From Our Programs
SSRC programs focus on scholarly innovation and border-crossing, deepening understanding of major public issues, and providing opportunities for social researchers. From Our Programs provides a window on current work at the SSRC, including intellectual breakthroughs and challenges; impacts on practice and policy; and the craft of organizing social knowledge production, dissemination, and use.
Democracy Papers
How Social Media Influences Democracy: New State-of-the-Field Report from a Recent Conference
by Kris-Stella Trump
The Media & Democracy program has released a report on the proceedings from its April 2018 conference on "Social Media and Democracy." Here, program codirector Kris-Stella Trump provides an overview of the report and discusses the motivation behind the convening.
From Our Programs
Youth Disconnection Rates Highlight Structural Barriers to Achievement in the US
by Kristen Lewis, Sarah Burd-Sharps and Becky Ofrane
Kristen Lewis, Sarah Burd-Sharps, and Becky Ofrane dive into the demographic data in Measure of America’s latest report on youth disconnection, More than a Million Reasons for Hope. While the recent rebounding economy offers some good news in terms of the overall disconnection rates among young people, these remain disturbingly high for minority youth. The authors argue economic growth alone cannot erase the multiple structural barriers and institutional racism that produce significant gaps in the disconnection rates between different racial and ethnic groups, but solutions can be found through local organizations and by including youth in the conversation.
A Portrait of LA County
A Portrait of Los Angeles County Revisited: Responding to Scholars’ Reflections
by Kristen Lewis and Sarah Burd-Sharps
Responding to the reflections on A Portrait of Los Angeles County, Measure of America codirectors Kristen Lewis and Sarah Burd-Sharps first provide an overview of how they applied the Human Development Index to Los Angeles, including the categorizing of different neighborhoods from Glittering to Precarious. They then engage with key issues of ethnicity, incarceration, and the ways different parts of LA County are interrelated and affect each other—all issues that emerge from the reflections by Jennifer Lee, Pedro Noguera, and Kelly Lytle Hernandez and Terry Allen.
A Portrait of LA County
Access to Freedom: Caged LA
by Kelly Lytle Hernandez and Terry Allen
In this reflection on MOA’s A Portrait of LA County report, Kelly Lytle Hernandez and Terry Allen connect their research on incarceration and policing in LA to the report’s findings. The same neighborhoods coded as Struggling LA and Precarious LA by the report have the highest incarceration rates, as well as high “collateral damage” of the prison system such as the cost of bail. The authors refer to these parts of the city and county as Caged LA, and argue that an understanding of urban inequality needs to incorporate patterns of incarceration into measures of human development.
A Portrait of LA County
Advancing Human Development for All in Los Angeles County
by Pedro A. Noguera
In a new response to the recently published Measure of America report A Portrait of LA County, Pedro Noguera unpacks a range of socioeconomic disparities revealed in the report. Noguera calls attention to how comparing inequalities across neighborhoods can miss the ways in which different parts of LA are interconnected—how what happens in one part of the city shapes social outcomes elsewhere. Showing how the lack of affordable housing, long commutes, and poor access to quality education are related, he proposes recommendations for addressing inequality based upon geographic interdependencies.
A Portrait of LA County
It Takes More than Grit: Reframing Asian American Academic Achievement
by Jennifer Lee
Jennifer Lee begins Items’ set of reflections on A Portrait of LA County—a new report from the SSRC’s Measure of America program—by building on its data for educational outcomes by ethnicity. In particular, she complicates the myth surrounding the educational success of Asian Americans, and the frequent reference to culture as its principal cause, by disaggregating the category of “Asian.” By exploring class and geographic differences in outcomes, Lee uncovers key socioeconomic dimensions to variations within the “Asian” category as well as between it and other ethnicities in Los Angeles.
From Our Programs
Rethinking the Politics of Violent Conflict
by Tatiana Carayannis
Program Director Tatiana Carayannis provides some of the conceptual basis for a new SSRC program on Understanding Violent Conflict. This essay traces the program’s origins in new understandings of the complexity of contemporary international conflict—including the importance of local dimensions and the extra-local nature of so much violence. Building on the recent work of the Justice and Security Research Program (JSRP) on how public authority is exercised in conflict settings, the UVC will take these lessons in a range of new directions, especially in the Middle East and Africa.
Democracy Papers
A Political Science Research Agenda on Climate Change
by Kris-Stella Trump and Cole Edick
The Anxieties of Democracy (AoD) program’s Working Group on Climate Change has released three substantive reports on the ways in which social science, particularly political science, can and should engage with climate change. Here, AoD’s Kris-Stella Trump and Cole Edick provide an overview of the reports, which address the political demand for addressing climate change, the politics of choosing climate change policies, and the ethical and normative concerns that underscore the need for political action. Each report provides a concise overview of current research and outlines suggestions for future work.
From Our Programs
Doing What Comes Naturally, or, Being Interdisciplinary Isn’t All That Hard to Do
by Gaurav Desai
Gaurav Desai contributes to our "Interdisciplinarity Now" series by reflecting on his experiences on the selection panel of the Council’s largest fellowship competition, the International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) Program. Desai highlights a number of elements that make a research project interdisciplinary—drawing on the conceptual frameworks and methods of multiple disciplines (especially those fields not immediately proximate to one’s home discipline) and framing the research in ways that would resonate across a range of fields and approaches.