Category: Lockdown

Book Review: Easy Living: The Rise of the Home Office by Elizabeth A. Patton

In Easy Living: The Rise of the Home Office, Elizabeth A. Patton explores how the status of the home as an intimate space and locus of economic activity is closely tied to the economic, social and cultural transformations of the past century. This acce…

Building new bridges between research and policy during a national lockdown

Annette Boaz and Kathryn Oliver are social scientists with expertise in production and use of evidence for, policy. In this blogpost, they reflect on their recent experiences putting their knowledge into practice at the heart of government during a national lockdown. They describe the significant changes they had to make to their planned programme of … Continued

Science in inaction – The shifting priorities of the UK government’s response to COVID-19 highlights the need for publicly accountable expert advice.

The phrase following the science is repeated frequently in relation to government policies to address COVID-19. However, what this science might be and how it is better than other ‘sciences’ is less frequently explained. In this post, Jana Bacevic reviews the UK government’s initial response to the COVID-19 outbreak and argues that a key factor … Continued

Are we all digital scholars now? How the lockdown will reshape the post-pandemic digital structure of academia.

The closure of university campuses in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, has resulted in the rapid adoption of digital technologies for almost all activities that could previously have taken place within the physical space of the university. Whilst this presents opportunities to rethink how many academic practices might take place in virtual environments. Mark Carrigan … Continued

The Locked-Down: We need more than headline statistics to understand the impact of Covid-19

For governments and individuals much of our understanding of the Covid-19 pandemic has been mediated through metrics of cases and deaths and shaped by heartbreaking personal stories. In this post, Leeza Osipenko argues that such metrics only scratch the surface of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and makes the case for more expansive data … Continued