News Browse by Topic

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?

Professor Elizabeth Evans, ISSR Scholar and Assistant Professor of Public Health and Health Sciences

ISSR is proud to congratulate Elizabeth Evans, ISSR Scholar and Assistant Professor in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences, on the $10.2 million center grant awarded for the proposal she developed in her 2018 ISSR Scholars year in support of vital research on opioid treatment with incarcerated populations in Massachusetts. The ISSR Scholars Program is a proven investment in the  research and career development of promising UMass faculty, providing strategic grantsmanship mentoring and support to a growing cohort of social scientists across the UMass colleges and disciplines. 

 

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.

""

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 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.

Some Tips for Collaboration and some meditations on Equality. Presentation by John N. Parke, NSF. First slide.

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.

 

""

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.

""

On February 21 2019, a full house packed the ISSR lab to explore research on how gender affects the conduct of research and professional life more broadly for social scientists. This article summarizes the discussion highlights, and shares valuable resources for those interested in the topic. This seminar was the second in our Social Science and Social Location series which focuses on the ‘positionality’ of researchers, asking how our social location informs the way in which we go about our scholarly lives, the questions we ask, the approaches we take to inquiry, and the way that we conduct our scholarship more broadly.

Panelists in seminar: Sonia Atalay, Linda Tropp, Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Kiran Asher

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. 

Pages