TOK situations in the human sciences
Systematic study of human behaviour and social life, where the objects of study are aware of being studied and can change in response. This makes measurement, replication and the isolation of variables harder here than in the natural sciences, without making them impossible.
- East Asia
Recognised as indigenous, at last
Japan legally recognised the Ainu as indigenous only in 2019, after generations of assimilation policy that had suppressed language and practice while…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- India
Counting Bhopal's victims
Official, judicial and activist counts of deaths from the 1984 gas leak differ by tens of thousands, diverging on time windows, causation standards and whose…
Enduring · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Power
- Evidence
- Responsibility
- South Asia
Measuring national happiness
Bhutan reports Gross National Happiness through surveys spanning psychological wellbeing, culture and ecology, making a value system into an official…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Values
- Culture
- East Asia
Simplifying the characters
Mainland China's simplified characters raised literacy while severing visual links to older texts that Taiwan and Hong Kong retain, so the same classical…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- India
What the Chipko villagers knew
In the 1970s, Himalayan villagers, many of them women, embraced trees to stop commercial felling, arguing the forests' real yield was soil, water and air…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Values
- Culture
- India
Demonetisation and the missing counterfactual
India's 2016 note ban was declared a success and a failure by credentialled economists looking at the same aftermath. With no parallel India that kept its…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Evidence
- Values
- Southeast Asia
Counting the drug war
Government figures and independent tallies of deaths in the Philippine drug war differed by tens of thousands, depending on which killings were classified as…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Evidence
- India
The night the exit polls were wrong
Ahead of India's 2024 general election results, exit polls converged on a sweeping majority for the incumbent alliance; the counted votes delivered something…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Evidence
- Certainty
- India
Rewriting yesterday's growth rate
When India moved to a new GDP methodology, recalculated back-series produced growth figures for earlier governments that differed sharply from the numbers…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Objectivity
- Global
The economy that does not count the household
National accounts exclude most unpaid household and care work by definitional choice, leaving activity that sustains every economy outside its headline…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Values
- Objectivity
- South Asia
Does microcredit work? Ask which study
Microcredit spread from Bangladesh on powerful anecdotes of transformation; later randomised trials found modest average effects and few of the promised…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Evidence
- Certainty
- India
The Green Revolution's two ledgers
High-yield wheat varieties helped end famine-scale scarcity in India, and decades later the same programme is cited for depleted aquifers, soil damage and…
Enduring · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Values
- Latin America
The inflation statistic nobody believed
After Argentina's government intervened in its statistics institute in 2007, official inflation ran far below every independent estimate for years, private…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Objectivity
- India
When a region goes offline
India records among the world's highest counts of regional internet shutdowns, imposed on public-order grounds. During each one, journalism, schooling,…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Global
The map that inflated the north
The Mercator projection, ideal for navigation, wildly inflates land near the poles, so generations of classroom maps showed Greenland rivalling Africa, which…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Perspective
- Interpretation
- Africa
The economy that grew 89 percent overnight
In 2014 Nigeria rebased its GDP calculation to include sectors like Nollywood and telecoms that the old 1990 framework barely saw, and the economy became…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Certainty
- Objectivity
- Global
The textbook findings that would not repeat
Large replication projects in psychology found that many celebrated effects shrank or vanished on rerun, implicating flexible analysis, publication bias and…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Justification
- Certainty
- India
The right to ask the state what it knows
India's Right to Information Act lets any citizen demand documents from public authorities, and activists have used it to surface everything from ration fraud…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Responsibility
- South Asia
A nationwide experiment with no pilot
In 2021 Sri Lanka banned synthetic fertiliser imports almost overnight, aiming for fully organic agriculture; harvests collapsed and the decision was reversed…
Enduring · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Responsibility
- Southeast Asia
Thirteen lives and competing expertise
The 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue forced a live arbitration between cave divers, military planners, medics and engineers whose recommendations conflicted, under…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Evidence
- Responsibility
- Africa
A person is a person through other persons
Ubuntu, articulated across southern African thought, treats personhood and understanding as constituted through relations with others rather than achieved…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Perspective
- Culture
- Southeast Asia
When the platform is the public square
In several Southeast Asian countries, a single social platform effectively is the internet for much of the population, and investigations after episodes of…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Evidence
- Responsibility
- India
A billion identities in one database
Aadhaar links welfare, banking and identity to biometric records for over a billion people, and when a fingerprint fails to match or a record misfires, the…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Responsibility
- India
Ayurveda meets the randomised trial
India funds research ministries for both biomedicine and traditional systems like Ayurveda, and disputes recur over whether centuries of documented clinical…
Current · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Culture
- India
Counting caste for the first time since 1931
India's 2027 census, its first fully digital one, will enumerate caste across all communities for the first time in nearly a century. Every design choice,…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Interpretation
- Global
Ninety seconds to midnight
The Doomsday Clock compresses expert judgment about nuclear and climate risk into a single metaphorical time, set each year by a board and reported worldwide.…
Current · The human sciences
- Interpretation
- Responsibility
- Global
The crash test body was a man
Vehicle safety testing standardised for decades on dummies modelled on an average male body, and injury statistics show women faring worse in comparable…
Current · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Values
- Objectivity
- East Asia
A national border for information
China's filtering infrastructure produces an internet where searches, encyclopedias and archives return different results than elsewhere, and a generation has…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- India
Mapping rights onto a forest
India's Forest Rights Act asks communities to document customary use of land their ancestors never surveyed, converting remembered practice into GPS points and…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- East Asia
The exam that defines what counts
China's gaokao channels millions of students' entire schooling toward one sitting, and whatever the exam rewards, memorisation, speed, model essays, becomes…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Values
- The Middle East and North Africa
Measuring heat where people must work
Gulf states ban outdoor work during set summer hours, defined by clock and calendar rather than by measured heat stress on given sites, while researchers argue…
Current · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Responsibility
- Global
Languages the machines skip
Machine translation is strong between data-rich languages and weak or absent for thousands of others, so speakers of low-resource languages get worse search,…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- Global
The pirate library of science
Sci-Hub, built by a Kazakhstani graduate student, serves paywalled research papers free and is heavily used in countries whose universities cannot afford…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Responsibility
- Global
The encyclopedia's uneven world
Wikipedia's English edition dwarfs most others, and topics rich in one language sit as stubs or absences in another, so the same person consulting the same…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture