From Our Archives

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Environmental Discourses and Human Welfare in South and Southeast Asia

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To accompany Prasenjit Duara’s essay, we republish Paul Greenough and Anna Tsing’s 1994 contribution to Items. The authors articulate an intellectual agenda for a collaborative project between the Council’s South and Southeast Asia programs focused on how environmental discourses intersect with development in the context of these regions’ colonial legacies. Engaging topics and concepts such as “wild nature,” natural disasters, biodiversity, ecotourism, and environmental science, the essay was the first step toward the eventual publication of a volume edited by Greenough and Tsing entitled Nature in the Global South.

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November 7, 2017

Landed Property Rights and Global Environmental Change

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In this archive piece, John F. Richards and David C. Major describe a project, a core component of the Council’s Global Environmental Change Program, to study the role of landed property rights in global environmental change. Grappling with theoretical issues related to location, scale, bundles of rights, and communities, the project sought to understand the relationship between culture, nature, and place. Moreover, it was structured around an interactive research process, one that fostered interdisciplinarity and a coherent dialogue among its participants.

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September 19, 2017

National Implementation and Compliance with International Environmental Accords

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In this archive piece Harold Jacobson and Edith Brown Weiss explain how the Council’s Committee for Research on Global Environmental Change led the way in researching how countries implement and comply with international environmental agreements. Jacobson and Brown Weiss lay out how the group defined implementation and compliance and ask multiple questions that are relevant today in terms of more comprehensive climate change accords. Though the project focused on what countries do when they are signatories to an accord, not what happens when they pull out—as the Trump administration did with the Paris Agreement—understanding state behavior on this topic, and how social scientists wrestled with it over 20 years ago, remains valuable.

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August 22, 2017

Puzzles of Global Environmental Change

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Continuing our archival posts on the work of The Council's Committee for Research on Global Environmental Change, here Richard Rockwell provides a detailed account of the various ways in which the social sciences can contribute to a wide array of research puzzles at the intersection of human and social activity with the environment. Rockwell also argues that engaging with natural scientists on these questions will strengthen the social sciences more broadly.

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July 25, 2017

Human Processes in Earth Transformation: A Proposed Council Program on the Social Sciences and Global Environmental Change

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In 1988, the Council embarked on an ambitious new initiative on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change. In tandem with Items’s new series on “Just Environments,” we are publishing the first of a set of archival essays detailing the development and progress of this program. Anticipating a research agenda on what has come to be called the “anthropocene,” executive associate Richard Rockwell describes an initial planning conference at Brown University and presciently writes, “The time has surely come to incorporate social perspectives more adequately into research on humans as forces in nature.”

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June 13, 2017

The Conference on Problems of Area Research in Contemporary Africa

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The Items archive contains a wide range of essays on the evolution of area studies in the United States. Here, Bryce Wood reports on a major 1953 conference at Princeton University that played a role the development of African studies, bringing together a wide range of actors soon to have major influence on the establishment of that interdisciplinary field. It was cosponsored by the National Research Council and supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which now funds two of the SSRC’s most significant programs in Africa, albeit with a focus on social scientists in Africa—Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa and the African Peacebuilding Network.

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May 16, 2017

Neighborhoods and Communities in Concentrated Poverty

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Continuing our series of archival posts on the SSRC’s influential Committee on the Urban Underclass, Council staff associate Martha Gephart reports on efforts by the program to articulate a research agenda on what is now a major focal point in urban studies: neighborhood effects. Early committee discussions engaged not only on the effects of neighborhoods on the socioeconomic prospects of disadvantaged individuals, families, and communities, but also debates on how to define and delimit a “neighborhood” and on the broader social forces that both are channeled through local institutions and that change neighborhoods over time.

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April 18, 2017

Economy, Culture, Public Policy, and the Urban Underclass

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In the second in a series of essays from the Items archives on the SSRC’s Urban Underclass program, Robert Pearson provides an overview of key issues engaged by the program’s advisory committee. Focusing on the concentration and persistence of urban poverty in the United States, the group debated the impact of global economic changes, labor market transformations, the intended and unintended consequences of public policies, and the controversial place of “culture” in understanding the fragile social-economic status of many urban residents and communities.

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April 4, 2017

Contemporary Research on the Urban Underclass

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In the late 1980s, the Council launched a new program focused on urban poverty in the United States. The Council's program on the Urban Underclass brought together a wide range of disciplinary expertise, and focused on understanding the connections between macroeconomic change, deindustrialization, neighborhood attributes and processes, and individual and family outcomes. In the first of several Items features on the program, its leading staff―Martha Gephart and Robert Pearson―describe its origins and rationale.

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March 21, 2017

Postcolonial Urban Apartheid

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In this 2006 essay from the Items archive, Paul Silverstein and Chantal Tetreault examine the social history out of which the November 2005 riots in the suburbs of Paris (and across France) arose. In their analysis, they discuss the use of colonial era laws and broader parallels with overseas French colonial rule that constitute a form of internal colonialism with regard to migrant communities in France itself. The parallels with N. D. B. Connolly’s new essay on the contemporary relevance Robert Allen are clear—i.e., one way of understanding racial and ethnic marginalization and discrimination (in the United States or France) is through the lens of colonial relations and structures.

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March 7, 2017
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