Search results for ""Social Science Research Council""

Rachel Dorothy Tanur (1958-2002) wasn't trained as a social scientist, but she cared deeply about people and their lives and was an acute observer of living conditions and interactions. Her profound empathy for others and her commitment to helping those less fortunate than herself accompanied her on her travels and often guided her photography. She delighted in capturing the interaction between people and the artifacts they created and used, which, of course, are the raw materials of social science. In 1999 Tanur was diagnosed with cancer, and in response, she made several trips to Cuba, South and Central America, Africa, and Europe, as well as across the United States, before her death at the age of 43. The following year, Tanur's family and friends organized a memorial exhibit at Gilda's Club in New York called Cancer Journeys. The Social Science Research Council then opened its space for second show entitled Photographic Journeys. When Nikita Pokrovsky of Moscow's State University-Higher School of Economics experienced the SSRC exhibit, he was struck by the "human passion and compassion" of Tanur's work. He suggested combining the photographs with commentary, transforming the photos into useful tools for visual social science. These commentaries, written by an international group of social scientists, now accompany close to fifty of Rachel's photographs, and together the exhibit made its debut at the National Science Foundation in their Art of Science's 2006 show, Visualizing Social Science. This volume is an extension of that exhibition.

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For the past twenty years, international donors have invested heavily in large-scale disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programs, while, at the same time, transitional justice measures have proliferated, bringing truth, justice, and reparations to those recovering from state violence and civil war. Yet DDR programs are seldom deconstructed to discover whether they truly achieve their justice-related aims. Additionally, transitional justice mechanisms rarely articulate strategies for coordinating with DDR. Disarming the Past examines the connections--and failures--between these two initiatives within peacebuilding contexts and evaluates future links between DDR programs and the aims of transitional justice. The outcome of a substantial research project initiated by the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), this book is crucial for anyone interested in effective interventions and enduring outcomes.

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After periods of conflict and authoritarianism, educational institutions often need to be reformed or rebuilt. But in settings where education has been used to support repressive policies and human rights violations, or where conflict and abuses have resulted in lost educational opportunities, legacies of injustice may pose significant challenges to effective reform. Peacebuilding and development perspectives, which normally drive the reconstruction agenda, pay little attention to the violent past. Transitional Justice and Education: Learning Peace presents the findings of a research project of the International Center for Transitional Justice on the relationship between transitional justice and education in peacebuilding contexts. The book examines how transitional justice can shape the reform of education systems by ensuring programs are sensitive to the legacies of the past, how it can facilitate the reintegration of children and youth into society, and how education can engage younger generations in the work of transitional justice.

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Arguing that excluded and marginalized social groups should benefit from the growth of international higher education, Origins, Journeys and Returns reports on the development and impact of the Ford Foundation International Fellowships Program (IFP) which is designed to further social justice in some of the world's poorest, most populous, and most unequal countries. Extending opportunities for advanced education to individuals from marginalized communities has a significant impact that transcends individual beneficiaries. In 2001, the Ford Foundation began to dedicate substantial resources toward providing disadvantaged groups with postgraduate education, a process that gave hope to many. Fellows' academic success challenged presumptions about the disadvantaged and their ability to benefit from educational opportunities in prestigious international universities. Alumni have also exhibited a deep dedication to their communities, proving there is a collective return on investing in individuals. In some regions, IFP practices have modified institutional practices in universities and other fellowship programs. Through case studies of seven countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Origins, Journeys and Returns shows how nuanced approaches to defining the disadvantaged, along with flexible, local implementation of global program goals can actually counter "brain drain" and empower individuals to effect social change at home.

