a few outdoor public events in 2019. I received an email from 4WCOP in May 2020 with an update about the next gathering. They wrote that:

There followed an invite to submit proposals for a Congress which would take place during a long weekend in September and be completely online. There was interesting terminology with the word ‘despatialized’ and a welcome for ideas from any place in any time zone of the world to take place during those 72 hours.

I put forward a Zoom talk about a walk inspired by the writer Arthur Machen. The experience of presenting online was useful for my own practice, but there were lots of very interesting contributions within the wider program. For example, I joined artist and academic Simon Woolham on a one-to-one walking journey using Google Earth. He hosted our online walk on Skype and used some software to make a video from our conversation. The meeting was centered on the place where I grew up, which repeated a process followed by Simon on Wythy Walks – a project to recall growing up in Wythenshawe. Incidentally, this suburb of South Manchester, England, is where geographer Doreen Massey also came from.

Altogether this online walk felt like a really strong social research method. Simon had mapped edited video conversations for his website In Search of the Shortcuts, which has also led to subsequent publications. Some of the group projects were also useful.

Group Project: Extreme Noticing

I really enjoyed the Extreme Noticing under Lockdown film (18 minutes). This initiative involved a group of people in Stirchley, on the edge of Birmingham, England, who launched a walking collective during the pandemic. Due to the legal demands for people to go alone, members of the group would walk the same routes repeatedly and notice things that they had not noticed before. They said that “alongside society’s seismic shifts, their attentions were reprogrammed. As the everyday faded away, other stuff took its place, from the mundane to the really odd.” There is something in here of breaking down dominant messages which relates back to the philosophy of the Situationists. The group, who have an online presence on http://walkspace.uk, were also very generous in their practice as they “invited other lockdown walkers to tell them what they’d seen, and accidentally created a social record, a collective practice and a resource for future walk-work.”

To my mind, this sounds like a really good ethnographic practice. Another interesting idea connected with extreme noticing was the Distance Drift; developed on social media platform Twitter by writer and walker Sonia Overall.

Using social media to connect synchronized walks

Every Sunday morning at 10 a.m. Sonia sends out a #distancedrift message on Twitter with a set of instructions for people to follow over the next hour. My first attempt, on Sunday 6 September 2020, is shown below. I left the front door at 10 a.m. and followed an instruction to look out for signage which was close to the ground.

At no point was I ever more than about 300 or 400 meters from the house. Putting the images together I realized that there were lots of things that I had never really noticed. For example, Cardiff Council seemed to impose a higher fine for dog mess on certain streets than it did on others. This was not about different pavements being more valuable; more about stickers and signs being made at different times. I also started to explore the different numbers and codes on lamp posts and other street furniture.

The whole experience is a good ethnographic approach that makes you look and notice things a bit more. On a social level, it works well because people use the #distancedrift hashtag. They comment upon, and share, each other’s observations. Some use Instagram also. In the months and years since that day I have regularly dipped into the Sunday distance drift. The following edition from early 2021 was both surreal and cerebral.

Foundation for looking internationally

The 2020 Congress was a really significant moment for gathering psychogeography fans from across the globe. The 4wcop.org website is an excellent resource with talks and films, including a few by New York-based dancer Jody Oberfelder. My own practice advanced following this event as I developed new working relationships and learned a lot. In fact, coupling the experience of being interviewed by Simon Woolham with the functionality of Zoom helped me develop the spatially-led online interview method. This latter technique features in my first blog here on Social Science Space. The next article in this series centers on the online Congress held in September of 2021 and what emerged on an international level.

The series so far

Mapping the Ebb and Flow of Psychogeography | Broadly speaking we can assume that psychogeography lies between that which studies the psyche and the mind and that which focuses on space and place. However, it is worth stressing that we are mostly concerned with an innovation within geography, particularly of the humanistic kind, rather than a branch of psychology

How British Literary Psychogeography Offers Possibilities for Researchers | Here we explore how the basic principles of Situational International re-emerged as a new form of psychogeography in the British Isles. This form would be less political than the work of Debord, at least on the surface, and would be championed by poets, writers of historical fiction and other forms of literature.

