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Image of book cover art: colorful painting of a group of Black figures gathered around figure of a Black woman reading an open newspaper

On November 3, 2022, ISSR hosted a conversation with Dr. Kathy Roberts Forde, SBS Associate Dean of Equity & Inclusion, on what history teaches us about the power of news media untethered to fact-based reality to disrupt democracy and serve the goals of white nationalism.

Logo for FirstGen program - icon of open book printed in orange and blue-green.

First generation scholars can now find support for the publishing process from the FirstGen program at the University of California Press. Check out the resources on offer!

https://www.ucpress.edu/resources/firstgen-program

Book cover image. Image of modern art installation: woman's body shaped from multicultural textiles.
On October 25, 2021, ISSR and the UMass Department of Sociology's Committee on Colloquia and Social Events hosted a panel discussion among eight contributors to an important new edited volume of feminist theory and practice. Video from the online event can be viewed here for a period of 120 days.
 
Image of red fist breaking out of a box, with shattered glass and numerals flying out

On October 20, 2021, ISSR celebrated Erica Scharrer's and Srividya Ramasubramanian's new book, Quantitative Research Methods in Communication: The Power of Numbers for Social Justice, an important new resource on using the power of numbers to advance social justice.

ISSR is pleased to co-sponsor the Methods Symposium 2019, to be held Saturday, October 19, from 10:00am to 5:00pm at South College. Workshop registration is now closed, but all are invited to join the open Roundtable Discussion, from 3 - 5 pm in South College W245:

What Is the Methods Symposium?

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.

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. Presentation slides and grant application information here.

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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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On April 4, the co-PIs presented the final report of a one-year project funded by the National Science Foundation's research program on the Future of Work at Human-Technology Frontiers. The project, Understanding Emerging Technologies, Racial Equity and the Future of Work, convened experts in the social sciences, computational sciences and engineering to articulate the knowledge needed to shape emergent techologies that are equitable and result in "good" jobs for a wider range of workers, and elicited broader stakeholder feedback on this academic conversation.  

View the report here.

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