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Though it is rarely explicitly articulated, many believe that there is no "public" in the Middle East. Scholarship on the Middle East and North Africa almost always engages with politics-a prominent focus of this region-yet the assumed absence of public spaces and fora has led many to think that debate, consensus, and concerted social action are antithetical to the cultural, religious, and national heritage of the region. It is a mistake to exclude the public dimension from the study of processes in this region. Recent studies have demonstrated not only the critical importance of the public in everyday practices of the MENA region, but they have also shown how the term and notion of the public sphere can be used productively to advance understandings of collective life. The first section of this volume offers alternative conceptions of the public sphere through rich and innovative theoretical analysis. Philosophical investigations focus on the role of collective action, the relationship between nationalism and democracy, and the notions of the public employed by socioreligious movements. The second section addresses a wide range of counter-hegemonic discourses and practices that enable the public sphere, such as memoirs, testimonies, strategies of surveillance, the Tehran bazaar, and the movements of migratory workers. The third section provides empirical accounts of the way in which mutual communication through technology has vitally expanded the notion of the public in the MENA region. In conclusion, conflict and resistance are shown to be generative forces in public discourse and debate and in the production of national publics.

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Many believe that economic development is primarily a function of institutions that help societies reap potential gains from interdependent actors. The norms, rules, and organizations that "govern" transactions are meant to resolve the collective action problems at the heart of economic development. Recognition that institutions are key to economic growth and to the distribution of resources is reflected not only in scholarly literature on property rights and public agencies, but also in the advice of development agencies that encourage the construction of pro-market institutions. Yet claims that "institutions matter" begs an important question: Where do "good" institutions (those that facilitate efficient and equitable outcomes) come from and why do they evolve the way they do? Explaining Institutional Innovation explores these issues, adopting the argument that institutional innovation requires "tough times" during which leaders see themselves as highly vulnerable to internal pressures and external threats yet lack the means to address them. Analyzing business associations and states in Latin America, private sector organizations in China, the Office of the Historian of Havana, the Association of Caribbean States, Caribbean universities, and sugar industries in Southeast Asia, the contributors affirm the vulnerability approach by demonstrating how various types of crises precede and stimulate institutional changes. Also, by highlighting the impact of such factors as more proximate political arrangements and structures of elite political competition, contributors suggest further avenues for institutional analyses.

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Transitional justice processes have a fundamental public dimension. Their impact depends in part on the social support they receive. For this reason, transitional justice bodies have increasingly implemented outreach programs. Beyond the role of outreach, however, other initiatives-such as media and cultural interventions-can strengthen, but also in some cases undermine, the public resonance of transitional justice. How can media and art be used to engage society in discussions about accountability and redress? How do media influence social perceptions and attitudes toward the legacy of the past? To what extent is social engagement in the public sphere necessary to advance the political transformation that transitional justice measures try to promote? Examining the roles that society and culture play in transitional justice contexts, the essays in this volume focus on the ways in which communicative practices can raise public awareness of and reflection on the legacies of mass abuse.

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Digital technologies are engines of cultural innovation, from the virtualization of group networks and social identities to the digital convergence of textural and audio-visual media. User-centered content production, from Wikipedia and YouTube to Open Source, has become the emblem of this transformation, but the changes run deeper and wider than these novel organizational forms. Digital culture is also about the transformation of what it means to be a creator within a vast and growing reservoir of media, data, computational power, and communicative possibilities. We have few tools and models for understanding the power of databases, network representations, filtering techniques, digital rights management, and other new architectures of agency and control. We have even fewer accounts of how these new capacities have transformed our shared cultures and our understanding of and capacities to act within them. This volume addresses these issues and supplies the demand for a comprehensive critical framework that places these developments in context.

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As developing societies emerge from legacies of conflict and authoritarianism, they are frequently beset by poverty, inequality, weak institutions, broken infrastructure, poor governance, insecurity, and low levels of social capital. These countries also tend to propagate massive human rights violations, which displace victims who are marginalized, handicapped, widowed, and orphaned--in other words, people with strong claims to justice. Those who work with others to address development and justice often fail to supply a coherent response to these concerns. The essays in this volume confront the intricacies--and interconnectedness--of transitional governance issues head on, mapping the relationship between two fields that, academically and in practice, have grown largely in isolation of one another. The result of a research project conducted by the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), this book explains how justice and recovery can be aligned not only in theory but also in practice, among both people and governments as they reform.

