2016 General Social Survey Data Available

The 1972-2016 General Social Survey cumulative file is now available on our website (http://gss.norc.org/). As of Wednesday April 5, it is also available on the GSS Data Explorer (https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/).

New GSS Trends Feature: Already available on the GSS Data Explorer you will find the new GSS Key Trends feature.  This dynamic visualization function is designed to provide both researchers and the general public with unprecedented capacity to create graphic views of key trends and user responses over time.

New Book: Women in Global Science

Kathrin, Zippel. 2017. Women in Global Science Advancing Academic Careers through International Collaboration. Stanford University Press.

Women in Global Science cover Scientific and engineering research is increasingly global, and international collaboration can be essential to academic success. Yet even as administrators and policymakers extol the benefits of global science, few recognize the diversity of international research collaborations and their participants, or take gendered inequalities into account. Women in Global Science is the first book to consider systematically the challenges and opportunities that the globalization of scientific work brings to U.S. academics, especially for women faculty.

Webinar on Critical Realism

As part of the Critical Realism Network Webinar Series, Professor Philip Gorski of Yale University would like to invite you to join the upcoming webinar with Professor Kevin Schilbrack (Department of Philosophy and Religion, Appalachian State University) on Critical Realism and the Academic Study of Religion.

Date: Wednesday, April 19th
Time: 12:00-1:30 pm EST
Click here to register: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/1033739221691083777

Brief Description:  In this webinar, I’ll explore how critical realism aids our understanding of both scholars who study religious agents and the religious agents themselves. I’ll briefly contextualize the debate among religious studies scholars today about the status of the central conceptual category of “religion”. Some contemporary scholars, influenced by genealogy and deconstruction, argue that religion was not discovered in those cultures but was rather manufactured, imagined, or invented in Europe and then imposed on the rest of the world.  Here, religion is a social construction, a projection of the western imagination. On what grounds can Western scholars retain the concept? In response, I will argue that CR enables us to speak of religion as a real entity, a social structure, that operated even before the word was created. I will consider three arguments for abolishing the category of “religion” and show how CR provides tools with which we can respond to them. Second, how does CR help us understand religious agents? Religious people organize their lives around and claim to experience value-laden realities that those who are not members of their communities typically cannot see. What is needed, then, is a relational ontology where human beings are not independent substances but are rather constituted by their relations.

Summer Schools Call for Applicants

Berlin Summer School

The summer school aims at supporting young researchers by strengthening their ability in linking theory and empirical research. The two-week program creates an excellent basis for the development of their current research designs.

In the first week, we address the key methodological challenges of concept-building, causation/explanation, and micro-macro linkage that occur in almost all research efforts. We strive for a clarification of the epistemological foundations underlying methodological paradigms. In the second week, these methodological considerations are applied to central empirical fields of research in political science, sociology, and other related disciplines. In this second part of the program, participants are assigned to four thematic groups according to their own research topics. The thematic areas covered are: “External Governance, Inter-regionalism, and Domestic Change”, “Citizenship, Migration, and Identities”, “Social Struggle and Globalization”, and “Democracy at the Crossroads”.

New Book: Reparation and Reconciliation

Smith, Christi M. 2016. Reparation and Reconciliation: The Rise and Fall of Integrated Higher Education. University of North Carolina Press.

Reparations and Reconciliation cover This is the first book to reveal the nineteenth-century struggle for racial integration on U.S. college campuses. As the Civil War ended, the need to heal the scars of slavery, expand the middle class, and reunite the nation engendered a dramatic interest in higher education by policy makers, voluntary associations, and African Americans more broadly. Through a detailed analysis of archival and press data, Christi M. Smith demonstrates that pressures between organizations–including charities and foundations–and the emergent field of competitive higher education led to the differentiation and exclusion of African Americans, Appalachian whites, and white women from coeducational higher education and illuminates the actors and the strategies that led to the persistent salience of race over other social boundaries.