Using field experiments, I investigate if provision of (social) information can increase incoming university students' attendance in a voluntary remedial math course. In Intervention 1, treated students receive an invitation letter with or without information about a past sign-up rate for the course. In Intervention 2, among those who signed up…

Sociologists are engaging in a long-overdue reckoning about the place of the traditional canon in social theory courses and pedagogy. Instructors are revising their syllabi to include a more diverse set of authors while "provincializing" classics that have long been taught as universal. We confront the question of how to teach contested…

Previous research has examined how mismatched dispositions within a divided or 'cleft' habitus are subjectively experienced but has not adequately explored nor theorized the variety of ways in which the dispositional disjunctures that progressively give rise to a cleft habitus are initially generated. Combining recent sociological work on…

The question of why the works of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida are often attributed to France by HE lecturers and students when the origins or developments of their key ideas come from northern Africa is examined from critical and personal standpoints. The article joins the call for the decolonisation of the HE curriculum…

This article is a reflective analysis of an assignment in which undergraduate students developed dystopian, postapocalyptic, fantasy, and fictional short story parables to illustrate their understanding of sociological theory. In a social theory course, students were assigned a final paper in which they designed a short story that integrated…

In this reflective account, I revisit my geopolitical location, earlier life and career, and academic journey using the ideas of feminist theorist Dorothy Smith as an interpretive frame. Her theorizing and methodology have been transformative, particularly in relation to gaining insight into a paradox. In order to undertake community-engaged…

Office of Social Innovation undertakes transformative initiatives that challenge systemic issues and create a space to imagine alternative pathways and perspectives. Our team of staff, students, and faculty has undertaken an intentional process to reflect on these initiatives and elaborate a scholarly approach: one that enters into dialogue with…

In this essay, the author reflects on her teaching as a site in which to analyse the pedagogical tensions produced by foregrounding disability in the study of gender and sexuality and by allowing students to see her vulnerability. Analysing a moment in class, the author thinks through a queercripistemological vulnerable pedagogy of care that…

Offering online courses can be seen as a way of enhancing the three essential "presences" (teaching, cognitive, and social) of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model. Creating and enhancing cognitive, teaching, and social presences require an innovation for teachers during planning, implementing, and evaluating their online courses. As…

This article explores pedagogic strategies for resisting the racism of contemporary populism and age-old coloniality through challenging secularism in the academy, especially in social theory. Secularism sustains racism and imperialism in the contemporary academy and is inscribed, in part, through the norms of social theory. Post-secular social…

In this article, I pick up established critical explorations of the role and use of theory in higher education research, focusing on the theoretical affordances of the work of Bruno Latour, one of the architects of actor-network theory. Actor-network theory is increasingly widely used within education research, although Latour has moved away from…

This article sheds light on employee wellbeing. We reveal how an 'adapted' action learning intervention (a change laboratory) introduced prior to the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK, enabled learning and action to emerge within an educational programme. We utilise the theoretical lens of activity theory to illustrate the challenges and tensions of…

In the chapter we wrote 10 years ago for "Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods" we asked instructors to free themselves from the stifling heritage of positivism that privileged tools and instrumentality above meaning. Drawing on Henry Giroux and Oscar Wilde, we urged our peers to embrace dialogue that respects the…

Since 1952, the "Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing" has provided criteria for developing and evaluating educational and psychological tests and testing practice. Yet, we argue that the foundations, operations, and applications in the "Standards" are no longer sufficient to meet the current U.S. testing demands…

The instruction of classical sociological theory at Lehman College of the City University of New York (CUNY) underwent significant transformation to make it more activity-based and better aligned with departmental learning goals. The article focuses on the effectiveness of an "edited book" project that came of this endeavor, where…