The working group on climate change seeks to make the study of climate change a distinct and recognized area of study in the social sciences. Its steering committee convened to discuss several meetings and events of the past year, as well as new initiatives.
The Social Science Research Council was pleased to convene a group of seventeen esteemed scholars who have been working in ways that might be identified as Anticipatory Social Research (ASR). This group will begin the work of defining ASR, identifying potential sites for ASR inside and outside the academy, and ascertaining examples of emerging phenomena that may be opaque to existing methodologies and in need of a more anticipatory approach. Attendees Crystal Abidin Simone Browne Courtney Cogburn Kate Crawford Jen Croissant Carl DiSalvo Gary Downey Virginia Eubanks* Marion Fourcade David Custon Ava Kofman Andrew Lakoff Bill Maurer Shobita Parthasarathy …
Nairobi, Kenya – Fellows from the Social Science Research Council’s (SSRC) Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa (Next Gen) program gathered in Nairobi, Kenya, during the second week of January for the 14th bi-annual fellows workshop. The event was held in partnership with United States International University-Africa (USIU-Africa), and in collaboration with the SSRC’s African Peacebuilding Network (APN) program, which held its grantees workshop from January 9-11, 2019. 28 doctoral dissertation proposal development and research fellows from eight African countries were joined by five dynamic workshop facilitators and convened in Nairobi for the three-day event. The workshop was designed to help …
Earlier this month, program staff from SSRC’s Scholarly Borderlands initiative attended the Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society in Phoenix, where they hosted a series of panels entitled “The Other Uncertainty: Social, Political, and Cultural Forms of Uncertainty in Weather Contexts.” These multidisciplinary panels aimed to bring deeper understanding of the complex social aspects of uncertainty into conversation with a field that is primarily focused on eliminating uncertainty from probabilistic forecasting models. Invited speakers from across the social sciences spoke to the myriad sources of individual, social, and cultural ambiguity that emerge, interact, operate, and propagate throughout the life …
Measure of America and the Nonprofit Coordinating Committee of New York present DATA2GOHEALTH.NYC in the webinar "Unlocking Potential: New Health-Related Data for Decision Making & Community Well-Being."
The “Political Institutions and Challenges to Democracy: America in Comparative Perspective” conference, co-organized by the Social Science Research Council’s Anxieties of Democracy program and Stanford University’s Global Populisms project, brought together scholars of comparative and American politics to present research on the role of parties, the legislature, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, and other institutions in moments that challenge democracy. The conference was held in New York City January 31-February 1, 2019. Questions addressed at the conference included: • What role, if any, do democratic institutions play in enabling or exacerbating the growth of antisystem sentiment and/or populist appeals? How do the responses of mainstream parties and politicians affect …
The “Political Institutions and Challenges to Democracy: America in Comparative Perspective” conference, co-organized by the Social Science Research Council’s Anxieties of Democracy program and Stanford University’s Global Populisms project, brought together scholars of comparative and American politics to present research on the role of parties, the legislature, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, and other institutions in moments that challenge democracy. The conference was held in New York City January 31-February 1, 2019. Questions addressed at the conference included: • What role, if any, do democratic institutions play in enabling or exacerbating the growth of antisystem sentiment and/or populist appeals? How do the responses of mainstream parties and politicians affect …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xErFnyjMAA About the Lecture Long before there were computers or even reliable calculating machines, there were algorithms, recipes, and other rigid rules. But for just as long, stretching back to ancient Greece and Rome and continuing through the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, the rule-as-algorithm coexisted peacefully and fruitfully with another idea of a rule: the rule-as-pattern. For us, who live in the age of algorithms, this centuries-long cohabitation between the most rigid of rules—the algorithm to be followed to the letter—and the most supple of rules—the pattern or model to be imitated but not slavishly copied—seems paradoxical. Lorraine Daston’s …
Identity, Community, and Political Participation was a two-day research design workshop that took place at Social Science Research Council headquarters in Brooklyn, New York on February 7 and 8, 2019. The workshop convened primarily younger scholars to develop in-progress or planned research projects on how political participation is fundamentally shaped by individual identity and/or community membership (and vice versa). The workshop was organized from an open call for proposals from the Anxieties of Democracy program's Identity, Community, and Participation working group, whose members provided feedback and commentary on research design presentations. Working group member Adam Seth Levine also presented on how to build …
Immigration: The Politics of Inclusion and the Politics of Threat was a one-day research workshop that took place at Social Science Research Council headquarters in Brooklyn, New York on March 29, 2019. The workshop gathered scholars to address the politics of immigration, with a particular focus on how and why Latin American immigration is politicized (sometimes as virtue and increasingly as threat) in the United States in the contemporary period. Scholars were organized into panels on three themes: Parties, Voter Linkages, and Immigration Politics; Framing Immigrants; and Policies of the State. Panels and Participants Parties, Voter Linkages, and Immigration Politics What …
https://www.wiltonpark.org.uk/event/wp1676/ Wilton Park, in collaboration with the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the African Leadership Centre (ALC), organized and hosted a conference on “Next generation African peacebuilding: new voices, new networks and new strategies” in Steyning, England, from April 10-12, 2019. The three-day conference was supported by Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY). This conference is the fifth in an annual series on peacebuilding in Africa that started in 2015. Previous events assessed the changing dynamics of conflict and other evolving challenges, the ways in which African peacebuilding actors have been responding to these challenges, how to sustain civil …
If you consult recent headlines, the news media is in crisis, and the problems are manifold: disruptive changes to media technology, the spread of misleading news, and anonymous harassment of public figures are causing serious concerns about the quality and trajectory of our democracy and the place of the news media in it. At the same time, these phenomena are not new; disruptions, falsehoods, and harassment have been topics of public concern at various moments throughout the history of media and democracy. How does the current moment, dominated by concerns over the rise of social media, the prevalence of online …
