From March to September 2020, researchers working at a biomedical scientific campus in Spain faced two lockdowns and various mobility restrictions that affected their social and professional lifestyles. The working group “Women in Science,” which acts as an independent observatory of scientific gender inequalities on campus launched an online survey to assess the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on scientific activity, domestic and caregiving tasks, and psychological status. The survey revealed differences in scientific performance by gender: while male researchers participated in (...) a larger number of scientific activities for career development, female researchers performed more invisible scientific tasks, including peer review or outreach activities. Mental impact was greater in researchers caring for children or dependents, and this was aggravated for women. Results spot a disproportionate impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on female scientific career development, and urges for equity measures to mitigate the consequences of an increase in the gender gap in biomedical sciences for current and future pandemics. (shrink)

Una de las principales dificultades para escribir un texto sobre el acceso y el uso que los jóvenes hacen de las TIC (tecnologías de la información y la comunicación) consiste en el hacho de que inevitablemente, lo escribimos desde nuestro punto de vista adulto. Posiblemente nuestras preocupaciones como padres y educadores tienen poco que ver con las preocupaciones reales de los propios hijas e hijos, alumnos y alumnas, cuando navegan por Internet, chatean con sus amigos o intercambian fotos y vídeos. (...) Frecuentemente se atribuye ésta distancia a la diferencias de edad. (shrink)

Sensor-based data are becoming increasingly widespread in social, behavioral and organizational sciences. Far from providing a neutral window on 'reality', sensor-based big-data are highly complex, constructed data sources. Nevertheless, a more systematic approach to the validation of sensors as a method of data collection is lacking, as their use and conceptualization have been spread out across different strands of social-, behavioral- and computer science literature. Further debunking the myth of raw data, the present article argues that, in order to validate (...) sensor-based data, researchers need to take into account the mutual interdependence between types of sensors available on the market, the conceptual (construct) choices made in the research process, and the contextual cues. Sensor-based data in research are usually combined with additional quantitative and qualitative data sources. However, the incompatibility between the highly granular nature of sensor data and the static, a-temporal character of traditional quantitative and qualitative data has not been sufficiently emphasized as a key limiting factor of sensor-based research. It is likely that the failure to consider the basic quality criteria of social science measurement indicators more explicitly may lead to the production of insignificant results, despite the availability of high volume and high-resolution data. The paper concludes with recommendations for designing and conducting mixed methods studies using sensors. (shrink)

This article reflects on the role of aesthetic concepts for cultural and social analysis. More specifically it addresses the fundamental ambiguity that surrounds the discussion of aesthetics as being both the poison and cure for a critique of contemporary society. Aesthetic concepts often figure as a reservoir of resistance and transformation while simultaneously constituting a crucial affirmative force of the existing social order. This ambiguity then results in unfruitful oscillations between either hailing the critical potential of aesthetics or lamenting its (...) conservative momentum. In order to address this paradoxical situation, it will be argued that these opposed usages of aesthetics can be unfolded through the concept of ‘mediation’. Drawing on postmodern art and the aesthetics of the sublime (Lyotard, Deleuze), as well as on cybernetics and systems theory (Luhmann), enables us to understand difference as both aesthetic sensibility and as dynamic principle. It therefore becomes clear that the singularity of aesthetics is at the same time a constitutive, productive force and as such intimately tied to the existing (social) order. Understanding mediation and aesthetics as two sides of the same coin may lay an untapped potential for critical analysis of the social. (shrink)