Psychogeography Becomes More Accessible — and Goes Online | Above

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In 2017, three researchers from France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (INRAE) — Denis Bourguet, Benoit Facon and Thomas Guillemaud — founded Peer Community In, a peer-review-based service for recommending preprints (referring to the version of an article that a scientist submits to a review committee). The service greenlights articles and makes them and their reviews, data, codes and scripts available on an open-access basis. Out of this concept, PCI paved the way for researchers to regain control of their review and publishing system in an effort to increase transparency in the knowledge production chain.

Birth of an idea

The idea for the project emerged in 2016 following an examination of several failings in the science publishing system. Two major problems are the lack of open access for most publications, and the exorbitant publishing and subscription fees placed on institutions.

Even in France, where the movement for open science has been gaining momentum, half of publications are still protected by access rights. This means that they are not freely accessible to citizens, journalists, or any scientists affiliated with institutions that cannot afford to pay scientific journal subscriptions. These restrictions on the free circulation of scientific information are a hindrance to the sharing of scientific knowledge and ideas at large.

Moreover, the global turnover for the academic publishing industry in science, technology and medicine is estimated at US$10 billion for every 3 million articles published. This is a hefty sum, especially given that profit margins enjoyed by major publishing houses have averaged at 35-40 percent in recent years. Mindful of these costs and margins, the PCI founders wanted scientists and institutions to take back control of their own publishing. And so, in 2017, the Peer Community In initiative was born.

By science communities for science communities

PCI sets up communities of scientists who publicly review and approve pre-prints in their respective fields, while applying the same methods as those used for conventional scientific journals. Under this peer-review system, editors (known as ‘recommenders’) carry out one or more review rounds before deciding whether to reject or approve the preprint submitted to the PCI. Unlike virtually all traditional journals, if an article is approved, the editor must write a recommendation outlining its content and merits.

This recommendation is then published along with all other elements involved in the editorial process (including reviews, editorial decisions, authors’ responses, etc.) on the site of the PCI responsible for organizing the preprint review. This level of transparency is what makes PCI unique within the current academic publishing system.

Lastly, the authors upload the finalized, approved and recommended version of the article – free of charge and on an open access basis – to the preprint server or open archive.

A revolution unfolding in science publishing

PCI is making traditional journal publication obsolete. Due to its de facto peer-reviewed status, the finalized, recommended version of the preprint is already suitable for citation. In France, PCI-recommended preprints are recognized by several leading institutions, review committees and recruitment panels at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). At the Europe-wide level, the reviewed preprints are recognized by the European Commission and funding agencies such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust.

PCI is also unique in its ability to separate peer review from publishing, given that approved and recommended preprints can still be submitted by authors for publication in scientific journals. Many journals even advertise themselves as ‘PCI-friendly,’ meaning that when they receive submissions of PCI-recommended preprints, they take into account the reviews already completed by PCI in order to speed up their editorial decision-making.

New ground broken in 2021

This initiative was originally intended exclusively for PCIs to review and recommend preprints, but authors were sometimes frustrated to only see their recommended preprint on dedicated servers (despite being reviewed and recommended, preprints are still poorly indexed and not always recognized as genuine articles) or having to submit it for publication in a journal at the risk of being subjected to another round of review. However, since the creation of Peer Community Journal, scientists now have access to direct, unrestricted publishing of articles recommended by disciplinary PCIs.

Peer Community Journal is a diamond journal, meaning one that publishes articles with no fees charged to authors or readers. All content can be read free of charge without a pay-wall or other access restrictions. Designed as a general journal, Peer Community Journal currently comprises 16 sections (corresponding to the PCIs in operation) and is able to publish any preprint recommended by a disciplinary PCI.

An innovative model on the rise

Currently there are 16 disciplinary PCIs (including PCI Evolutionary Biology, PCI Ecology, PCI Neuroscience and PCI Registered Reports) and several more are on the way. Together, they boast 1,900 editors, 130 members in the editorial committees and more than 4,000 scientists-users overall. PCI and Peer Community Journal are recognized by 130 institutions worldwide, half of which (including the University of Perpignan Via Domitia) support the initiative financially. The number of French academics who are familiar with and/or who use PCI varies greatly between scientific communities. The percentage is very high among communities with a dedicated PCI (e.g., the ecology or evolutionary biology communities, with PCI Ecology and PCI Evol Biol, wherein an estimated half of scientists are now familiar with the system), but remains low among those without one.

