Yes, I tweeted the above, this morning, in response to a tweet about “an older prof” who supposedly said to someone that writing book reviews is “professionally worthless.” What I find so frustrating is the contempt that many scholars (older or younger) seem to have for the day-to-day machinery of the field — from reviewing essay submissions to journals, reviewing book submissions to publishers, reviewing tenure & promotion applications, reviewing books, and editing journals to advising students, supervising graduate work, […]
Tag: Peer Review
Comparing Apples to Apples
There’s an interesting article, from July 2006, making the rounds on social media. Published in the bilingual, peer-reviewed quarterly, Bulletin of Sociological Methodology/Bulletin de Méthodologie Sociologique, it’s entitled: “Editing a Normal Science Journal in Social Science.” It’s abstract reads as follows: Using Thomas Kuhn‘s once well-known notion of normal science (a collective endeavor inasmuch as researchers share the same paradigm), the author, Linton Freeman, argues that work carried out in the sociological sub-field of social networks is more closely aligned […]
Sticks and stones and all that
A grad student elsewhere in North American recently contacted me to say that my first book, Manufacturing Religion, was on their class’s reading list and so asked if I’d answer a few questions in advance of their discussion on the book. […]
A Response to “Responsible Research Practices,” Part 10: Peer Review
This is an installment in an ongoing series on the American Academy of Religion’s recently released draft statement on research responsibilities. An index of the complete series (updated as each article is posted) can be found here. As with the eighth and ninth points of the draft document, the tenth also strikes me as unproductively redundant: For while the previous two were both concerned with scholars talking plainly to wide audiences, this bullet point focuses on that too, but narrows […]
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A Response to “Responsible Research Practices,” Part 4: Research on Human Subjects
This is an installment in an ongoing series on the American Academy of Religion’s recently released draft statement on research responsibilities. An index of the complete series (updated as each article is posted) can be found here. The previous post ended by citing the fourth of Bruce Lincoln’s “Theses on Method” — specifically, his call for scholars always to contextual, historicize, what they study by asking “who speaks here?” and “to what audience?” Among my difficulties with the AAR’s draft […]
Read More from A Response to “Responsible Research Practices,” Part 4: Research on Human Subjects