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Nelson Announces Plans to Step Down as SSRC President in Early Fall 2021

Board Kicks Off Search for Next Leader New York -The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) today announced that President Alondra Nelson, the acclaimed scholar and former Columbia University Dean, who has led the SSRC since 2017, will be stepping down in the early fall of 2021, and that a search for her successor is now underway. In a letter to SSRC staff and partners, Board chair Dr. Mamadou Diouf said of Dr. Nelson, “Her commitment to scholarly rigor, insistence on research innovation and experimentation, and pursuit of new and novel partnerships has reinvigorated the SSRC and positioned it for a vibrant …

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A Statement from the Social Science Research Council

Academic integrity and scholarly independence are bedrock values of the Social Science Research Council. Rigorous and independent peer review has been critical to our fellowship selection process, and always will be. A September 2019 article in the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom brought to light deviations from those norms with respect to the 2015 Abe Fellowship selection process, and in particular the scoring and selection as it related to scholar Celeste Arrington. Our own investigation found the part of the article describing practices in the 2015 Abe selection process that deviated from the established procedures and protocols in place at the SSRC

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SSRC Labs Offers Free, Interactive Online Course

The Digital Culture program’s SSRC Labs, teaching resources created in collaboration with partners in the digital humanities and computational social sciences, now includes a free, interactive online course on “Managing Qualitative Social Science Data,” developed in collaboration with the Qualitative Data Repository.

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University of California, Irvine Joins College and University Fund for the Social Sciences

The University of California, Irvine (UC Irvine), is the latest member of the College and University Fund for the Social Sciences (CUF), a consortium of more than 30 esteemed educational institutions that partner with the Social Science Research Council to support the infrastructure of social science research, catalyze interdisciplinary and cross-institutional collaboration, and support scholars and scholarship. UC Irvine is the fourth member institution from the University of California system, joining UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, and UC Santa Barbara. Bill Maurer, dean of the School of Social Sciences at UC Irvine, noted that its joining the College and University Fund stems

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To Secure Knowledge: A Task Force of the Social Science Research Council

The Social Science Research Council has launched “To Secure Knowledge,” a task force that is born from the organization’s essential obligations to scholarship, the infrastructure of social research, standards of inquiry and evidence, and the role rigorous understanding plays in public affairs. “To Secure Knowledge” builds on the SSRC’s history of utilizing the instrument of a task force from time to time to address particularly pressing concerns. The most recent was a Katrina Task Force that investigated the social dimensions of the response to Hurricane Katrina, as well as lessons that could be applied to similar disasters in the future.

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Launch of MediaWell Platform

Leading Research Council Announces New Digital Platform for Disinformation Scholarship The Social Science Research Council launched MediaWell, its latest initiative towards improving lives through healthier democracy WASHINGTON D.C. – Today, before an audience of policymakers, media, academics, and members of the public, the Social Science Research Council announced the launch of MediaWell, the Council’s latest digital initiative that represents an effort to unite the resources of academia to address the impact of disinformation on democracy. In light of the growing impacts of disinformation, misinformation, and fake news, scholars globally have increased their attention to studying these phenomena. The resulting volume of

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Statement from Social Science Research Council President Alondra Nelson on the Social Media and Democracy Research Grants Program

For nearly a century, the Social Science Research Council has supported researchers as they pursue vanguard and rigorous scholarship for the public good. In keeping with this tradition, the Social Media and Democracy Research Grants program—a collaboration with a diverse group of eight philanthropic organizations, Social Science One, and Facebook—is an effort to make privacy-protected data available to social researchers to examine Facebook’s impact on elections and democracy.

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