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Transitional justice is often pursued in contexts where people have been forced from their homes by human rights violations and have suffered additional abuses while displaced. Little attention has been paid, however, to how transitional justice measures can respond to the injustices of displacement. Transitional Justice and Displacement is the result of a collaborative research project of the International Center for Transitional Justice and the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement. It examines the capacity of transitional justice measures to address displacement, engage the justice claims of displaced persons, and support durable solutions, and analyzes the links between transitional justice and the interventions of humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding actors. The book makes a compelling case for ensuring that justice measures address displacement and that responses to displacement incorporate transitional justice.

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"Foundations are socially and politically significant, but this simple fact . . . has mostly been ignored by students of American history. . . . This collection represents an important contribution to an emerging field." —Kenneth Prewitt, Social Science Research Council

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Journeys Through Conflict is the story of the Conflict Early Warning Systems (CEWS) project of the International Social Science Research Council. It relates the history of the project, presents its empirically grounded approach to anticipating violent conflict, and shows how the approach may be extended to other social science research arenas. Phase analysis of conflict life cycles, comparative case studies, reconstructed narratives, and policy lessons are hallmarks of this pathbreaking work by an international, interdisciplinary group of expert conflict analysts. Journeys Through Conflict projects alternate pathways to war and peace by a unique coding, graphing, and computational procedure that takes into account both contested conflict histories and future conflict resolutions.

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Solapa: Este volumen forma parte de la serie de libros Memorias de la Represión que pone a disposición del público los resultados de un programa desarrollado por el Panel Regional de América Latina (RAP) del Social Science Research Council, con el propósito de promover la investigación y la formación de investigadores sobre las memorias de la represión política en el Cono Sur. Bajo la dirección de Elizabeth Jelin y Carlos Iván Degregori, y con fondos proporcionados por las fundaciones Ford, Rockefeller y Hewlett, el programa apoyó a cerca de 60 investigadores jóvenes de Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Paraguay, Perú, Uruguay y los Estados Unidos. El programa fue diseñado para encarar tres cuestiones diferentes, aunque relacionadas entre sí. La primera es la necesidad de generar avances teóricos y de investigación que contribuyan a enriquecer los debates sobre la naturaleza de las memorias en la región, sobre su rol en la constitución de identidades colectivas y sobre las consecuencias

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Following World War II the American government and philanthropic foundations fundamentally remade American universities into sites for producing knowledge about the world as a collection of distinct nation-states. As neoliberal reforms took hold in the 1980s, visions of the world made popular within area studies and international studies found themselves challenged by ideas and educational policies that originated in business schools and international financial institutions. Academics within these institutions reimagined the world instead as a single global market and higher education as a commodity to be bought and sold. By the 1990s, American universities embraced this language of globalization, and globalization eventually became the organizing logic of higher education. In Making the World Global Isaac A. Kamola examines how the relationships among universities, the American state, philanthropic organizations, and international financial institutions created the conditions that made it possible to imagine the world as global. Examining the Center for International Studies, Harvard Business School, the World Bank, the Social Science Research Council, and NYU, Kamola demonstrates that how we imagine the world is always symptomatic of the material relations within which knowledge is produced.

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Field Notes reconstructs the origins and trajectory of area studies in the United States, focusing on Middle East studies from the 1920s to the 1980s. Drawing on extensive archival research, Zachary Lockman shows how the Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford foundations played key roles in conceiving, funding, and launching postwar area studies, expecting them to yield a new kind of interdisciplinary knowledge that would advance the social sciences while benefiting government agencies and the American people. Lockman argues, however, that these new academic fields were not simply a product of the Cold War or an instrument of the American national security state, but had roots in shifts in the humanities and the social sciences over the interwar years, as well as in World War II sites and practices. This book explores the decision-making processes and visions of knowledge production at the foundations, the Social Science Research Council, and others charged with guiding the intellectual and institutional development of Middle East studies. Ultimately, Field Notes uncovers how area studies as an academic field was actually built—a process replete with contention, anxiety, dead ends, and consequences both unanticipated and unintended.