To date, more than 600 articles have been reviewed through the system. Biology maintains a significant lead, but more and more fields are popping up, including archaeology and movement sciences. There is still plenty of scope for growth, in terms of greater investment from those familiar with the system and the creation of new PCIs by scientists from fields not yet represented by the current communities.

Other open-science initiatives have been set up across the globe, but none have quite managed to emulate the PCI model. Mostly limited to offers of peer-reviewed preprints (often directly or indirectly requiring a fee), these initiatives, such as Review Commons and PreReview, do not involve an editorial decision-making process and are therefore unable to effect change within the current publishing system.

While the PCI model is undeniably growing and now garners more than 10,000 unique visitors per month across all PCI websites, the creation of Peer Community Journal shows that the traditional academic publishing system is still intact. And it will doubtless endure into the near future, even though the preprint approval offered will hopefully become a sustainable model due to its cost-effectiveness and transparency across the board.

In the meantime, PCI and Peer Community Journal present a viable alternative for publishing diamond open-access articles that are completely free of charge for authors and readers. In these changing times of unbridled, unjustifiable inflation placed on subscription and publishing prices, numerous institutions and universities are backing the rise of these diamond journals. PCI and Peer Community Journal embrace this dynamic by empowering all willing scientific communities to become agents of their own review and publishing process.

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Shortly before the new year, legislation — which among many other things increased funding for the United States National Science Foundation by 12 percent compared to the current year – was signed by President Joe Biden.

The Consolidated Appropriations Act for the 2023 fiscal year approved spending $1.7 trillion across the U.S. government for the current year, so the $9.9 billion appropriated for the National Science Foundation (NSF) is just a small piece of that colossal pie. However, the additional $1.036 billion is still a large increase in total spending for the premiere funder of academic social science research in the United States.

It is, however, less than what Biden had requested for the agency originally. In his budget request released last March, the White House requested $10.5 billion for NSF, a $1.66 billion increase, or 18.8 percent.

The increase is also not built into the “base” budget of the NSF. As explained in a detailed budget analysis prepared by the Consortium of Social Science Associations:

The practical effect of that tactic means that future discussions about the size of NSF’s budget might use the smaller base figure as a starting point instead of the larger appropriated amount.

Looking at the appropriated amount for the 2023 fiscal year, $7.8 billion is allocated to NSF’s research and related activities, an increase of $680 million, or 9.5 percent, above the FY22 level. (The president had asked for$8.2 billion.)

By convention, the appropriations bill – which is actually 12 more-focused funding bills rolled into one – does not specify NSF spending at the directorate level, i.e. how much goes to social science as opposed to say, geology. As an executive branch agency, the NSF is therefore allowed to set its own priorities (see usaspending.gov for a plain-language breakdown of 2022). At present, while it’s the smallest of NSF directorates, the Social, Behavioral and Economic (SBE) Sciences Research Directorate funds over half of the United States’ university-based social and behavioral science research.

To give an idea of what might happen, the amount actually allocated to SBE in the 2022 fiscal year was $285.8 million. A 12 percent increase to that would put the budget at around $320 million. Meanwhile, the president’s budget request suggested allocating $330.2 million.

For more information on how the new budget affects other social and behavioral science spending in the U.S., including the $47.5 billion sent to the National Institutes of Health and the $8.5 billion to the Department of Education, we recommend the COSSA analysis mentioned above.

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Trigger warnings are widely used in many universities – and increasingly, the wider world. Last year, London’s Globe theatre attached a trigger warning to Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, advising it “contains depictions of suicide, moments of violence, and references to drug use,” among other things.

In the US, the widest survey to date found an estimated half of all college professors used trigger warnings before introducing difficult content. In the UK, a survey earlier this year found 86 percent of undergraduate students support the use of trigger warnings.

In Australia, policies vary between universities. In 2017, Monash University’s Student Association recommended the use of trigger warnings for courses that contain “emotionally confronting material” – with warnings placed on 15 courses in a pilot program.

At Griffith University, in contrast, the use of trigger warnings is discouraged. In 2016, the Network of Women Students Australia published online (but has since removed) a list of potential triggers ranging from rape, sexual assault, and suicide, to slimy things, eye contact, insects, vomit, and corpses, skulls, and skeletons.

But remarkably, given the prevalence of trigger warnings, there is little consensus on the extent to which they are, in fact, an effective strategy for reducing the risk of trauma exposure, vicarious trauma, and re-traumatization.

One recent meta-analysis conducted by Australian researchers sought to statistically synthesize the existing research on participants’ emotions and comprehension following the use of a trigger warning. The study found trigger warnings have no meaningful effect on an individual’s emotional response to the material they have been warned about (whether positive or negative), their avoidance of this content, or their comprehension of the text itself.

In light of these findings, the researchers, Victoria Bridgland, Payton Jones and Benjamin Bellet, concluded that “trigger warnings are fruitless” and “should not be used as a mental health tool.”

Flinders University’s associate professor Melanie Takarangi, who has published several studies on trigger warnings, recently told Nine newspapers: “There is really no meaningful difference to how people react to something whether they received a trigger warning or not.” If anything, she said, such warnings gave people anticipatory anxiety.

One American university now regards the term “trigger warning” itself as triggering, increasing anticipatory distress and reinforcing unhealthy avoidance behaviors.

To understand the extent to which trigger warnings are an effective strategy for helping university students manage trauma, we conducted a systematic literature review collating and synthesizing the existing qualitative research in this area. Systematic reviews require scrupulous scientific investigation methods, intended to produce reliable, trustworthy, and unbiased results.

Our study found trigger warnings can, in fact, be harmful to students.

In our review of 20 peer-reviewed studies, published between 2010 and 2020, we found that trigger warnings can inflame existing stressors and exacerbate maladaptive behaviors, both of which can undermine students’ autonomy and their ability to cope with potential distress.

For instance, substantial evidence from a two-group randomized controlled experiment of 451 trauma survivors found that providing trigger warnings before the reading of distressing literature caused the participants to view trauma as more central to their identity.

This is potentially harmful for trauma survivors in both the short- and long-term.

Interestingly, a number of studies also expressed concerns regarding the potential for trigger warnings to infringe on academic freedom and free speech during classroom discussions.

Some studies found trigger warnings can promote students’ emotional well-being by encouraging them to prepare for a potentially difficult discussion. However, when trigger warnings are used in isolation, or in a tokenistic way, they are not an effective strategy for managing trauma.

Acknowledging trauma effectively

In our own courses, some of us have chosen to use trigger warnings to encourage preparedness for particular and necessary areas of study. In professor Gildersleeve’s first-year course on the study of Australian literature, students are advised in the introduction that some texts, such as Puberty Blues and Dead Europe, “deal with violence, horror, and other traumatic themes.”

In Dr. Bryce’s postgraduate course on child abuse and neglect, she acknowledges the inclusion of difficult topics, case studies, and scenarios, and recognizes that “some students enter the classroom with their own lived experiences, which can exacerbate the difficult nature of the course.”

University educators cannot avoid trauma. According to one British study, over half of undergraduate students had experienced at least one adverse event prior to entering university. The COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated psychological distress in people reporting at least one adverse childhood experience, one Irish study found.

Neurobiological research has shown trauma hinders the development of brain areas associated with cognition, memory, and language. Trauma jeopardizes an individual’s ability to engage in formal learning and is a strong predictor of academic failure.

Higher education policy needs to acknowledge students’ trauma histories and consider the impact of trauma on student retention, progression, and success.

Teachers should employ a holistic, trauma-informed framework, across all disciplines, that promotes resilience and recovery through a skills-based approach to coping and capacity building. For example, building reflective tasks into a curriculum can assist students with self-awareness and resilience as strategies for coping with potentially traumatic content.

The overall finding of our review is that when embedded as part of such a broader approach, trigger warnings can be a valuable tool for assisting with the management and reduction of trauma exposure.

But relying solely on trigger warnings, especially as a disingenuous gesture of trauma awareness, does more harm than good.

The post Are Trigger Warnings Hitting Their Target? appeared first on Social Science Space.

