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Image of two hands clasping, one maroon, one black. Text encourages faculty to connect with ISSR grant support staff.

On September 25, 2023, ISSR and the College of Social & Behavioral Sciences hosted a Faculty/PI Grants Summit, to present an overview of the UMass grantseeking and award management process for all interested SBS faculty.

UMass Advance Collaborative Research Seed Grants presentation by Laurel Smith-Doerr, Jen Normaly and Julie Woods, May 22 2019.

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.

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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.

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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.

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On February 8, 2019, John N. Parker facilitated the first UMass ADVANCE Research Collaboration workshop with an engaging talk on how collaboration and equity leads to better science. Parker is Program Officer for the Science, Technology and Society and Cultivating Cultures for Ethical STEM programs at the National Science Foundation. He is also Senior Sustainability Scientist, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability and Senior Fellow, Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University.

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On February 21 2019, a full house packed the ISSR lab to explore research on how gender affects the conduct of research and professional life more broadly for social scientists. This article summarizes the discussion highlights, and shares valuable resources for those interested in the topic. This seminar was the second in our Social Science and Social Location series which focuses on the ‘positionality’ of researchers, asking how our social location informs the way in which we go about our scholarly lives, the questions we ask, the approaches we take to inquiry, and the way that we conduct our scholarship more broadly.

Panelists in seminar: Sonia Atalay, Linda Tropp, Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Kiran Asher

A full house packed the ISSR lab for the first event in ISSR’s seminar series on Social Science and Social Location. The central question of this panel was “How does where we stand affect what we see, and what we can know as scholars?” Responses came in the form of four thought-provoking expositions on the politics of creating social science that reflects non-traditional academic origins, asks questions that the mainstream is not asking, honors histories and standpoints that have traditionally been excluded from scientific discourses, and claims a vital and legitimate – if fiercely challenged – place in the scientific enterprise. 

ISSR and CRF Scholar Application Strategies

On December 13, the Directors of ISSR and CRF shared their top tips on choosing the Scholars program for you, and making a successful case for your selection.
Check out the slides, and contact us if you have any questions!

How do longstanding theories of social interaction hold up when communication shifts from in-person to online interaction? And how can novel research methods, applied by collaborative teams of social scientists and computer scientists to new forms of online data, help us re-imagine the mechanisms driving social life?

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