Journal Title: AIDS research/AIDS policy . competing paradigms of science and public policy/
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As universities have increasingly adopted corporate management models, the landscape of higher education has undergone a fundamental transformation. In this article, Eric Margolis and Michael Soldatenko examine how the “capitalist turn” in academia has reshaped research priorities, labor conditions, and the very purpose of the university.
Drawing on their own decades of experience within the academy, the authors reflect on how market logic has penetrated teaching, tenure, and institutional governance — turning students into consumers, faculty into contingent workers, and knowledge into a commodity. The article combines personal narrative with structural analysis to chart these changes and their consequences for academic freedom and intellectual life.
Contributed to The Sage Handbook of Visual Research Methods, this chapter by Eric Margolis and Renu Zunjarwad provides a comprehensive overview of visual research as a methodological approach in the social sciences. The authors survey the diverse ways researchers use photographs, film, video, and digital media as tools for data collection, analysis, and representation.
The chapter traces the development of visual research from its origins in early anthropological photography through the emergence of visual sociology, participatory visual methods, and contemporary digital approaches. Margolis and Zunjarwad examine the theoretical frameworks that inform different visual methodologies — from positivist approaches that treat images as objective records to interpretive and critical perspectives that foreground the constructed nature of all visual representation.
Particular attention is given to the ethical dimensions of visual research, including questions of consent, representation, and power that arise when researchers create, collect, or analyze images of other people. The authors argue that visual methods are not simply techniques to be applied but ways of seeing that carry epistemological and political commitments.
This chapter serves as both an introduction for newcomers to visual research and a synthesis of current debates for experienced practitioners.
In this personal and reflective essay, Eric Margolis traces the evolution of his thinking about the hidden curriculum in higher education — the unwritten rules, unstated expectations, and invisible structures that shape academic life as powerfully as any formal syllabus. Writing from the vantage point of decades in the academy, Margolis recounts how his own experiences as a student, professor, and researcher gradually revealed the hidden lessons embedded in everyday institutional practices.
The essay moves between memoir and analysis, connecting personal episodes — a dissertation committee’s unspoken expectations, a department’s informal power dynamics, the spatial politics of a faculty meeting — to broader patterns of how universities transmit ideology, reproduce social hierarchies, and resist change.
In the coalfields of the American West, radical labor unions waged some of the most intense and consequential struggles in American history. The Greater Evil examines how organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World (the “Wobblies”) and the United Mine Workers challenged the system of industrial feudalism that kept mining families in conditions of virtual serfdom.
Eric Margolis and Mary Romero analyze the strategies, conflicts, and ultimate outcomes of these labor struggles, arguing that the radical unions — despite being crushed by a combination of corporate power, state violence, and internal divisions — played a decisive role in ending the most extreme forms of industrial exploitation in the western coalfields.
Published in Research in Social Policy, this article connects the history of western mining to broader questions about class conflict, state power, and the possibilities and limits of radical labor organizing in America.
This special issue of the Journal of the West features Eric Margolis’s photographic research documenting Colorado coal mining communities. The issue presents a visual history of mining towns, working conditions, and the people who lived and labored in the western coal fields.