The latest iteration of OpenAI’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, ChatGPT, and the bot’s almost uncanny capability to write poetry and academic essays that are very difficult to distinguish from human-centric production has recently, and much like other companies linked to Elon Musk, caused a stir in the world of research. This is raising the specter of AI in the service of research fraud and a race-to-the-bottom in research output and publication. As John Gapper warned in the Financial Times, “…if an unreliable linguistic mash-up is freely accessible, while original research is costly and laborious, the former will thrive.” Does a new age of research desktop paper mills that are in easy reach of everyone anywhere present a real and present danger to research integrity?

In short, the risk is already with us. In May, data sleuth Elisabeth Bik tweeted about how image fraud was being boosted by AI, with generative adversarial network (GAN) technology (where algorithms that closely match the human brain are pitted against each other to produce synthetic data) is capable of producing deepfakes in biomedical literature. Ethics and integrity issues are growing exponentially across scholarly communication. F1000’s and Taylor & Francis’ figures tell a story that is reflected across academic publishing, with such cases representing 34 percent of ethics cases for F1000 and about 50 percent of T&F’s ethics cases. Other major issues include duplicate submissions, data integrity, citation manipulation and authorship integrity issues. As Sabina noted recently, the problem is significant, not just because of the volume and extent of the growth in the number of these issues, but also because there are different types of paper mills, and they are all highly adaptive.

Investigating these issues within a context of shifting sands poses many challenges. Nevertheless, publishers play a vital role in ensuring the legitimacy and integrity of what we publish and disseminate across the world. We invest in systems, safeguards and expertise to ensure due process has been applied to the scholarly content we publish. So, when this is manipulated and the integrity of the scholarly record is under threat, it’s vital we take all steps necessary to protect it. Technology is playing an ever more important role for publishers. The ability to detect research integrity and publishing ethics issues needs to be scalable, because some types of misconduct only become noticeable when patterns are detected across a number of different articles and datasets. This is a key area where developers, publishers and other scholarly organizations are collaborating and investing, not just financially, but with time and effort too.

Systems, safeguards and expertise are just one part of the solution. At a recent Westminster Higher Education Forum,  there was “wide agreement across the global research system” that open research is critical in reducing research waste and enabling scrutiny of data. We agree. Open data and materials make it harder to fabricate data and conclusions, and access to the underlying data by readers and AI means that issues are more likely to be noticed. As AI and automation, such as automated research workflows, increasingly become an integral part of research (particularly in the analysis of big data), making that data open will significantly benefit the use of AI to interrogate data for fraud. Furthermore, enabling and encouraging the publication of a broad range of outputs including negative/null findings, protocols, incremental studies – a key element of the open research model – minimizes publication and editorial bias and provides additional accessible data for AI tools aimed at combatting research fraud.

Publishers themselves also need to be open to collaboration with stakeholders (including other publishers) across the research ecosystem to tackle the root causes including a system of rewards and incentives that deter rather than feed into incentives to use paper mills. The STM Integrity Hub and its prototype paper mill detector shows what can be achieved through cross-publisher collaboration. The use of automated, AI processes that can spot duplicate publications and other issues between publishers are a crucial development, given publishers’ often distinct submission and publication systems.

However, AI tools cannot do this alone and human judgment also plays a crucial role in safeguarding research integrity. From F1000’s experience of open research, we know that rigorous checks prior to publication by both AI and experienced experts are integral to maintaining research integrity in publications.

There is also a crucial need for more training and education for researchers in publishing ethics as well as research integrity. Many types of misconduct or bad practice issues are not deliberate, but rather the consequence of inconsistent quality of training. This includes training in both good research and publishing practices, including the roles and responsibilities of authors. It’s also important to be aware of what good peer review looks like given that most peer review is still typically conducted anonymously: most researchers only see peer review reports on their own work (unless they happen to also be an Editor of a journal). There is a key role for many of the stakeholders in the scholarly ecosystem to collaborate on this and make such training open to ensure researchers, wherever they are based, can access adequate high-quality information.

There is already a rapidly accelerating race taking place between paper mills using ever more complex AI to produce fake papers at scale and publishers employing ever more sophisticated AI technology to detect issues. Ultimately, to paraphrase one of the best-known, popular reflections on AI and humanity: The future of research is not set. There is no research integrity, but what we make for ourselves.

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