The University of Panic

A pandemic crushes assumptions and inherited narratives of higher education. This chapter explores how COVID-19 tested the parameters of teaching and learning and how universities failed this test. Through the panic of shutdowns, lockdowns, economic restructures, social distancing, and closures, the speed of change and decision making was profound and under public scrutiny. Online learning has been a panacea for economic and social problems for 20 years. To manage a crisis the scale of COVID-19, online learning would be the obvious solution. However, the pandemic showed the flaws in this strategy and the toxic reality of quick fixes to higher education. Students were short changed and academics pushed to exhaustion. After COVID-19, higher education is in shreds. The visions and futures of universities are blurred. Using the theories of Paul Virilio, particularly his University of Disaster, this chapter probes how higher education unravels and dissociates teaching and research. When time is short and risks are high, what mode of leadership will survive in the post-pandemic university?

Commercial involvement in academic publishing is key to research reliability and should face greater public scrutiny

The publishers of scholarly journals, particularly the large for-profit publishers, have failed to ensure journal publication is transparent in process and output. They have failed to sustain and invigorate peer review. By relying on the print tradition of publishing, which focuses on the short research report, they have failed to sufficiently support innovations which take advantage of digital platforms for archiving, distributing and critiquing scholarly work. We review the consequences of this for research reliability and call for greater scrutiny of for-profit academic publishing.

Political Economy of Conquest

By the final decade of the eighteenth century, the political economy of conquest had crystalized into a distinctively recognizable modern form. Expanded scale of war-making created a need to surveil the financial operations of the colonial state. The changing valence of ‘corruption’ came to include a growing insistence on eliminating leakages from the financial flows that enabled conquest. Corruption was not merely a moral scourge but a structural flaw, which if left unresolved would drain the war-making capability of the early colonial regime. Financial accounts of the East India Company therefore had to be rendered legible to public scrutiny and parliamentary debate in the form of an annual India Budget. Colonial conquest captured the cultural imagination of metropolitan Britain – from painting and the Georgian stage to a new graphic scheme of statistical visualization – all sought to comprehend Britain’s territorial empire in South Asia. The growing appetite for war was fed by territorial conquest on an ever-expanding scale and transformed colonial warfare into the most fiscally impactful activity. An entire infrastructure of financial surveillance had to be created to organize warfare and conquest more efficiently. This edifice of control and scrutiny rested upon a growing appetite for reliable information about the financial health of the Indian empire and forecasting the dividends of territorial conquest.

Value-added and Transparent Experiments

Experimental research by political scientists on elites has grown dramatically in recent years. Experimenting on and with elites raises important questions, both practical and ethical. Elites are busy people, doing important work under public scrutiny. Therefore, any experiments that use up political elites’ time, risk impairing their ability to do their jobs as well as possible, or put at risk the larger research community’s access to elites should be avoided. Nevertheless, despite these risks and challenges, we argue experimenting with elites has enough benefits both to the research community and to elites themselves, that it should still be done. The relevant question then becomes how should we think about doing experiments with political elites? We propose a framework of value-added and transparent experiments. Our framework is guided by the following two simple rules: Elite subjects should individually benefit from the process of doing the experiment. It should add value to their role as representatives. Second, the identity of the researchers and purposes of the experiment should be transparent. As we argue, these two combined features can still accommodate a large range of experiments, can creatively spark researchers to think up new designs and can protect access to elites for future research. We review two such examples at the end of this essay.

The Criminal Police Officer: Understanding Factors That Predict Police Crime in the United States

Although police decision making and behavior always face intense public scrutiny, officers’ criminal lifestyles have largely been ignored in national debates and discussions. The primary focus of this study was to understand factors that predicted police criminality. To achieve this objective, we analyzed a nationally representative dataset on officers who were arrested from 2005 to 2011 using advanced statistical approaches. Results obtained using multilevel modeling demonstrate the predictive effects of officer and agency characteristics in explaining police criminality. Specifically, findings reveal differences in types of crimes committed by the officers. For example, male officers engage in crimes that are entirely different from those committed by their female counterparts. Likewise, on-duty officers tend to criminally behave differently from their off-duty counterparts. Furthermore, agency-level factors such as type of agency, number of sworn officers, and location of the agency predict police crime. Current findings highlight the importance of policies that would directly address criminality in law enforcement.

Dreaming of The Peaceful Ways: An Evaluation of The Indonesian Deradicalisation Program

The Indonesian deradicalization program conducted by Indonesian National Counterterrorism Agency (BNPT) comes under public scrutiny due the number of terrorist recidivism with a total of 47 individuals during 2018 until 2020. This indicates that the ongoing deradicalization program has not been successful and effective and it requires a massive change across all levels. This article aims to analyse the Indonesian deradicalization programs which has been adopting the peacemaking criminology approach and how it is implemented. Employing a qualitative study through desk research and informal interviews as the data collection techniques, this article examines various problems and challenges that are hampering the peacemaking-based deradicalization programs in Indonesia, including the problem of database on the ex-convicts, methods of approach and assessment, reliance on the top-down approach conducted by government institutions, pandemic challenges, and inconsistencies with the legal or judicial aspects. Adapting to the social change approach by including the involvement of the non-government stakeholders is important for deradicalization program to work. This article recommends that the evaluation of deradicalization policies in Indonesia should consider the re-focusing of deradicalization goals by aiming at behavioural changes rather than mindset and ideological changes, incorporating gender aspects in deradicalization programs, research-based programs formulation based on intersecting multidiscipline research fields and the possibility for the deradicalization as well as disengagement privatization programs to increase the effectiveness and reduce inefficiency.