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Field Notes reconstructs the origins and trajectory of area studies in the United States, focusing on Middle East studies from the 1920s to the 1980s. Drawing on extensive archival research, Zachary Lockman shows how the Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford foundations played key roles in conceiving, funding, and launching postwar area studies, expecting them to yield a new kind of interdisciplinary knowledge that would advance the social sciences while benefiting government agencies and the American people. Lockman argues, however, that these new academic fields were not simply a product of the Cold War or an instrument of the American national security state, but had roots in shifts in the humanities and the social sciences over the interwar years, as well as in World War II sites and practices. This book explores the decision-making processes and visions of knowledge production at the foundations, the Social Science Research Council, and others charged with guiding the intellectual and institutional development of Middle East studies. Ultimately, Field Notes uncovers how area studies as an academic field was actually built—a process replete with contention, anxiety, dead ends, and consequences both unanticipated and unintended.

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For millennia, the city stood out against the landscape, walled and compact. This concept of the city was long accepted as adequate for characterizing the urban experience. However, the nature of the city, both real and imagined, has always been more permeable than this model reveals. The essays in Urban Imaginaries respond to this condition by focusing on how social and physical space is conceived as both indefinite and singular. They emphasize the ways this space is shared and thus made into urban culture. Urban Imaginaries offers case studies on cities in Brazil, Israel, Turkey, Lebanon, and India, as well as in the United States and France, and in doing so blends social, cultural, and political approaches to better understand the contemporary urban experience. Contributors: Margaret Cohen, Stanford U; Camilla Fojas, De Paul U; Beatriz Jaguaribe, Federal U of Rio de Janeiro; Anthony D. King, SUNY Binghamton; Mark LeVine, U of California, Irvine; Srirupa Roy, U of Massachusetts, Amherst; Seteney Shami, Social Science Research Council; AbdouMaliq Simone, New School U; Maha Yahya; Deniz Yükseker, Koç U, Istanbul. Alev Çinar is associate professor of political science and public administration at Bilkent University, Turkey. Thomas Bender is university professor of the humanities and history at New York University.

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Following World War II the American government and philanthropic foundations fundamentally remade American universities into sites for producing knowledge about the world as a collection of distinct nation-states. As neoliberal reforms took hold in the 1980s, visions of the world made popular within area studies and international studies found themselves challenged by ideas and educational policies that originated in business schools and international financial institutions. Academics within these institutions reimagined the world instead as a single global market and higher education as a commodity to be bought and sold. By the 1990s, American universities embraced this language of globalization, and globalization eventually became the organizing logic of higher education. In Making the World Global Isaac A. Kamola examines how the relationships among universities, the American state, philanthropic organizations, and international financial institutions created the conditions that made it possible to imagine the world as global. Examining the Center for International Studies, Harvard Business School, the World Bank, the Social Science Research Council, and NYU, Kamola demonstrates that how we imagine the world is always symptomatic of the material relations within which knowledge is produced.

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Some years—1789, 1929, 1989—change the world suddenly. Or do they? In 2020, a pandemic converged with an economic collapse, inequalities exploded, and institutions weakened. Yet these crises sprang not from new risks but from known dangers. The world—like many patients—met 2020 with a host of preexisting conditions, which together tilted the odds toward disaster. Perhaps 2020 wasn’t the year the world changed; perhaps it was simply the moment the world finally understood its deadly diagnosis.In The Long Year, some of the world’s most incisive thinkers excavate 2020’s buried crises, revealing how they must be confronted in order to achieve a more equal future. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls for the defunding of police and the refunding of communities; Keisha Blain demonstrates why the battle against racism must be global; and Adam Tooze reveals that COVID-19 hit hardest where inequality was already greatest and welfare states weakest. Yarimar Bonilla, Xiaowei Wang, Simon Balto, Marcia Chatelain, Gautam Bhan, Ananya Roy, and others offer insights from the factory farms of China to the elite resorts of France, the meatpacking plants of the Midwest to the overcrowded hospitals of India.The definitive guide to these ongoing catastrophes, The Long Year shows that only by exposing the roots and ramifications of 2020 can another such breakdown be prevented. It is made possible through institutional partnerships with Public Books and the Social Science Research Council.

