Lyon Blog

I’ve been blogging off and on for a long time– well before the handy term ‘blog’ showed up! In the late 1990s, I maintained Weekly Updates from the Field while I was conducting my doctoral field research. Since then, I’ve toyed with various blogging sites, but never managed the regularity that a blog requires. I probably still won’t manage to keep up a very consistent or frequent pace, but there are things that I think we all want to communicate that don’t fit in our peer reviewed articles and books.

This space is an attempt to engage in a different kind of communication. I want to touch on topics that may not fit neatly within any of the subjects that I could get published in a peer reviewed journal or book. Of course, this means that it’s going to be less reliable. Like all scholars, I make mistakes. And probably like most scholars, I have an inflated sense of the importance of my own opinions. Because I am a well established expert on some topics, I can occasionally find myself assuming I must be an expert on all topics. That clearly isn’t true. Peer review has its flaws, but one thing it does very well, is remind those of us who believe we know a lot about a subject, that we don’t know everything about any subject and there are some subjects that we really don’t know more than the average human.

So this is space to share some personal reflections and opinions. I will make reference to credible and reliable evidence, but to be sure, anyone who is interested should absolutely go to the peer reviewed journal or book in which the evidence was published. It has always been important to make decisions based on the best available evidence. I’m tempted to say that is more true now than it has ever been, but I have a feeling that I’ve just been lucky and that there have been other times and places where the consequences of bad decisions were just as potentially catastrophic for the people involved as our own bad decisions are for us today.