Sociology – Policy Translation: Guide to Interpretive Approaches to Governance

Public Policy Bits: The Importance of Being Stupid in Research

This year I supervise three Master students in their thesis work, and a few other written assignments of students. It’s the time when students come up with their proposals and try to work out a puzzle and a methodology around it. Now, research would not be called research if it was easy. It’s a lot […]

Workshop on “Translation in World Politics” at Kate Hamburger Kolleg, Duisburg, Germany

Last week, on October 08-09, I took part in a workshop at the University of Duisburg’s Kate Hamburger Kolleg (Centre for Global Cooperation Research) named “Translation in World Politics”. It was very pleasing to see the ideas of policy translation making headway in other disciplines, and now also in International Relations and World Politics. I […]

Crafting or Designing Socio-Ecological Systems? NEW PUBLICATION!

Finally, our Special Issue of Environmental Science & Policy is online, and you can enjoy the articles. You can read our editorial about the issue here, and the article I wrote with colleagues on water user associations in the region here.

“Our Kids” by Robert Putnam, 2015

The New York Review of Books published a review of the new book of Robert Putnam “Our Kids”. This book is about where America is going in terms of the “morality” of life — increasing divorce rates, children born out of the wedlock and an overall decreasing happiness trend.

ADA University Faculty Debate

On March 13, 2015, ADA University Debate Society hosted a great round of debate with ADA University faculty – Dr. Anar Valiyev, Dr. Kavus Abushov, Dr. Javid Gadirov, Dr. Farhad Mukhtarov on the motion “Freedom of speech is more important than religious sensitivities.” The event followed up with a round of discussion and Q&A panel. […]

Oxford Bibliographies: Great Resource for Students and Researchers!

Energy Security and Water Security Farhad Mukhtarov (ADA University, Azerbaijan) and Aleh Cherp (Central European University, Hungary; Lund University, Sweden), with essential assistance from a graduate ADAU student Richard Sarpong, published 2 articles in Oxford Bibliographies, Oxford University Press. One article is about Energy Security — the concept that commands great policy attention nowadays, from […]

Public Policy Bits: Check Blog by Professor Cairney

However, one website offers a good take on many of those concepts, and only in 1000 words! It is the blog written by Paul Cairney and can be found here. This is excellent for students of public policy and people with general interest. So are you taking a public policy class and you have to […]

ADA Faculty Debate on Charlie Hebdo

Friday, 13 March at 4pm in the Large Auditorium of ADA University I am going to debate freedom of speech versus religious sensitivities. This is open to all ADA members, especially students interested in the subject. All are welcome!

Weekend Reading: “Social Theory”

One day when I was a student in Oxford, I went to a student auction to buy a bicycle. Instead, I bought a book. It was only 3 GBP and it was second hand. It was called “Social Theory: a Historical Introduction” by Alex Callinicos, and this was a start of my passion for social […]

Weekend Reading: “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference”

The travel of ideas This week’s weekend reading is the international bestseller from Malcolm Gladwell “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference”. In this book released in 2000, the New York Times columnist and a writer Malcolm Gladwell describes the turning point when a trend starts to catch fire, becomes important, […]

Oxford Handbook on Water Politics and Policy (2015)

An excellent news for the scholars and policy-makers in water policy and politics is that the new Oxford Handbook of Water Politics and Policy is contracted and currently in progress to be published in 2015! Most excitingly, this is the first edition of such a high profile Handbook in the field of Water Policy and […]

Public Policy Bits: Ways of Knowing Public Policy

Farhad Mukhtarov and Andrea Gerlak have just published an article in Policy Sciences, a well-respected political science journal, on Ways of Knowing and Integrated Water Resources Management. In this article, the authorss came up with the argument that there are 3 ways of knowing reality, and public policy for that matter, which they named prescriptive, discursive […]

Public Policy Bits: Techno-fixes?

Albert Einstein famously proclaimed that “you can’t solve a problem with the same mind that created it”. But we keep trying to fool ourselves that we can. We see technology as our ultimate solution, from extending our lives through synthetic biology, to arguing that we must have genetically modified food and other organisms as we are […]

Cigarettes for Children! Public policy issues around smoking

“Old Joe Camel cartoon advertisements are far more successful at marketing Camel cigarettes to children than to adults. This finding is consistent with tobacco industry documents that indicate that a major function of tobacco advertising is to promote and maintain tobacco addiction among children.”

Emotion and Policy Analysis

By Farhad Mukhtarov. It is not clear how to reconcile emotion and policy analysis which seem to encompass different worlds. The first is enveloped in subjectivity, whereas the second claims to be objective; the first occurs mostly in private sphere, whereas the second is mandated and takes place in public arena. The challenge is great: […]

Anthropology and Political Science: Dialogue or Contact Zone?

By Farhad Mukhtarov. As we reported earlier, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) is currently hosting its 2012 annual session in San-Francisco. Within this session there is a roundtable arranged for the discussion of the dialogue between public policy and anthropology. Our colleague Paul Stubbs has given a short talk in which he emphasized the recent […]

Policy Translation: Guide to Interpretive Approaches to Governance

Category: Sociology