‘Almost divine power’: the lawyers who sign off who lives and who dies in modern war zones
Military lawyers told me how they must make split-second decisions that weigh military variables against real human lives.
A series of annual workshops with the aim of bringing together economists and other social scientists, to facilitate new conversations and the development of common vocabularies.
A pilot project – led by Dr Ivano Cardinale & Dr Constantinos Repapis, with technical support from Dr Ricardo Leizaola – aimed to investigate how one might re-orient economics, featuring interviews with celebrated economists who have articulated a clear view of what is wrong with the subject and how we can change it. The basic outcome of this project was to provide non-technical and easy access material to students and the wider public that are interested in discourses of the economy which we find to have merit but are marginalised in the current public discussion.
A third series of interview, led by Dr Ragupathy Venkatachalam, will be produced from January 2019.
This project – led by Dr Julie Parsons – incorporates ideas from the Photographic electronic Narrative (PeN) project hosted at an ‘offender’ resettlement scheme (RS), as well as initiatives explored during an August 2017 research residential, Mapping the Transformative Potential of Participatory Styles of Research with Vulnerable, Marginalised and/or Hard-to-Reach Groups. The success of the PeN project is such that the RS continues to use it as part of its work with ‘offenders’, documenting ‘offender’ journeys through their resettlement scheme. This is currently supported by Plymouth University, and from May 2018 – April 2020, the PeN project will be one of five impact measurement tools used by the RS in their evaluation of the scheme. Moreover, data gathered through the PeN project continues to be shared with stakeholders, delivery partners, funders, supporters and the wider community.
‘Finishing Time’ (FT) follows ‘offenders’ who have been on placement at the RS, beyond their re-entry into the community after punishment. The FT project incorporates ideas developed during an ISRF residential ‘mapping the transformative potential of participatory styles of research with marginalised groups’. Indeed, a collaborative and creative approach is fitting, as all of the participants have experience of the criminal justice system and are likely to be wary of traditional interview situations (Jewkes 2012). In preparation, participants will provide photographs or images from other sources, and/or objects of significance to them. During semi-structured interviews, participants will visually map their resettlement journeys beyond their time at the RS and significantly for some, beyond the end of their licence conditions/supervision orders. This provides participants with a story line to help with organising memories and encouraging a temporal sense of change (Williams and Keady 2012, McLeod 2017). Both the storyline and photographs/ images/ objects are a useful focus for participants as they discuss their resettlement journeys.
From April 2017, the ISRF has funded an Interdisciplinary stream at The Conversation. Scholars at The Conversation’s member universities, as well as past and present Fellows of the ISRF, are thus encouraged to bring interdisciplinary social research to millions of readers worldwide. Researchers are encouraged to write short newsworthy articles, working with an Editor to produce pieces with journalistic flair but no loss of academic rigour. The ISRF hopes that, by promoting interdisciplinarity through this partnership with The Conversation, the usefulness of interdisciplinary approaches will reach broader audiences, and that knowledge of such work will spread beyond the confines of academia.
Military lawyers told me how they must make split-second decisions that weigh military variables against real human lives.
Colonial police organisations used similar arguments to uphold their power as were heard in the trial of George Floyd’s murderer.
A missing girl, a sensational trial, and the troubled history of anti-trafficking.
Any ISRF Fellows wishing to pitch an idea for an article, or simply interested in knowing more, should contact the Interdisciplinary Editor directly at josephine.lethbridge@theconversation.com.
The research project – led by Dr Paulo Serodio – contributes to the ISRF’s programme: ‘Reframing the moral foundations of economics’, which responded to the displacement of a social science discipline of economics (Political Economy) by a ‘scientised’ quantification of economic activity. The project’s overall goal is a generally applicable analysis of the relational structures and the normative controversies existing among contemporary economists, to understand how far these determine both the nature of academic economics and economic policy.
The Centre for Social Ontology was based in the College of Humanities at EPFL, its central focus being the Morphogenetic Project. The project’s main theoretical aim was to conceptualize a nascent but unique transformation of the social order towards ‘Morphogenesis Unbound’.
The Centre for Social Ontology (CSO) was established in 2011 at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where Professor Margaret Archer was ISRF Chair in Social Theory 2011-2013. Following a move to the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, its main focus was the Morphogenetic Project.
This 3-day-summit, organised by Rethinking Economics Bologna, had two objectives: firstly, to analyze how the economic discipline can contribute to better address these global challenges, widening its scope and perspective; secondly, to identify the critical knowledge economists need to be equipped with.
The Digital Social Science Forum brought together innovative figures, working at the cutting edge of research in their own fields, in order to develop an interdisciplinary space within which the Digital Social Sciences could thrive.
Members included:
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory is an international peer-reviewed, open-access online journal which aims to situate ethnography as the prime heuristic of anthropology, and return it to the forefront of conceptual developments in the discipline.
A significant shift in the architecture of international development finance is taking place. Under the aegis of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), plans are underway to move away from exclusive public financing of sustainable development to the active engagement of the private sector in the mobilisation and delivery of development finance. This includes a) official partnerships with financial actors not traditionally engaged in development finance, such as hedge funds, pension funds, insurance companies and private equity firms; and b) creating new markets and forms of financial instruments to fund public goods and services, including securities, bonds and insurance.
This evolving landscape poses significant challenges to the regulation and governance of the international development architecture and broader transnational economic governance. As new partnerships and modalities of engagement are formed, existing structures of governance and accountability are reconstituted, reshaping the relationships between different actors to a development finance transaction and reconfiguring the regulatory modalities through which these relationships are governed.
This project – led by Dr Celine Tan and Siobhán Airey – seeks to engage in an interdisciplinary examination of these changes in international development finance policy and practice, drawing from insights from law, politics, economics and finance and geography. The focus here is to map, assess and critique this evolving architecture and what this means for international development cooperation and global economic governance.
It aims to contribute to scholarship and policy in this area in three important ways: 1) publication of a papers that will provide novel insights in the subject area and establish international development finance as a dedicated field of interdisciplinary scholarly enquiry; 2) production of an interdisciplinary resource bank for teaching and research in this area; 3) formation of a specialist node and network of interdisciplinary scholars in the field to feed into the preparation of a larger research project to explore the issues in depth.
The Limits of the Numerical project explored one of the most pressing sets of questions for modern social science and its relation to policy. What are the effects on a system of social policy when numerical quantification and evaluation is introduced into that system? How does the use of numerical evaluation exclude, trivialize or distort other systems of political, moral and social evaluation? What are the political and moral consequences of this shift towards numerical evaluation?
These questions were addressed with respect to three distinct strands of social policy — education, climate change and healthcare — where social science, policy and the gritty world of politics interact with intense urgency.
The ISRF funded the Cambridge-based strand, focusing on healthcare and the role of numerical quantification in the British National Health Service (NHS).
Professor Tony Lawson’s research programme at the University of Cambridge generated a book and papers on a range of topics, as well as supporting participation in workshops and networks.
The purpose of the workshop was to re-visit a tradition of psychodynamically informed consulting developed at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in the 1960s by a group of psychoanalytically trained social scientists. A key figure there was Isabel Menzies, a psychoanalyst and sociologist whose seminal papers on her work with organisations developed the thesis of social systems operating defensively in response to the collective anxieties within them in a way that obstructed the principal task of the institution.
Organised by:
A conference organised by the Institute of Psychoanalysis, and the British Sociological Association’s study group for Sociology, Psychoanalysis and the Psychosocial.
Organised by: