Peer-Reviewed Article by François Lachapelle
If the standpoint of economics is the market and its expansion, and the standpoint of political s... more If the standpoint of economics is the market and its expansion, and the standpoint of political science is the state and the guarantee of political stability, then the standpoint of sociology is civil society and the defense of the social. In times of market tyranny and state despotism, sociology -and in particular its public face -defends the interests of humanity."
China Information, 2018
In post-Mao China, a group of Chinese intellectuals who formed what became the
New Left (新左派) so... more In post-Mao China, a group of Chinese intellectuals who formed what became the
New Left (新左派) sought to renew socialism in China in a context of globalization
and the rise of social inequalities they associated with neo-liberalism. As they saw it,
China’s market reform and opening to the world had not brought greater equality and
prosperity for all Chinese citizens. As part of China Information’s research dialogue on
the intellectual public sphere in China, this article provides a historical survey of the
development of the contemporary Chinese New Left, exploring the range of ideas
that characterized this intellectual movement. It takes as its focus four of the most
prominent New Left figures and their positions in the ongoing debate about China’s
future: Wang Shaoguang, Cui Zhiyuan, Wang Hui, and Gan Yang.
Canadian Review of Sociology / Revue Canadienne de Sociologie, Feb 14, 2018
Amid growing numbers of doctoral graduates entering an increasingly competitive global academic j... more Amid growing numbers of doctoral graduates entering an increasingly competitive global academic job market, concerns about equity in the hiring process and the value of the Canadian Ph.D. are mounting. Grounded within the historical context of the Canadianization Movement, we examine the doctoral credentials of 4,934 U15 social science faculty between 1977 and 2017 to understand the ebb and flow of incoming and outgoing faculty across the country's academic field. Our trend analyses reveal an overall increase in the proportion of Canadian-trained faculty hires with the noted exceptions of Canada's top three universities who display a strong presence of high-status American-trained faculty throughout. Results from the contemporary period, between 1997 and 2017, reveal a time of retirement during which outgoing Canadian-trained faculty are replaced with increasing proportions of American-trained academics.
Short sociologically-inclined biographical mapping of Shen Yuan's intellectual trajectory in Mao ... more Short sociologically-inclined biographical mapping of Shen Yuan's intellectual trajectory in Mao and Post-Mao China
Manuscript Drafts by François Lachapelle
![Research paper thumbnail of subfield.lab [Link-Cov-P] database: a daily updated and comprehensive linkage of data sources on Covid-19 research with extensive meta-data information](https://a.academia-assets.com/images/blank-paper.jpg)
[https://github.com/lanbufan/subFIELD.lab-Covid-19-pub-database]
Our goal is to provide (1) an ... more [https://github.com/lanbufan/subFIELD.lab-Covid-19-pub-database]
Our goal is to provide (1) an up-to-date and (2) comprehensive bibliometric database on covid-19 publications with daily updates [5, 391 cases as of today]. We consolidate and link Covid-19 related publications from more than four authoritative sources. In other words, our database is building on a number of ongoing and important projects; World Health Organization's Global research on coronavirus disease (COVID-19), LitCovid and CORD-19.
At this point of the project, the process of automating the pipeline and data linking of those sources into one data frame is mostly done. But there is a lot of exciting work ahead if you are interested to join us. We envision this project as an open-source and collaborative project. The most pressing tasks to undertake are:
a. Building data pipelines to automate harvesting and parsing of publication full text [pdf] as this is the best sources of meta-data points [citations/references, names, inst. affiliations].
b. Building the first ever [to my knowledge], daily citations tracking of academic works. Covid-19 research is pumping literally 100s of publications daily, and therefore, traditional yearly citations tracking approaches are not suitable. I expand in details on that task in both the to-do.txt/page and methodology.txt/page.
Many voices across the Canadian academic field are raising concerns about the perceived ongoing r... more Many voices across the Canadian academic field are raising concerns about the perceived ongoing re-Americanization of Canadian professoriate’s national PhD origin while others suggest such forces only affect the country’s largest research-intensive universities (Wilkinson et al. 2013). As the narrative suggest, this current wave of internationalization comes after a period of committed Canadianization between the mid-1970s and the late-1990s. Using the largest dataset detailing the academic trajectories of 4,934 U15 social science faculty between 1977 and 2017, this paper examines the Canadianization Movement as a case-study of scientific inequalities and institutional stratification in the country’s academic field. For the 1977-1997 period, findings indicate that all U15 schools recorded a domestication of their faculty’s doctoral degree with the noted exception of Canada’s top-three schools. Results from the 1997-2017 period, on the other hand, indicates school’s field-positionality and the retirement wave helps explain the differential occurrence of de-Canadianization and re-Americanization trends. Canadian universities actively committed to “global” aspirations show trends of de-Canadianization and re-Americanization of their faculty’s doctoral credentials.
Canadian higher education’s literature oscillates between two radically different narratives to d... more Canadian higher education’s literature oscillates between two radically different narratives to depict the field. On the one hand, the concept of institutional flatness depicts the academic environment north of the U.S. border as encouraging “egalitarianism over hierarchy” (Siler and McLaughlin, 2008: 108, Davies and Hammack, 2005; Davies and Zarifa 2006), and as “a flat system devoid of strong elites in a discipline” (Siler & McLaughlin 2008: 96). While on the other hand, the concept of emergent educational stratification describes the field as increasingly marked by inequalities and closure (Guppy, Grabb & Mollica 2013). Largely supporting the latter, this paper builds on core/periphery scholarship (Schott 1993; Connell 2001, 2007) to put forth a new conceptual framework that better articulates the stratified position occupied by Canada’s U15 schools in the global field of educational-scientific activities. I argue that the concept of global semi-core is what best captures Canada’s top three schools’ doctoral networking practices—Toronto, UBC, and McGill—as these schools actively participate in the global scientific field’s Anglo-American dominance. The remaining U15 English-speaking schools occupy the local semi-core—Alberta, McMaster, Queen’s, Waterloo, and Western—and local semi-periphery—Calgary, Dalhousie, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. Since the late 1970s, these universities contribute the most to the development of a strong form of counter-core localization. Drawing upon the largest dataset on the educational background of Canada’s U15 universities social scientific professoriate between 1978 and 2015 (9,777 hand-cured cases), I provide the first longitudinal study on the Canadianization movement, one of the defining moments in the short history of social sciences in Canada.
Media Piece by François Lachapelle
M.A. Thesis by François Lachapelle
The study of intellectuals constitutes a vibrant intersection of political sociology, sociology o... more The study of intellectuals constitutes a vibrant intersection of political sociology, sociology of knowledge, sociology of intellectual life, and sociological theory. Influential scholars such as Karl Mannheim, Zygmunt Bauman, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel Foucault have enriched the social-historical understanding of intellectuals in modern societies; and more recently, the New Sociology of Ideas (NSI) has extended this endeavour with studies of social scientists and humanities scholars in Western countries. This thesis, however, documenting the intellectual trajectory of Shen Yuan (沈原, b. 1954) since the 1960s, is the first empirical study of a Chinese social scientist as a public intellectual produce within the sub-field of the NSI. It explains how Shen negotiated an authoritarian regime to become a public intellectual. In order to
explore such a process, this study demonstrates the importance of attending to the way Shen sees and defines himself as an intellectual. Following Gross’s theory of Intellectual Self-Concept, the research shows that the key to understanding the making of Shen as a public intellectual is to study the Chinese sociologist’s changing intellectual identity, from problematic Marxist during
the 1980s and 1990s to public sociology after 2000. To trace Shen’s intellectual trajectory, this research utilized original interviews with Shen Yuan and several of his students in Beijing, and primary sources including Shen’s publications. While employing various interpretative tools, including Gross’s intellectual self-concept, Bourdieu’s field and habitus, and Watson’s dual concepts of orthopraxy and orthodoxy, the research makes two conceptual contributions to the
sociology of intellectual life: both archived identity and conceptual literacy hone an analytical understanding of the development and work of public intellectuals.
Papers by François Lachapelle
ABSTRACTA critical part of science is the extraction of general principles by synthesizing result... more ABSTRACTA critical part of science is the extraction of general principles by synthesizing results from many different studies or disciplines. In the fields of ecology and evolution, a popular method to conduct synthesis science is in working groups – that is, research collaborations based around intensive week-long meetings. We present in this report an analysis of the impact of working group participation and gender on the publication impact of ecology and evolution faculty at Canadian universities who were research active over the last three decades (N=1408). Women are underrepresented in this research population relative to the general population, and even the Canadian faculty population. Participation in working groups not only benefits science, but also benefits the researchers involved by accelerating the temporal increase in their H-index. However, this benefit is particularly driven by senior male researchers. The effect is weaker for female researchers and even negative fo...
ContextAs the COVID-19 pandemic persists around the world, the scientific community continues to ... more ContextAs the COVID-19 pandemic persists around the world, the scientific community continues to produce and circulate knowledge on the deadly disease at an unprecedented rate. During the early stage of the pandemic, preprints represented nearly 40% of all English-language COVID-19 scientific corpus (6, 000+ preprints | 16, 000+ articles). As of mid-August 2020, that proportion dropped to around 28% (13, 000+ preprints | 49, 000+ articles). Nevertheless, preprint servers remain a key engine in the efficient dissemination of scientific work on this infectious disease. But, giving the ‘uncertified’ nature of the scientific manuscripts curated on preprint repositories, their integration to the global ecosystem of scientific communication is not without creating serious tensions. This is especially the case for biomedical knowledge since the dissemination of bad science can have widespread societal consequences.ScopeIn this paper, I propose a robust method that will allow the repeated m...
Canadian review of sociology = Revue canadienne de sociologie, 2018
Amid growing numbers of doctoral graduates entering an increasingly competitive global academic j... more Amid growing numbers of doctoral graduates entering an increasingly competitive global academic job market, concerns about equity in the hiring process and the value of the Canadian Ph.D. are mounting. Grounded within the historical context of the Canadianization Movement, we examine the doctoral credentials of 4,934 U15 social science faculty between 1977 and 2017 to understand the ebb and flow of incoming and outgoing faculty across the country's academic field. Our trend analyses reveal an overall increase in the proportion of Canadian-trained faculty hires with the noted exceptions of Canada's top three universities who display a strong presence of high-status American-trained faculty throughout. Results from the contemporary period, between 1997 and 2017, reveal a time of retirement during which outgoing Canadian-trained faculty are replaced with increasing proportions of American-trained academics.
China Information, 2018
In post-Mao China, a group of Chinese intellectuals who formed what became the New Left (新左派) sou... more In post-Mao China, a group of Chinese intellectuals who formed what became the New Left (新左派) sought to renew socialism in China in a context of globalization and the rise of social inequalities they associated with neo-liberalism. As they saw it, China’s market reform and opening to the world had not brought greater equality and prosperity for all Chinese citizens. As part of China Information’s research dialogue on the intellectual public sphere in China, this article provides a historical survey of the development of the contemporary Chinese New Left, exploring the range of ideas that characterized this intellectual movement. It takes as its focus four of the most prominent New Left figures and their positions in the ongoing debate about China’s future: Wang Shaoguang, Cui Zhiyuan, Wang Hui, and Gan Yang.
China Information, 2018
In post-Mao China, a group of Chinese intellectuals who formed what became the New Left (新左派) sou... more In post-Mao China, a group of Chinese intellectuals who formed what became the New Left (新左派) sought to renew socialism in China in a context of globalization and the rise of social inequalities they associated with neo-liberalism. As they saw it, China's market reform and opening to the world had not brought greater equality and prosperity for all Chinese citizens. As part of
Drafts by François Lachapelle
medRxiv, 2020
Context: As the COVID-19 pandemic persists around the world, the scientific community continues t... more Context: As the COVID-19 pandemic persists around the world, the scientific community continues to produce and circulate knowledge on the deadly disease at an unprecedented rate. During the early stage of the pandemic, preprints represented nearly 40% of all English-language COVID-19 scientific corpus (6, 000+ preprints | 16, 000+ articles). As of mid-August 2020, that proportion dropped to around 28% (13, 000+ preprints | 49, 000+ articles). Nevertheless, preprint servers remain a key engine in the efficient dissemination of scientific work on this infectious disease. But, giving the 'uncertified' nature of the scientific manuscripts curated on preprint repositories, their integration to the global ecosystem of scientific communication is not without creating serious tensions. This is especially the case for biomedical knowledge since the dissemination of bad science can have widespread societal consequences. Scope: In this paper, I propose a robust method that will allow the repeated monitoring and measuring of COVID-19 preprint's publication rate. I also introduce a new API called Upload-or-Perish. It is a micro-API service that enables a client to query a specific preprint manuscript's publication status and associated meta-data using a unique ID. This tool is in active development. Methods: I utilize conditional fuzzy logic on article titles to determine if a preprint has a published counterpart version in the database. My approach is an important departure from previous studies that rely exclusively on bioRxiv API to ascertain preprints' publication status. This is problematic since the level of false positives in bioRxiv metadata could be as high as 37%. Findings: My analysis reveals that around 15% of COVID-19 preprint manuscripts in CORD-19 dataset that were uploaded on from arXiv, bioRxiv, and medRxiv between January and early August 2020 were published in a peer-reviewed venue. When compared to the most recent measure available, this represents a twofold increase in a period of two months. My discussion review and theorize on the potential explanations for COVID-19 preprints' low conversion rate. 2
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Peer-Reviewed Article by François Lachapelle
New Left (新左派) sought to renew socialism in China in a context of globalization
and the rise of social inequalities they associated with neo-liberalism. As they saw it,
China’s market reform and opening to the world had not brought greater equality and
prosperity for all Chinese citizens. As part of China Information’s research dialogue on
the intellectual public sphere in China, this article provides a historical survey of the
development of the contemporary Chinese New Left, exploring the range of ideas
that characterized this intellectual movement. It takes as its focus four of the most
prominent New Left figures and their positions in the ongoing debate about China’s
future: Wang Shaoguang, Cui Zhiyuan, Wang Hui, and Gan Yang.
Manuscript Drafts by François Lachapelle
Our goal is to provide (1) an up-to-date and (2) comprehensive bibliometric database on covid-19 publications with daily updates [5, 391 cases as of today]. We consolidate and link Covid-19 related publications from more than four authoritative sources. In other words, our database is building on a number of ongoing and important projects; World Health Organization's Global research on coronavirus disease (COVID-19), LitCovid and CORD-19.
At this point of the project, the process of automating the pipeline and data linking of those sources into one data frame is mostly done. But there is a lot of exciting work ahead if you are interested to join us. We envision this project as an open-source and collaborative project. The most pressing tasks to undertake are:
a. Building data pipelines to automate harvesting and parsing of publication full text [pdf] as this is the best sources of meta-data points [citations/references, names, inst. affiliations].
b. Building the first ever [to my knowledge], daily citations tracking of academic works. Covid-19 research is pumping literally 100s of publications daily, and therefore, traditional yearly citations tracking approaches are not suitable. I expand in details on that task in both the to-do.txt/page and methodology.txt/page.
Media Piece by François Lachapelle
M.A. Thesis by François Lachapelle
explore such a process, this study demonstrates the importance of attending to the way Shen sees and defines himself as an intellectual. Following Gross’s theory of Intellectual Self-Concept, the research shows that the key to understanding the making of Shen as a public intellectual is to study the Chinese sociologist’s changing intellectual identity, from problematic Marxist during
the 1980s and 1990s to public sociology after 2000. To trace Shen’s intellectual trajectory, this research utilized original interviews with Shen Yuan and several of his students in Beijing, and primary sources including Shen’s publications. While employing various interpretative tools, including Gross’s intellectual self-concept, Bourdieu’s field and habitus, and Watson’s dual concepts of orthopraxy and orthodoxy, the research makes two conceptual contributions to the
sociology of intellectual life: both archived identity and conceptual literacy hone an analytical understanding of the development and work of public intellectuals.
Papers by François Lachapelle
Drafts by François Lachapelle
New Left (新左派) sought to renew socialism in China in a context of globalization
and the rise of social inequalities they associated with neo-liberalism. As they saw it,
China’s market reform and opening to the world had not brought greater equality and
prosperity for all Chinese citizens. As part of China Information’s research dialogue on
the intellectual public sphere in China, this article provides a historical survey of the
development of the contemporary Chinese New Left, exploring the range of ideas
that characterized this intellectual movement. It takes as its focus four of the most
prominent New Left figures and their positions in the ongoing debate about China’s
future: Wang Shaoguang, Cui Zhiyuan, Wang Hui, and Gan Yang.
Our goal is to provide (1) an up-to-date and (2) comprehensive bibliometric database on covid-19 publications with daily updates [5, 391 cases as of today]. We consolidate and link Covid-19 related publications from more than four authoritative sources. In other words, our database is building on a number of ongoing and important projects; World Health Organization's Global research on coronavirus disease (COVID-19), LitCovid and CORD-19.
At this point of the project, the process of automating the pipeline and data linking of those sources into one data frame is mostly done. But there is a lot of exciting work ahead if you are interested to join us. We envision this project as an open-source and collaborative project. The most pressing tasks to undertake are:
a. Building data pipelines to automate harvesting and parsing of publication full text [pdf] as this is the best sources of meta-data points [citations/references, names, inst. affiliations].
b. Building the first ever [to my knowledge], daily citations tracking of academic works. Covid-19 research is pumping literally 100s of publications daily, and therefore, traditional yearly citations tracking approaches are not suitable. I expand in details on that task in both the to-do.txt/page and methodology.txt/page.
explore such a process, this study demonstrates the importance of attending to the way Shen sees and defines himself as an intellectual. Following Gross’s theory of Intellectual Self-Concept, the research shows that the key to understanding the making of Shen as a public intellectual is to study the Chinese sociologist’s changing intellectual identity, from problematic Marxist during
the 1980s and 1990s to public sociology after 2000. To trace Shen’s intellectual trajectory, this research utilized original interviews with Shen Yuan and several of his students in Beijing, and primary sources including Shen’s publications. While employing various interpretative tools, including Gross’s intellectual self-concept, Bourdieu’s field and habitus, and Watson’s dual concepts of orthopraxy and orthodoxy, the research makes two conceptual contributions to the
sociology of intellectual life: both archived identity and conceptual literacy hone an analytical understanding of the development and work of public intellectuals.