Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
On 29 January 2021, Rochester police responded to an incident involving a Black nine-year-old girl, who they were told might be suicidal. An extended police body camera video of the incident shows the agitated child, her mother, and an officer attempting to de-escalate the situation.
Listen to season two of The VSI Podcast for concise and original introductions to a selection of our VSI titles from the authors themselves.
Do new technologies, such as robots, destroy jobs and cause mass unemployment? Many current and past commentators have forcefully made this point in the public debate, but new research published in the Journal of the European Economic Association suggests that “technological mass unemployment” is indeed not something we should worry about.
The question of whether Athens was a Greek or Roman city seems straightforward, but among scholars there is some debate.
In the late twentieth century, New York City transformed into a model of neoliberal governance. While at mid-century, city government maintained the most robust social democratic program in the country, by the late twentieth century, much of this program had been curtailed and the private sector and market had gained a far greater role in providing services previously maintained by government.
Nearly 40 years after the publication of David Kolb’s 1984 book, “Experiential Learning: Learning as the source of learning and development,” experiential learning remains one of the most influential theories of learning in management education.
Although the issue of economic inequality has long been neglected by economists, it has become increasingly important in academic and public debate over the past decade. International institutions long considered pro-liberal, such as the OECD and the IMF, are now openly calling on governments to take redistributive and tax justice measures to enable more inclusive and equitable growth.
A human rights approach places children’s dignity (and their voice) at the heart of the care system. Ensuring that carers and professionals engage with children in a meaningful way is the cornerstone for a system based on ethics of care and children’s rights.
Will a robot take your job? The fear of artificial intelligence (AI) and digital automation as a growing threat to human labour has been on the rise in recent years.
In roughly 7 out of 10 workplaces in the US, HR professionals use cybervetting to get to “know a person” beyond information provided on a resume. But what are cybervetters really attempting to learn, what inferences do they make, and what does any of this have to do with how a candidate will perform on the job?
Son preference is a phenomenon that has strong historical roots in many western and non-western cultures. The positions of men and women in modern societies are becoming more aligned. In this context, it is natural to ask whether son preference is yet another social phenomenon that is losing its historical ground. Could it even be that in some domains of life such preference is already a thing of the past?
At his recent press conference, President Biden said that he came to the Senate 120 years ago. I knew exactly what he meant because I got there three years after him when I joined the Senate Historical Office in 1976, and it was a different world.
During the past decade, the eyes of the world have often been directed toward Gaza. This tiny coastal enclave has received a huge amount of diplomatic attention and international media coverage. The plight of its nearly two million inhabitants has stirred an outpouring of humanitarian concern, generating worldwide protests against the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
Once again, we are exposed to daily doses of “border crisis” news. Calling the groups of immigrants arriving at the US Southern border a crisis has become an easy shorthand with sensationalist overtones. It provokes reactions across the range of political opinions, as well as among government officials and civil society actors alike. But is there really a crisis at the border? Or is this crisis located elsewhere? And whose crisis is it?
OUP have recently announced our support for the newly created SHAPE initiative—Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy. To further understand the crucial role these subjects play in our everyday lives, we have put three questions to four British Academy SHAPE authors and editors—social and cultural historian Lucy Noakes, historian of objects and faith Eyal Poleg, historical sociolinguist Laura Wright, and Lecturer in Contemporary Art History Mary Kelly—on what SHAPE means to them, and to their research.
It might be an exaggeration to say a boar broke the internet. But when someone posted an image of wild boar sleeping on a mattress and surrounded by garbage from a recently-raided dumpster in Haifa, Israel in March, Twitter briefly erupted. In a recent article in The New York Times, Patrick Kingsley documented the uneasy relationship, not only between people and pigs, but also between the people who want the animals eliminated and those who welcome them. But Kingsley curiously omits an important detail: the drama over the fate of Haifa’s boar plays out against a backdrop of taboo and religious law.