The pragmatic desire to ensure that research, especially social science research, has ‘impact’, that is consequences for those outside the research community, is growing priority for funding agencies (although it is curiously absent from the arcane realms of elementary particle

It is well established that climate change and environmental degradation are intensifying the pressures on crucial resources such as food and water security and air quality.  These pressures are especially difficult to counteract in the least developed economies.  Yet if

What is the measure of a man? There are various emetics, but here’s one … Photo: David Canter) Having recently enjoyed voluntary severance from my academic post (less troubling than my vasectomy), after half a century as an academic, I

Tin-yuet Ting from Hong Kong interviewed those who took part in recent protests over democratic crises in Hong Kong.(Photo: Studio Incendo/Flickr/CC BY 2,0) It is generally accepted that it is difficult to be a young person in these less than

A crime or a terrorist act? Or both? The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) was quick to claim that 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, who killed dozens and injured hundreds more in Las Vegas, was

The usual image of political activism is of young people, probably students, waving banners, or even throwing cobbles at serried ranks of law enforcement. But as the eleven papers, brought together for an issue of Contemporary Social Science, by Melissa

Although most citizens in developed Western societies have relatively little direct contact with crime as victims and even fewer as offenders, criminality reaches out to influence most aspects of people’s daily lives. Criminology and related social science disciplines rarely examine

Karl Marx recognized that the polarization at the heart of inequality has its own self-enhancing momentum. There are no natural processes that reduce the division between the haves and the have-nots. The opposite is the case, as has been seen

The concept of absence, and its attendant harms, mark most instances of civic disengagement. It is often assumed that happy workers are more productive than unhappy ones. But the evidence for this is limited. What unhappy workers do is stay

Protesters known as indignados — the indignant — demonstrate in the Spanish city of Palencia in 2011. Echoes of their “professional politicians are burglars” could be heard loud in clear in Donald Trump’s rhetoric. (Photo: By Montgomery (own work) [CC BY-SA