What are consequential world problems? As "grand societal challenges", one might define them as problems that affect a large number of people, perhaps even the entire planet, including problems such as climate change, distributive justice, world peace, world nutrition, clean air and clean water, access to education, and many more. The…

The biggest threat to an equitable and prosperous American society is not a particular educational policy, but the gravitational pull of politics, explains Jonathan Collins. Before educational policy can be developed and put into place, the politics that drive education must be acknowledged and addressed. Violence is erupting at school board…

In envisioning literacy at a crossroads, we ask what may be the potential of a different, intense, possible love, a love we may scarcely know and may yet discern--what we think of as a cosmic love, an explosive love. Such stance-taking in literacy research provokes new possibilities for research, teaching, and learning. We share brief narrative…

Any academic from an overrepresented group who advocates more "diversity" is directly contributing to the lack of "diversity" by remaining in his position. Assuming the number of jobs is relatively fixed, such an individual is effectively saying, "I want the percentage of academics who have the same demographic…

My concern in this article is how the university might become more distributed, less concentrated in particular places and times, and more permeable to different sorts of interests. In order to do this, I have written a partly autobiographical reflection on an attempt to practice the work of the university differently. It is the early story of a…

In this article John Raven responds to commentaries on his article, "Diving in Where Angels Fear to Tread: Pre-Requisites to Evidence-Based Interventions" (EJ1248321). Herein, he provides dialogues with individual authors that relate closely to his original theme and which seemed to merit further elaboration. He briefly addresses: (1)…

The primary goal of this response to Eric C. Sheffield's presidential address "Human Expression and Meaning Making: Pondering the Role of the Medium in Creating a Life Worth Living," is to extend some of the excellent points raised and to offer some questions for continued inquiry. To extend Sheffield's critique, the author offer three…

For much of human history, inequity was taken as a fact of life. However, as reflection on the human condition became more prominent, arguments that some forms of inequity can be ameliorated began to emerge. In this paper, the authors note that "inequity aversion" is a built-in human trait, and they reflect on the fact that, nonetheless,…

In the context of the current COVID-19 pandemic, we deem of importance the identification of what content is privileged in secondary schools around health and disease. From our point of view, a relevant task is to accompany science teachers in their transit from teaching information to be evoked to teaching knowledge on that content that enables…

In John Raven's "Diving in Where Angels Fear to Tread: Pre-Requisites to Evidence-Based Interventions," he outlines several critical failings in which social scientists bear a responsibility for potentially a great deal of damage toward children, society, and notably, the planet itself. The nature of the damage appears to be one of…

Speech at Australian universities is restricted in various ways. A few of them, such as student protests against visiting speakers, receive lots of attention. Others seldom do, such as defamation threats and cyber harassment. Self-censorship may be more significant than overt censorship. Those who want to raise awareness of hidden limitations on…

Academic racism is an intellectualized and race-based ideology of hatred fostered and propagated in classrooms and newsrooms. In this article, William Howard asserts that rather than transparent, unadorned, visceral hatred, academic racism consists of a maze of theory that conceals visceral hatred under a veneer of intellectualism and…

In this special issue response paper, we pick up from prior discussions to suggest areas where we think policy sociology can benefit from further conversation and research. In particular, we bring together our respective readings and work on policy mobilities, in conversation with the contributions of this special issue, to think further about…

The ongoing ecological crisis and the more recent Coronavirus crisis challenge the grand narrative of Enlightenment that human beings are 'masters of nature'. For millennia, human "social learning" has allowed "Homo sapiens" to outpace most of our competitor creatures and live a comfortable life, but this competitive success…

Although climate change is already a reality in many geographical regions, and the scientific evidence of the global environmental danger is stark, 'business as usual' often remains unchallenged in business and management research. Moreover, business and management education continues to teach and promote human-centered economic models that are…