Social Science Research Council

(The following piece, re-posted here, was written to introduce the SSRC’s new essay forum Haiti, Now and Next.)
Haiti has been this hemisphere’s hard case for centuries. Colonialism and slavery were particularly brutal there. When Haitians took the French declaration of the Rights of Man seriously in 1792, their revolution was crushed by Republican France. When Haiti [...]

The Supreme Court has just ruled that corporations are people like you and me. Specifically, a narrow majority held that Congress must not restrict the “free speech” of corporations as they exercise it in the political process. As artificial people, corporations have the same right to buy advertisements to promote the candidates and policies of [...]

There’s lots of debate about whether the economic crisis is over. One reason the debate doesn’t get resolved is that we don’t have a clear conception of an economy doing well (though we sort of know bad, at least when we see it in extreme forms).
Somewhat disturbingly, what passes for economic news often focuses not [...]

Tariq Ramadan is a distinguished theologian and scholar of religion. He is an important voice within Islam, arguing for the value of exploring ways to advance and deepen religion within the modern world and indeed in the West, instead of either resisting or retreating. He’s also an important voice in relations between Muslims and others, [...]

The SSRC expresses its concern for all Iranian scholars and researchers in what is clearly a difficult time. We support both the freedom of scholarship from political intervention and the right of scholars to participate openly in public discussions.
We are disturbed that in the aftermath of the widely disputed election, media that should allow open [...]

Jim Leach is an outstanding choice to lead the National Endowment for the Humanities. He’s smart, thoughtful, and brings a combination of openness and good judgment to the job—as well as political connections.
Flourishing humanities fields (including scholarship in fields like cultural anthropology, historical sociology, and human geography) are important in themselves, but also as part [...]

For academic research to be truly innovative, it means not just coming up with that one new idea but coming up with effective ways of continually improving your ideas and communicating them to greater numbers of potential beneficiaries, Calhoun said in his 11 Feb 09 lecture for the USC Annenberg School for Communication, part of a series the school is running on sustainable innovation.
? Go to lecture write-up.
? Go to YouTube video.
? Download transcript (pdf: 91 pages, 256kb).

President Obama promises not just to stimulate the economy, but at the same time to remake America. He proposes to do this by making the government a more effective provider of public services and a more effective partner to private organizations that pursue the public good. His stimulus plan is an amalgam of dozens of [...]

More than one commentator has noted that there is a silver lining in the widespread belief that America urgently needs a major economic stimulus package. It is a gift to President Obama, many suggest, because it allows his administration to pursue a wide range of social policies as a package rather than one by one, [...]

The Bush administration earned justified opprobrium for neglecting many regions of the world, failing to ground its policies in serious knowledge of those regions it did address, and generally focusing on the world it wanted to create to the exclusion of the world as it really was. It’s not that it isn’t a good idea [...]