Research Group

Thematic Working Groups

Our thematic working groups bring together researchers across our grantee cohorts to chart new methods and approaches to tackle shared questions. Led by senior researchers and advisors to the Collaboratory, these groups are intentionally experimental in nature and encourage participants to actively engage across disciplines, regions, and time periods.

Public Health, Surveillance, and Human Rights Network

The Public Health, Surveillance, and Human Rights Network is an international, interdisciplinary group of organizations and leaders focused addressing the risks, opportunities, and challenges posed by the public health surveillance crucial to stemming the Covid-19 pandemic.

Working Group: Transparency and Reliability in the Social Sciences

This working group convenes a cross-disciplinary group of scholars to consider the current state of social science reliability and transparency across a variety of approaches, and explores whether and how principles of transparency and data access can be articulated to encompass different fields and ways of producing knowledge on and understanding the social world.

Working Group: Digital Social Science

Overview This working group will engage how social scientists use digital tools, methods, and data sources in their research. This includes “big data” (whether from the internet, social media, geo-spatial techniques, or more traditional quantitative and textual sources); the use of visualization tools for the collection, organization and analysis of data; and other ways in which data and information science is intersecting or could intersect with the social sciences. Along with these opportunities come serious challenges—scientific, practical, and ethical—that may result from the expanding use of these forms of knowledge. Key questions addressed by the working group include: What can

Migration and Cuba

Overview The Council is working with the migration centers of the University of Havana to assess the current state of research on migration in Cuba and to put forth agendas for research during the coming years. Central to this project will be facilitating, in modest ways, the incorporation of Cuban specialists into the international professional networks from which they have long been excluded while attracting the interest of foreign institutions and individuals to work in Cuba for the first time. Another core objective is strengthening the capacity of Cuban institutions to collaborate with one another.

Working Group on Security

The working group on the Politics of Security considers these issues and more, probing the repertoire of institutions and ideas that democracies use to deal with threats. In the course of this work, the group addresses a range of issues, including population movements, war, terror, and tensions of security and privacy.

Working Group on Distribution

Distinctive national institutions and politics filter economic shifts, and this working group seeks to understand how politics, the economy, and civil society intertwine to set the stage for a future settlement that may be different from country to country.

Working Group on Institutions

The working group on Institutions addresses concerns about the performance and legitimacy of representative political institutions.

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