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Some years—1789, 1929, 1989—change the world suddenly. Or do they? In 2020, a pandemic converged with an economic collapse, inequalities exploded, and institutions weakened. Yet these crises sprang not from new risks but from known dangers. The world—like many patients—met 2020 with a host of preexisting conditions, which together tilted the odds toward disaster. Perhaps 2020 wasn’t the year the world changed; perhaps it was simply the moment the world finally understood its deadly diagnosis.In The Long Year, some of the world’s most incisive thinkers excavate 2020’s buried crises, revealing how they must be confronted in order to achieve a more equal future. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls for the defunding of police and the refunding of communities; Keisha Blain demonstrates why the battle against racism must be global; and Adam Tooze reveals that COVID-19 hit hardest where inequality was already greatest and welfare states weakest. Yarimar Bonilla, Xiaowei Wang, Simon Balto, Marcia Chatelain, Gautam Bhan, Ananya Roy, and others offer insights from the factory farms of China to the elite resorts of France, the meatpacking plants of the Midwest to the overcrowded hospitals of India.The definitive guide to these ongoing catastrophes, The Long Year shows that only by exposing the roots and ramifications of 2020 can another such breakdown be prevented. It is made possible through institutional partnerships with Public Books and the Social Science Research Council.

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Young people have been at the forefront of political conflict in many parts of the world, even when it has turned violent. In some of those situations, for a variety of reasons, including coercion, poverty, or the seductive nature of violence, children become killers before they are able to grasp the fundamentals of morality. It has been only in the past ten years that this component of warfare has captured the attention of the world. Images of boys carrying guns and ammunition are now commonplace as they flash across television screens and appear on the front pages of newspapers. Less often, but equally disturbingly, stories of girls pressed into the service of militias surface in the media. A major concern today is how to reverse the damage done to the thousands of children who have become not only victims but also agents of wartime atrocities. In Child Soldiers in Africa, Alcinda Honwana draws on her firsthand experience with children of Angola and Mozambique, as well as her study of the phenomenon for the United Nations and the Social Science Research Council, to shed light on how children are recruited, what they encounter, and how they come to terms with what they have done. Honwana looks at the role of local communities in healing and rebuilding the lives of these children. She also examines the efforts undertaken by international organizations to support these wartime casualties and enlightens the reader on the obstacles faced by such organizations.

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Robert K. Merton (1910-2003) was one of the most influential sociologists of the twentieth century, producing clear theories and innovative research that continue to shape multiple disciplines. Merton's reach can be felt in the study of social structure, social psychology, deviance, professions, organizations, culture, and science. Yet for all his fame, Merton is only partially understood. He is treated by scholars as a functional analyst, when in truth his contributions transcend paradigm. Gathering together twelve major sociologists, Craig Calhoun launches a thorough reconsideration of Merton's achievements and inspires a renewed engagement with sociological theory. Merton's work addressed the challenges of integrating research and theory. It connected different fields of empirical research and spoke to the importance of overcoming divisions between allegedly pure and applied sociology. Merton also sought to integrate sociology with the institutional analysis of science, each informing the other. By bringing together different aspects of his work in one volume, Calhoun illuminates the interdisciplinary--and unifying--dimensions of Merton's approach, while also advancing the intellectual agenda of an increasingly vital area of study. Contributors: Aaron L. Panofsky, University of California; Alan Sica, Pennsylvania State University; Alejandro Portes, Princeton University; Charles Camic, Northwestern University; Charles Tilly, Columbia University; Craig Calhoun, Social Science Research Council and New York University; Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, City University of New York; Harriet Zuckerman, Mellon Foundation; Peter Simonson, University of Colorado; Ragnvald Kalleberg, University of Oslo; Robert J. Sampson, Harvard University; Thomas F. Gieryn, Indiana University; Viviana A. Zelizer, Princeton University

