News

This week, The Wallace Foundation and the Social Science Research Council released Building Trust, Sustaining Art, a major cross-cutting research analysis that offers field-level insights into how 18 arts organizations navigate trust, artistic value, labor, governance, and placemaking amidst a shifting cultural and funding landscape. The SSRC’s Arts Research for Communities of Color (ARCC) Fellowship matched 18 early-career researchers with each of the Thriving Communities organizations.

The Social Science Research Council is pleased to announce the LEGO Foundation Fellowship, a new global research fellowship developed in partnership with the LEGO Foundation. The fellowship will support early- and mid-career researchers whose work can strengthen understanding of how children thrive across diverse contexts. Applications open June 1.

This month’s theme is the environment—one of the most urgent and consequential areas of social science inquiry, and the site of profound human-driven change. As we close out Earth Month, we highlight how social science research can illuminate the impact of new environmental realities on society.

SSRC’s Just Tech program invites applications from researchers, artists, and practitioners working at the intersection of technology and society for the 2027 Just Tech Fellowship. The Just Tech Fellowship provides a one-year unrestricted award of up to $60,000 to support research, creative practice, or community-engaged work. The fellowship period runs from January 2027 through December 2027. Applications are due June 28.

This month’s theme is religion—an important aspect of national and international politics, a pervasive sociocultural force, and a critical area of study for social science. In this month’s edition, we highlight social science research that illuminates how religion intersects with nationalism, race, international policy, the public sphere, and more. 

The Better Urbanism, Infrastructure, and Land-Use Decisions (BUILD) Research Network program, seeks proposals from researchers to recruit and supervise students to conduct high-quality case studies during the summer of 2026 on state legislative sessions that passed bills intended to legalize or encourage housing production.

The SSRC’s first-ever research committee was formed in response to the restrictive immigration laws of the 1920s. A century later, as enforcement and detention expand and public scrutiny of federal immigration operations increases, this issue of Items & Issues gathers social science research on immigration and its connections to labor, race, foreign policy, surveillance, and more.