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. 

This fall, UMass Amherst was awarded a National Science Foundation ADVANCE Institutional Transformation Grant to develop systemic and sustainable approaches to advance gender equity (including dynamics at the intersection of race and gender) and promote gender equity in ways that involve women and men.  In order to inform our efforts, we need to hear from you. 

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?

On 17 October, David Snow, a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine engaged a packed house at the ISSR lab. Snow lectured on the relationship between right-wing populism and the construction of superfluous populations, drawing from his recent chapter on the topic in Mackert et al’s edited volume Populism and the Crisis of Democracy (Routledge, 2018).

The Institute of Diversity Sciences announces its faculty research funding opportunity. The institute will distribute up to $60,000 in seed project funds to teams who apply through a formal RFP mechanism. Funds will go toward supporting new collaborative projects between colleagues from different departments at UMass. Ideal projects will focus on research, involve graduate or undergraduate students in that research (i.e., include an educational component), and have an eye toward social impact.