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.

A recent major shift in practice by the Veterans Health Administration (VA) now means that complementary and integrative health (CIH) therapies such as meditation, yoga and acupuncture are increasingly being offered to VA patients as non-drug approaches for pain management and related conditions, says Elizabeth Evans, an epidemiology researcher in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences and a member of the ISSR Scholars network at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Research Assistant sought for fall semester 2018 for a qualitative research project that is part of a University-wide Institutional Transformation (IT) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) ADVANCE program. The purpose of NSF ADVANCE is to increase the participation and advancement of women faculty in science and engineering. The RA will work under the supervision of Professor Laurel Smith-Doerr, Director of the Institute for Social Science Research and Managing co-PI for the ADVANCE grant.