Social Science Research Council

In conjunction with the SSRC’s Possible Futures project, this is the first in a series of essays the Council will be publishing on Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy movement. —eds. Across America police have been called to clear protestors from parks and university campuses. Ostensibly progressive cities like Portland and Oakland have been in [...]

Is knowledge an optional extra, worthwhile only when resources are flush? Or is knowledge necessary, at least as important in difficult times as prosperous ones? The questions are not just abstract as budgets for science, research, and higher education are cut around the world. The Greek National Council for Research and Technology has issued an [...]

In this second series of interviews for the podcast Societas, editorial director Paul Price gets sociologist and historian Craig Calhoun to explore the various strands of social, economic, and political change that are creating the sense that advanced capitalist societies are coming “unstuck.” Radical populism on the right and left, deindustrialization in the North and [...]

 

 Societas #8 - Oct. 28, 2011 [49:21m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Fernando Coronil died this week, much too young and much too soon. Only four months ago, he got in touch to say he couldn’t attend the launch of a new collection of books to which he contributed a wonderful, if sad, essay (PDF). He had just received the diagnosis telling of his cancer and was [...]

In The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, Evgeny Morozov offers a valuable corrective to the illusion that the Internet is always a force for democracy, always a support for insurgents.

Pundits are puzzling over primary wins by Tea Party populists whose personal flaws and extreme ideologies may limit their chances in the November general election. They note that people are angry, and that many want to turn out incumbents in general. But they keep trying to analyze this in terms like conservative and liberal that [...]

The September 11th attacks turned the familiar into horror. Passenger planes became weapons. Iconic office buildings became tombs. And the world’s richest, most powerful country felt suddenly vulnerable. This is a key reason why the wound feels raw nearly a decade later. The terror came into the midst of our daily lives. The victims were [...]

Neither the idea of extending help to distant strangers nor the conceptualization of their circumstances as humanitarian emergencies is simply given by the reality of human suffering nor explained by universalistic ethics alone. These reflect a specific history and specific ways of framing troubling events. Religious charity, colonial rule, ideals of progress, and the rise [...]

(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 [...]

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 [...]