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The creation of the European Union in 1992 reflected new economic, political, and cultural realities on the continent. The dissolution of national borders and the easing of transit restrictions on people and goods with Europe, have contributed to a radical rethinking of such basic concepts as national sovereignty and citizenship. In Europe without Borders, Mabel Berezin and Martin Schain bring together leading experts from the fields sociology, political science, geography, psychology, and anthropology to examine the intersection of identity and territory in the new Europe. In this boldly interdisciplinary effort about the impact of reconfiguration, contributors address such topics as how Europeans now see themselves in relation to national identity, whether they identify themselves as citizens of a particular country or as members of a larger sociopolitical entity, how both natives and immigrants experience national and transnational identity at the local level, and the impact of globalization on national culture and the idea of the nation-state. Theoretically sophisticated and empirically informed, the essays explore an emerging global phenomenon that will have profound political, social, and economic consequences in both Europe and around the world. Contributors: John Agnew, UCLA; Roland Axtmann, University of Aberdeen; Mabel Berezin, Cornell University; Neil Brenner, New York University; Craig Calhoun, New York University, President of the Social Science Research Council; Juan Diez-Medrano, University of California, San Diego; Roy Eidelson, University of Pennsylvania; Nicholas Entrikin, UCLA; Riva Kastoryano, Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales; Krishan Kumar, University of Virginia; Ian Lustick, University of Pennsylvania; Levent Soysal, New York University.

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Central to the research that went into the preparation of this monograph is the relationship between economic development and equality. To determine and characterize that relationship Morris Singer focuses on the various components of equality at different stages of development. The author particularly explores the behavior of income distribution, together with its bearing on the components of aggregate demand. Mexico provided an excellent case to examine in depth because of its impressive growth and the fact that it experienced Latin America’s first successful twentieth-century revolution. Although the Revolution of 1910 hastened social equality and introduced other changes that stimulated Mexico’s economic growth, it could not prevent a serious increase in the inequality of income distribution. By the early 1960s the government found it necessary to rectify this increasing imbalance through a program of expenditures designed to counteract widespread poverty and weak aggregate demand. To ward off inflation, this program in turn could be implemented only by tax reform. In discussing the relationship between development and equality in its various dimensions, noneconomic as well as economic, this monograph points out that, at the time of this study, government policies in Mexico were dictated by an elite concerned primarily with the country’s economic advancement. Singer concludes that if programs of government expenditure and tax reform succeed in remedying the inequalities of income distribution, this could gradually make possible the development of a more genuine political as well as economic democracy. This book reflects Singer’s interest in the relationship between equality and development. It is the result of five months of intensive in-residence study in Mexico, financed in part by a grant from the Social Science Research Council.

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The aftershocks of the 2008 financial crisis still reverberate throughout the globe. Markets are down, unemployment is up, and nations from Greece to Ireland find their very infrastructure on the brink of collapse. There is also a crisis in the management of global affairs, with the institutions of global governance challenged as never before, accompanied by conflicts ranging from Syria, to Iran, to Mali. Domestically, the bases for democratic legitimacy, social sustainability, and environmental adaptability are also changing. In this unique volume from the World Public Forum Dialogue of Civilizations and the Social Science Research Council, some of the world’s greatest minds—from Nobel Prize winners to long-time activists—explore what the prolonged instability of the so-called Great Recession means for our traditional understanding of how governments can and should function. Through interviews that are sure to spark lively debate, 22 Ideas to Fix the World presents both analysis of past geopolitical events and possible solutions and predictions for the future. The book surveys issues relevant to the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Speaking from a variety of perspectives, including economic, social, developmental, and political, the discussions here increase our understanding of what’s wrong with the world and how to get it right. Interviewees explore topics like the Arab Spring, the influence of international financial organizations, the possibilities for the growth of democracy, the acceleration of global warming, and how to develop enforceable standards for market and social regulation. These inspiring exchanges from some of our most sophisticated thinkers on world policy are honest, brief, and easily understood, presenting thought-provoking ideas in a clear and accessible manner that cuts through the academic jargon that too often obscures more than it reveals. 22 Ideas to Fix the World is living history in the finest sense—a lasting chronicle of the state of the global community today. Interviews with: Zygmunt Bauman, Shimshon Bichler & Jonathan Nitzan, Craig Calhoun, Ha-Joon Chang, Fred Dallmayr, Mike Davis, Bob Deacon, Kemal Dervis, Jiemian Yang, Peter J. Katzenstein, Ivan Krastev, Will Kymlicka, Manuel F. Montes, José Antonio Ocampo, Vladimir Popov, Jospeh Stiglitz, Olzhas Suleimenov, Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Immanuel Wallerstein, Paul Watson, Vladimir Yakunin, Muhammad Yunus

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