HFA Faculty Invited to Two Talks by Yale University's Dara Strolovitch on Research and Fellowships
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Dara Z. Strolovitch, professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and Political Science at Yale University, will deliver the following two talks for UMass faculty on April 18-19.
Studying Inequalities Research Talk
Thursday, April 18
4:00pm to 5:30pm
South College E470
Please join us for this Research Talk on Studying Inequalities in the Social Sciences with with Dr. Dara Strolovitch (Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and Political Science, Yale University). During this talk, Dr. Strolovitch will be presenting her research When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People: Race, Gender, and What Makes a Crisis in America.
From climate change to opioids to COVID-19, the language of crisis is ubiquitous in contemporary politics, as are assertions by scholars, activists, and policymakers that crises are forces for change. Using a range of data, I show that whether or not a problem is treated as an intervention-worthy crisis is not a reflection of its severity but is instead partly endogenous to politics, and that for every problem labeled a crisis resolvable through government action, myriad others affecting marginalized groups are normalized as non-crises -- ongoing hard times that are treated by dominant political actors as natural, inevitable, immune to, and not warranting state intervention. Through a set of matched cases, I show that these dynamics of “crisis politics” were borne out, with devastating consequences, for Black, Latino, Indigenous, and sole-borrower-women homeowners in the American “foreclosure crisis” of the early twenty-first century and the unacknowledged foreclosure non-crisis that preceded it. Crisis politics, I conclude, have become a mode of governance, a mechanism for justifying the use of state power to protect privileged groups and for justifying its retrenchment or redirection when it comes to marginalized groups. Understanding crisis politics and the twinned lenses of crisis and non-crisis are therefore key to understanding the politics of racial, gender, and class inequalities in the US and to understanding competing ideas about the role of the state more generally.
This talk is sponsored by the Institute for Social Science Research, the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Council, and co-sponsored by the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the Department of Sociology, the Department of Political Science, and the School of Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Applying for the Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholars Program | A Conversation among Recipients, featuring Dara Strolovitch
Friday, April 19,
11:30am to 12:45pm
Thompson Hall 420
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What can a year at the Russell Sage Foundation do for your research? This panel brings together past and incoming Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholars, Dr. Dara Strolovitch (Yale University), Dr. Linda Tropp and Dr. Seth Goldman, both of UMass Amherst, for a panel discussion. It will address how they navigated their journey toward the RSF Scholars program. How did they decide when to apply? What did the process of building an application packet look like “from the inside”? How did they use their time while spending the year in residence at Russell Sage? This panel will be of interest to faculty contemplating residential fellowships of all kinds, whether they are planning for a sabbatical or seeking funding for completion of a major writing project. Libby Sharrow, ISSR Director of Faculty Research, will moderate.
Lunch will be served, please RSVP at above registration link above.
This panel is sponsored by Institute for Social Science Research and Behavioral Sciences Research Council.
Panelists:
Dr. Dara Strolovitch is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and Political Science at Yale University, and taught previously at the University of Minnesota and Princeton University. She is also co-director of the Center for the Study of Inequality at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies and co-editor of the American Political Science Review. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from sources including the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Aspen Institute, the Irving Louis Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, the Brookings Institution, the World Health Organization, the American Political Science Association, Georgetown University, Stanford University, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as well as by internal grants from Yale University, the University of Minnesota, and Princeton University, and her research and graduate mentorship were recognized in 2018 by the Midwest Political Science Association Women’s Caucus’s Outstanding Career Award. She is presenting her research on campus, Thursday, April 18, 2024, at 4pm in South College E470. Click here for more information.
Dr. Seth K. Goldman's research on political communication and public opinion about race and ethnicity in America has received financial support on multiple occasions from the Russell Sage Foundation. He first received grant support from RSF to examine the impact of mass public exposure to the 2008 Obama presidential campaign on racial attitudes, resulting in a book published by RSF (The Obama Effect: How the 2008 Campaign Changed White Racial Attitudes). More recently, he (PI) and a team of scholars received a RSF grant to study how Americans, and especially people of color, are responding to rising levels of racial and ethnic diversity in the population. Finally, next year he will be a RSF Visiting Scholar to continue work on this project.
Dr. Linda Tropp is Professor of Social Psychology and Faculty Associate in Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Over the last decade, Tropp and her colleagues have received funding from the Russell Sage Foundation to support multi-disciplinary research projects, and she participated in the Russell Sage Visiting Scholars Program during the 2017-2018 academic year; she has also received funding from several other private foundations to support her research activities, and she has been a visiting fellow at other academic centers and research institutions in the U.S., Germany, New Zealand, Chile, and the U.K. Dr. Tropp is coauthor of When Groups Meet: The Dynamics of Intergroup Contact (2011) and editor of several books, including Moving Beyond Prejudice Reduction: Pathways to Positive Intergroup Relations (2011), the Oxford Handbook of Intergroup Conflict (2012), and Making Research Matter: A Psychologist’s Guide to Public Engagement (2018).
Moderator:
Dr. Libby Sharrow is the Director of Faculty Research for ISSR, Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy and the Department of History. They specialize in the gendered politics of public policy and how policy has shaped intersectional meanings of sex, race, sexuality, disability, and class in US politics over the past fifty years. Sharrow’s research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Association of University Women, the American Political Science Association, the Williams Institute at the UCLA Law School, the Myra Sadker Foundation, the Gerald Ford Presidential Foundation, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and the Massachusetts.