Publisher Sara Miller McCune has established The SAGE Fund for Research Methods at the SSRC,
a $3 million endowment to support scholarly evaluation and monitoring
of research methodologies and promote the development of new social
science tools and styles of investigation.
The Decent City initiative cohosted an international debate on “The Possible City”
in Barcelona, Spain, with the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de
Barcelona. Sessions included “What Is a Decent City? Polarities of
Pragmatism and Utopia,” with SSRC president Ira Katznelson and sociologist Richard Sennett, and “The Possible City: From Urban Planning to Democracy,” with SSRC board member Teresa Caldeira
and urban design and studies scholars Richard Burdett and Diane Davis [video available].
In partnership with the SSRC,
the American Civil Liberties Union published a study demonstrating how
nuisance laws deter the reporting of crime and further victimize
vulnerable people, in particular domestic violence survivors: Silenced: How Nuisance Ordinances Punish Crime Victims in New York [PDF available].
The African Peacebuilding Network released a policy brief on “Nigeria’s 2015 Elections: Lessons and Prospects for Democratic Consolidation” [PDF available]. APN director Cyril Obi, who hails from Nigeria, appeared on Sahara TV, a broadcast outlet of the New York–based Sahara Reporters, to discuss the historic inauguration of the new Nigerian president
[video], and in a policy statement for the South African Institute of International Affairs, offered insights on the potential benefits of a reinvigorated Nigerian–South African partnership.
Tatiana Carayannis, deputy director of the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum, coedited Making Sense of the Central African Republic, now available in the United Kingdom from Zed Books (US release August 15), contributing a chapter on “CAR’s Southern Identity: Congo, CAR, and International Justice.”
Seteney Shami, director of the InterAsia Program and the Middle East and North Africa Program, discussed her experience shaping collaborative research beyond borders at the SSRC and as founding director of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences in an interview for the journal New Perspectives on Turkey: “Social Sciences in the Middle East: Community Building in an Embattled Region.”
Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project director Leon Sigal lent his expertise in a Korea Times article that collected the responses of US experts to reports of a North Korean test-fire of a submarine-launched ballistic missile, and writing for the National Interest, challenged assumptions by many in Washington that further arming by Pyongyang is a foregone conclusion.
The Education Research Program volumes Academically Adrift and Aspiring Adults Adrift provided context for a New York Review of Books piece on inequality in higher education, and David Brooks drew on Aspiring Adults Adrift in a New York Times op-ed, “How Adulthood Happens.” Program director Richard Arum and Aspiring Adults Adrift
coauthor Josipa Roksa reviewed their findings in an interview with Radio Higher Ed, a podcast on postsecondary education policy.
New fellow cohorts have been announced for 2015: The Drugs, Security and Democracy Program has awarded dissertation and postdoctoral fellowships to international scholars for five policy-relevant research projects in English, Portuguese, and Spanish on the primary theme of drugs in Latin America or the Caribbean. The International Dissertation Research Fellowship Program selected eighty fellows from thirty-four institutions and across fifteen disciplines
in the humanities and humanistic social sciences to pursue projects that advance knowledge about non-US cultures and societies.
Drugs, Security and Democracy fellow Javier Osorio (2011) was awarded the top prize
in the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime’s Fourth International
Thesis Competition on Victimization, Crime and Justice in Latin America
for his DSD-supported dissertation “Hobbes on Drugs: Understanding Drug Violence in Mexico.”
Drugs, Security and Democracy and International Dissertation Research Fellowship fellow Alex Fattal (2012 and 2009) received the 2015 Martin Diskin Memorial Dissertation Award
from the Latin American Studies Association and Oxfam America in
recognition of his creative combination of activism and scholarship.
Working papers presented at “Pushing the Boundaries of Migration
Studies: Perspectives from the US and France,” a conference cosponsored
by the Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship Program with Harvard University’s Transnational Studies Initiative, are now available online, featuring contributions by DPDF fellows Anne Bouhali (2012), Matthieu Mazzega (2010), Josepha Milazzo (2012), Guillaume T. Ma Mung
(2010), Sihé Néya (2012), Cynthia Salloum (2011), and Evren Yalaz (2010).
A number of other fellows have also recently published work developed from their fellowship research. Abe fellow Mary Alice Haddad (2009) coedited and authored a chapter as well as the conclusion for NIMBY Is Beautiful: Cases of Local Activism and Environmental Innovation around the World (Berghahn Books), based on her project on “Environmental Politics and Civic Participation in East Asia.” African Peacebuilding Network Individual Research grantee Amy Niang
(2013) wrote on “Ransoming, Compensatory Violence, and Humanitarianism in the Sahel” for the journal Alternatives: Global, Local, Political. And Drugs, Security and Democracy fellow Erika M. Robb Larkins
(2013) drew on her ethnographic research in Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro, to
show how favela violence is produced as a marketable global brand in The Spectacular Favela: Violence in Modern Brazil (University of California Press).