US president Dwight Eisenhower warned in 1961 ‘we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex’ (MIC). The idea that there is a grouping of lobbyists and industry desperate to suborn public money for their agenda is a persistent one in Western …
Research has its own language which reflects different theories – abstract ways of thinking about what research is, based on ideas of what reality we are examining, what the world is ‘really like’ (ontology) and how much we can know about it (epistemology). Ontology (‘what is’) is a topic students …
‘The cherry tree appears to be in a cut down situation’ is not a good sentence construction if the reality is ‘I cut down the cherry tree’. The former construction is common in risk adverse modern life. Acknowledge just enough of the situation while obfuscating all direction, cause, effect and …
I am thinking of those too-perfect cases that illustrate what we want students to know but which turn out to be overblown or plain wrong. My case is Maines’ (2001) The Technology of Orgasm, which used to be a central example in a lecture I delivered in intoxication, technology and …
Drones have had a bit of a moment with Ukraine, where they are presented as evening up the fight, providing a cheap way of countering Ukraine’s disadvantages in remote strike capability. I was thinking of the shift in how drones are normally seen in liberal Western circles, as weapons that …
One of the predictions made in global health was that as low/mid income countries became wealthier, their populations would adopt the illnesses characteristic of high income counties. Causes of death would shift away from neonatal conditions, violence and communicable disease to obesity, heart disease, stroke, cancer and other what are …
The concept of ‘the user’ or ‘person who uses drugs’ is central to how we talk about drug supply and distribution. It implies a singular individual who has a continuous relationship with drugs and a defined trajectory through which they become drug experienced. The non human elements of drug use …
When the whole world has been opened to capital, there is nowhere to expand into. There are no more sources of cheap labour or raw materials, and no more ways to mechanise complex tasks. You can only expand inward, through every more fiendish financial engineering, engineered solutions to non-problems such …
Ontology (‘what is’) is a topic students often have difficulty grappling with in their work. It tends to end up being a set of buzzwords that people lay fealty to (interpretivist! Social constructionist!) and generalist statements about society being ever changing and such. It should be a set of thinking …
As Olivia Rodrigo so wisely said ‘it’s brutal out there’. But we are never so brutal as with ourselves. Apply widely and be adaptable – you can fit into more posts and get something from them than you may realise. Recognise what they are looking for. Aim high and value …
