SSRC Update - July 2013

New Fellow Cohorts at the SSRC

The Council is pleased to announce the recent selection of two new cohorts of SSRC Fellows.

Thirty-six Fellows have been named to the Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa program, which provides fellowships to nurture the intellectual development and increase retention of early-career faculty in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. A thematic focus on peace, security, and development is intended to renew basic research agendas and strengthen interdisciplinary social science research capacity on these issues. This cohort, the program’s second, will work on a range of critical and timely topics, including projects on climate change and insecurity in the Lake Chad basin, land tenure and resettlement in northern Uganda, and the role of women in parliament in postgenocide Rwanda and postapartheid South Africa.

The International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) has also announced its 2013–14 cohort, welcoming eighty-two new Fellows. IDRF offers nine to twelve months of support to graduate students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who are enrolled in PhD programs in the United States and conducting dissertation research, in whole or in part, outside the United States, on non-US topics. The program is open to proposals informed by a range of methodologies, including research in archives and manuscript collections, fieldwork and surveys, and quantitative data collection. Selected projects include examinations of knowledge production in the African AIDS epidemic, Catholic representations of Muslims and Jacobins in nineteenth-century France, and transnational working-class formation surrounding international dockworkers' unions.

IDRF Fellow Michael Hathaway (2000) has published Environmental Winds: Making the Global in Southwest China (University of California Press), based on his fellowship research. The volume reveals how global environmentalism has been enacted and altered in China, often with unanticipated effects.

Watch two new Fellow Spotlight videos from the Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship program: Stuart Schrader (2011) discusses his experience in the Provincializing Global Urbanism research field, and Rebecca Woods (2008) talks about her work in the Animal Studies field.

Drugs, Security and Democracy Fellow Jeremy Slack (2013) appeared on Dan Rather Reports, “Operation Streamline,” to discuss his research on illegal migration into the United States from Mexico and the long-term effects of current deterrence policies. DSD Fellow Laura Lima (2013) wrote for the Indian Express on the history of class exclusion that contextualizes recent protests in Brazil.

Seteney Shami, director of the Inter-Asia and Middle East and North Africa Programs, contributed a review essay on “Identity and Difference in the Middle East and North Africa” (with Nefissa Naguib) to Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa: Into the New Millennium, now out from Indiana University Press.

Measure of America continues to catalyze public discourse, with new analysis of the program’s findings appearing in NPR’s All Tech Considered, the Seattle Times, and US News and World Report and the program’s directors Kristen Lewis and Sarah Burd-Sharps authoring an article on the societal risks of non-income inequalities for the Huffington Post.

Measure of America codirector Sarah Burd-Sharps was one of six expert panelists at Oxfam America’s "Voices on US Poverty” event, held at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. Listen to the discussion here [mp3].

President Ira Katznelson reviewed the book FDR and the Jews (Belknap Press), which he calls “level-headed yet deeply troubling,” in a piece for the New Republic.

Original content now featured at SSRC Forums: Simon During asks “Is Absolute Secularity Conceivable?” at The Immanent Frame, while at Reverberations, Peter Manseau reflects on the secular scripture of “Norman Corwin’s Radio Prayer.” Kujenga Amani leads off a special weekly series on “Ghana’s 2012 Elections: Reaffirming Africa’s Model Democracy?” with an essay on the role of the security sector by Kwesi Aning and Ernest Ansah Lartey, of the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre.

Upcoming Deadlines: Abe Fellowship (September 1), Grants for Collaborative Research on Environment and Health in China (September 1), Abe Fellowship for Journalists (September 15), Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship Faculty Field Competition (October 1), Mellon Mays Predoctoral Research Grants (November 1), and Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa (December 1).