Panel discussion for NHK – the Japanese public broadcasting network Borders can’t contain the raging COVID-19 pandemic. It has forced unprecedented action, but the outlook is grim. What is the nature of the coronavirus and how should we confront the worldwide risks? Moderator Ebara Miki Chief International Correspondent, NHK WORLD-JAPAN Panelists Shindo Nahoko Senior Advisor,… Read More »
All infectious disease outbreaks generate three social epidemics – of fear, explanation and action. The last describes the pressures to “do something”, however pointless or irrelevant. The Government’s lockdown represents another triumph of populism over science. Its approach is reminiscent of the line from the Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht about the failure of the people… Read More »
A programme for Arriang TV – a Korean English-language channel. I joined forces with a psychologist from a local university to discuss the human consequences of self-isolation. On the video page
In a democratic society, we should be very cautious about allowing the state to encroach on the space for individual decision-making and voluntary actions. This does not mean that states cannot signal preferred choices but that citizens have some freedom to interpret them in the light of their unique knowledge of their own circumstances. Even… Read More »
I have now added two brief video clips to the video page. One is from CGTN, which is Chinese Television’s Global English-language network, and discusses the elements of nationalism and xenophobia in early international responses to the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan. The other is from Euronews, discussing the problems of self-isolation if you are not… Read More »
The immediate reaction to the emergence of a novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in Wuhan, China, has focused on its challenges to the biomedical sciences. But the new infection is at least as big a challenge to the social sciences. If we continue to neglect this, there is a serious danger that we end up with mistaken… Read More »
The basic problem with shared decision making is that it has always been a matter of ideology rather than evidence…Shared decision making does not need to co-opt conversation analysis and sociolinguistics in its service but to use their findings about the nature of language and social interaction to reflect on the credibility of its own… Read More »
If you missed the broadcast of the new BBC/FX version of A Christmas Carol, it is well worth tracking down on a streaming service. While the production is occasionally bonkers, it brilliantly captures Charles Dickens’s passionate anger about social injustice in Victorian Britain. This is not a cosy story of a mean old man chivvied… Read More »
Most of the presentations from the 2019 Blankensee colloquium, “Capturing and Analyzing Social Change: Opportunities of Analyzing Visual Data in the 21st Century”, are now available online via YouTube. My contribution deals with Video Data–21st Century Methods and 20th Century Thinking. It is also available through this link. I discuss the rise of video data… Read More »
…This led me to think further about the weight of expectations that was being placed on the contemporary university and whether this was in any sense fair or realistic. A casual trawl of the trade press and social media identifies calls for universities to feed and house students for free or at highly subsidised rates,… Read More »