Research plans up in the air thanks to COVID-19? Keep going with ideas from Sharon Ravitch!

Research communities across the globe are tirelessly collecting, analyzing and sharing data to help us understand and tackle the coronavirus pandemic. Here’s a collection of resources that visualize, map and demystify COVID-19 data.

Initiated by Deborah Lupton, this crowdsourced document provides necessary information and key resources for researchers struggling to conduct traditional face-to-face research under new circumstances. Check out: "Doing Fieldwork In A Pandemic."

The call for ‘social distancing’ in the wake of the coronavirus and its attendant COVID-19 disease has seen schools and universities around the world hurriedly attempting to turn their physical classrooms into virtual ones. While this may be best immediate reaction from an epidemiological point of view, from a pedagogic perspective, it has left instructors desperately trying to retrofit and reformat their courses while trying not to unduly disadvantage large numbers of their students. As a means of supporting those attempting to do their best under trying circumstances, SAGE Publishing has drawn from its large body of published and peer-reviewed research to offer the resources below -- free of charge -- to serve teachers and students around the world.

Find yourself teaching online? MethodSpace offers guidance and open access resources for e-learning & methods instruction.

Nesta launched the Centre for Collective Intelligence Design back in 2018 at an event jointly hosted by SAGE Publishing. The event featured talks, workshops and discussions exploring the development of collective intelligence as its own field, bridging the worlds of academia and industry together to create a new look domain. October 2019 saw the return of this one day event, jam packed with interactive sessions and an array of attendees from tech to the arts, data science to critical thinking and beyond.

Welcome to a new focus on Theory and Research Design and our March Mentor-in-Residence Sharon Ravitch!

The rise of music streaming platforms, such as Spotify and Apple Music, has contributed to an explosion of new forms of digital data about music consumption practices. As the digital platforms through which consumers access and engage with recorded music and creators distribute it, they are uniquely positioned to create immense volumes of data about what and how people consume music, individually and at scale. From data about what music people search for and skip, to demographic information about who is consuming what, music streaming platforms generate data about almost every micro-interaction with music, amassing enormous databases ripe for further value-extraction.

Now is the time for social scientists to take responsibility for guiding societal improvement.

Twenty-first-century societies are rapidly changing. We’re witnessing historic levels of partisan discord and institutional breakdown, and multiple simultaneous sea changes in norms around gender and ethnic identity, sexual expression, and the definitions of criminality. These political and cultural shifts, often amplified and accelerated through Internet platforms, are occurring alongside major economic upheavals, including the deaths and births of entire industries, renewed international trade wars, and inequality levels rivaling those of feudal times. Worse, there is no end in sight for these tumultuous trends. What are people to do? How are we to make sense of all this turmoil and find some working consensus about social reality (if not a social contract) allowing more of us to find a stable and comfortable way in the world?