At the current moment there is growing concern about the role of digital systems in creating and furthering ‘harm’ across a range of domains (Powell, Stratton, and Cameron 2018). What harm means is often taken as read, or left to subjective claims. There is, or should be, fundamental disagreement as …
One of the ways in which trust is signalled in criminal groups is the fact of having been in prison. It is a signal that is costly and hard to fake. The better the system is at punishing the guilty, the cleaner the signal. Therefore in order to disrupt the …
Sharing some short and long essay questions from my course on illicit markets and criminal organisations particularly for other teachers but also to help students in how they go about selecting a question to answer. The short essay is either a guided book review, where the student examines the essay …
A PhD applicant did me the service of sending a list of questions in advance to see if we would be a good fit. It was a fantastic idea which led to a focused and creative discussion. It got me thinking about all the questions that went unasked in various …
The aim of this post is to provide a work in progress demo of how using titles for your paragraphs can structure your writing. The idea is that each paragraph has a named purpose in bold. I remove these before submitting the article. The titles add up to a narrative …
Is crime in competition with being law abiding? For rational choice theorists the answer is mostly yes. The decision to commit crime is a calculated judgement based on self interest. There is nothing particularly special about criminals or crime. In contrast both deviance theory and bio-psychological criminology say there is …
There is a spike in exports of household white goods and consumer electornics to former Soviet Central Asia and the neighbourhood. Why is that? The assumption is they are headed by hook and by crook to Russia. What for? It is claimed they are needed for the war. There is …
It is difficult to understand the appeal of Ardern, Sturgeon, Trump and Johnson without recognising that politics is about providing psychological goods: the warm bath of a seratonin hit, with the odd excitement of a dopamine rush to break it up now and then. Western politicians have given up on …
A research review is a summary, evaluation and critique of a book or other work, like a report or a collection of research articles. Its purpose is to comment on the state of knowledge on a topic and/or to evaluate a particular theory or contribution. The first task you have …
The value of social research methods is that it produces independent evidence on the nature of society, social-economic problems and challenges, and potentially agreed ways of reaching effective solutions. There are two challenges to social research methods: one is the epistemic fracture of societies, where awkward evidence is mistrusted or …
