ISSR is pleased to co-sponsor the Methods Symposium 2019, to be held Saturday, October 19, from 10:00am to 5:00pm at South College. Please review the call for proposals and participation below:

What Is the Methods Symposium?

On May 22, 2019, the UMass ADVANCE Program held an Information workshop on the new Collaborative Research Seed Grant program which seeks to foster the development of innovative and equitable collaborative research projects among UMass Amherst faculty. Funded seed grants at UMass will contribute to the mission of the National Science Foundation ADVANCE program, which is advancing women faculty, including women faculty of color, in science and engineering.

The seed grant application deadline is September 17, 2019.

We make social science but not out of conditions of our own choosing. While social institutions are a large part of the content of the social worlds that we investigate, our means of investigation are also affected by those very institutions. As social scientists we are thus always at risk of using some concept or idea or theory or instrument that may be ‘doing work’ that we might not first recognize. In other words, we may be unknowing carriers of political forces, intellectual pathologies, or be doing the bidding of some social forces we have inherited from the past. This article summarizes the discussion of how historical legacies that shape scientific research in ISSR's final panel on its 2019 seminar series on Social Science & Social Location.

The Institute for Social Science Research and the School of Earth and Sustainability, in partnership with the Institute for Diversity Sciences at UMass, are pleased to announce the winners of this year's Social Science and Environment Seed Grant competition. These SSEN Seed Grant awards totaling $40,000 in new investments will stimulate new scholarly collaborations for innovative research centered on sustainability themes in the social sciences. The winning grants link scholars across three colleges at UMass, and exemplify the SSEN commitment to spanning disciplinary boundaries to open new ways of conceptualizing and studying the defining issues of our times. Please join us in celebrating these important initiatives.

Joya Misra, Professor of Sociology and Public Policy, has been appointed Director of the Institute for Social Science Research (ISSR) in the UMass College of Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS), for a three-year term effective September 1, 2019. Misra succeeds Laurel Smith-Doerr, who has served as Director of ISSR since 2012, building it into a vibrant center for promoting excellence in social science research. Join us in congratulating them for their leadership and service to excellence in the social sciences across UMass.