Through an analysis of the influence of Cold War–era research and funding structures on modes of disaster research, Cécile Stehrenberger explains how and why the…
Our video is vanishing by design and threatening the collective memory of the largest social justice movement in US history. At the same time, archiving…
For the “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” series, Adam Baczko and Gilles Dorronsoro argue for the necessity of resuming fieldwork. They trace how subcontracting research…
As Western democracies debate social media regulation, Jonathan Corpus Ong outlines the valuable lessons they can draw from Southeast Asian experiences. Governments in the region have weaponized regulation and hijacked moral panics about disinformation to consolidate control over the digital environment. The challenge facing the world, he argues, is to build a more precise language of responsibility to tackle this multidimensional issue.
As part of the annual “Democratic Erosion” undergraduate series, Jamie Horowitz examines the potential effects of disinformation in Colombia—in particular, disinformation campaigns related to the country’s 2016 peace deal referendum and the 2018 Colombian presidential election. Horowitz finds that well-known politicians are primarily responsible for disseminating disinformation in Colombia, which then circulates unbridled on WhatsApp. Disinformation campaigns, she argues, serve to polarize the population, which, in turn, leads to democratic erosion that manifests in low trust in electoral procedures and government.
A short foray into an AI-based platform’s effort to tackle hate speech reveals its promise, but also the enormous inherent challenges of language and context. Debunking the “magic wand” vision of AI moderation, Sahana Udupa calls for a collaborative approach between developers and critical communities.
Alexis Rider’s contribution to the “Ways of Water” series argues for the utility of imaging ice as a rock, and not just frozen water. From glaciers to icebergs to the way layers of ice sheets have shaped landscapes (including New York City), the study of ice—as both a force and as a preserver of the past—opens temporal windows on long-term changes in both geology and society. Rider takes us from early expeditions of Antarctica to the present, in which “rocky ice” is “an interlocutor for the climate crisis.”
Hate speech does not operate in a vacuum, and its rise reflects changing political contexts. If we’re serious about fighting hate speech and its violent and destabilizing consequences, we need to identify its earliest manifestations. Babak Bahador offers a hate-speech intensity scale, a strategy that allows us to move beyond the binary approach that dominates current hate speech research. This concept can be operationalized to better identify and understand the evolutions of hate speech before it leads to real-world harms.
As part of the annual “Democratic Erosion” student series, Edcel John Ibarra examines the deterioration of the judicial independence of the Philippine Supreme Court in recent history, especially under Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency. Pointing to the relationship between judicial independence and democratic consolidation, he argues that the Philippine judiciary has historically been a crucial bulwark against democratic erosion. However, presidential and congressional efforts to reshape the Supreme Court in recent years have undermined its independence, and so the country may have to rely on other safeguards.
In this contribution to the “Ways of Water” series, Debjani Bhattacharyya examines how the tides of the Hooghly River in Kolkata have been visually represented historically. In doing so, she makes a larger point about how cartographic images of the intermingling of rivers and cities fix this relationship in time and space. Bhattacharyya contrasts representations of the Hooghly in maps with those in almanacs, which capture both the temporal and cosmological meanings and practices as experienced by Kolkata’s residents under colonial rule.
While many analyses have focused on the human-level health and economic impacts on essential workers themselves, Andrew Lakoff examines how the emergence of structural policies to “secure the supply chain” in times of disaster and public health crises created new categories of workers, and therefore of risk. In spite of the sense of urgency that emerged in the 2000s around the need to prepare for a global pandemic, the resulting guidance put forward in response to Covid-19 allowed for the social classification of essential workers to be subject to significant industry lobbying, with little regard to health and safety protections for those workers.
Ahead of the 2004 presidential election, the SSRC convened the National Research Commission on Elections and Voting after being approached by social scientists and election observers concerned about the lack of a resource for nonpartisan scholarship on electoral process controversies in the United States. The Commission published its final report in March 2005 highlighting ten key topics in need of continuing social science research, many of which remain relevant in 2020.
