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.

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.

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. 

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?