De-picturing John A. Macdonald: Opportunities and Challenges of Representing Canada’s Past with Graphic History

This article explores the historiographical and methodological opportunities and challenges of graphic history to represent, interpret, and interrogate Canada’s past. Graphic history is a research-creation approach that combines word and picture to produce illustrated texts and comic book-style narratives. While I address important critiques about academic rigour, pedagogical value, and practical viability, I argue that graphic history has much potential to offer historians. By broadening our understanding of scholarly work, graphic histories can be accessible sources for wider audiences, critical resources for teaching and learning, and/or imaginative methods for engaging with historiographical issues. After examining the theories and practices of graphic history, I illustrate a graphic-text essay on the contested images of John A. Macdonald. Pictures of the first prime minister are well known to most Canadians in photograph, caricature, and statue, but his legacy has come under greater academic and public scrutiny, particularly regarding policies towards Indigenous peoples. I focus on Macdonald because debates over his commemoration are relevant to the ways in which historians represent and confront complicated pasts. I use related debates over statue removal and anxieties about erasure of history to explore deeper historiographic questions about representation, truth, presentism, and perspective. I argue that a graphic history approach is a medium for deconstructing, or, as I call it, de-picturing, a one-dimensional, dominant image of Macdonald on a pedestal, exhibited in bronze.

Exploring Twitter Discourse around the Use of Artificial Intelligence to Advance Agricultural Sustainability

This paper presents an exploration of public discourse surrounding the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in agriculture, specifically related to precision agriculture techniques. (1) Advancements in the use of AI have increased its implementation in the agricultural sector, often framed as a sustainable solution for feeding a growing global population. However, lessons learned from previous agricultural innovations indicate that new technologies may face public scrutiny and suspicion, limiting the dissemination of the innovation. Using systems thinking approaches can help to improve the development and dissemination of agricultural innovations and limit the unintended consequences of innovations within society. (2) To analyze the current discourse surrounding AI in agriculture, a content analysis was conducted on Twitter using Meltwater to select tweets with specific reach and engagement. (3) Seven themes resulted from the analysis: precision agriculture and digital technology innovation; transformation and the future of agriculture; accelerate solutions, solve challenges; data management and accessibility; transforming crop management, prioritizing adoption; and AI and sustainability. (4) The discourse on AI in agriculture on Twitter was overwhelmingly positive, failing to account for the potential drawbacks or limits of the innovation. This paper examines the limits of the current communication and outreach across environmental, economic, social, cultural, political, and behavioral contexts.

Analisis Yuridis Tindak Pidana Pencucian Uang (Studi Putusan No. 311/Pid.Sus/2018/Pn. Mdn)

The panel of judges adjudicating the money laundering case found the defendant guilty of the crime of money laundering from the narcotics crime, and therefore sentenced the defendant to 7 (seven) years imprisonment. Based on this, the formulation of the problems in this study: 1) How are the legal rules regarding money laundering in Indonesia, 2) How is law enforcement against the crime of money laundering in the Medan District Court, 3) What is the basis for the judge's consideration in imposing crimes against money laundering offenders in the Decision Number 311 / Pid.sus / 2018 / PN. Mdn. The research method used is descriptive method, while the data analysis technique used is descriptive qualitative. The results showed that the crime of money laundering is regulated in Law no. 8 of 2010 concerning the Prevention and Eradication of the Crime of Money Laundering (UU PP - TPPU). The threat of money laundering is regulated in Article 3, namely imprisonment for a maximum of 20 (twenty) years and a maximum fine of Rp. 10,000,000,000. The panel of judges at the District Court that adjudicates money laundering crimes acts decisively in imposing crimes, especially because the examination process usually receives public scrutiny, such as money laundering from narcotics and corruption crimes. The basis for the consideration that the panel of judges, the defendant has participated in the circulation of narcotics by receiving, transferring money as payment for narcotics, this is commonly done by the perpetrators of the Crime of Money Laundering to disguise or hide the origin of the proceeds of crime. However, the panel of judges had imposed a sentence that was too low on the defendant, namely 7 years in prison, far below the threat of money laundering in Article 3 of the TPPU Law where the defendant was found guilty, namely 20 years in prison.

What the COVID-19 pandemic reveals about science, policy and society

The global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–2021 required politicians to work alongside and depend on scientists more closely than any other event in recent times. It also saw science unfold in real time under intense public scrutiny. As a result, it highlighted as never before the ways in which science interacts with policy-making and with society, showing with sometimes painful clarity that science does not operate in a social or political vacuum. With the advent of vaccines against the coronavirus that has caused the pandemic, science has come to be seen as something of a saviour. But at other times and in other contexts it has also been cast as a villain and an inconvenience, and has run into stark conflict with political leadership. In this article, I consider these issues with particular reference to the situation in the UK—which, as with any nation, illustrated some considerations of more general applicability but also had aspects unique to this country. I argue that there are many lessons to be learnt, and that, as this is surely not the last infectious-disease crisis of such magnitude that the world will face, we must hope they will be heeded.