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interdisciplinary structures

Researching Gun Policy: Futile or Feasible?

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In this “Understanding Gun Violence” essay, Robert Spitzer demystifies a range of perceptions about gun policies and their effects. Spitzer engages a range of laws and regulations—from background checks to waiting periods, and gun storage to concealed carry—and the ways they differ across US states. He finds that more stringent policies correlate with less death and injury from guns. For social scientists interested in the sources and impact of public policy, Spitzer argues that guns are a rich and important zone for future research.

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October 16, 2018

What We Don’t Know Can Hurt Us

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Angela Stroud’s contribution to the “Understanding Gun Violence” series calls for greater conceptual clarity among researchers. As an important example, Stroud examines different ways in which “mass shootings” are defined, and how fuzzy definitions contribute to public perceptions that overestimate their frequency. A more purposeful and sustained interdisciplinary conversation around gun ownership and violence, she argues, is critical for both advancing scholarship and informing public discourse and policy.

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October 16, 2018

Scholarly Committees as Elite Public Action: The SSRC and the Origins of Sociolinguistics

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Starting in the early 1950s, the SSRC cultivated interdisciplinary research into the role of language in culture and thought through its Committees on Psycholinguistics and Sociolinguistics. Here, Monica Heller examines how the latter committee (1963–1979) helped establish sociolinguistics in the United States, investigating the tensions between language, culture, and inequality. In exploring how the committee shifted focus from the developing world to marginalized groups in the United States, Heller addresses how the research agendas of these scholarly structures are influenced by the political dynamics or ideologies of their time, in this case the Cold War and decolonization.

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September 4, 2018

Simulating Cognition: The Legacy of an SSRC-RAND Summer Seminar

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Sixty summers ago, the SSRC’s Committee on the Simulation of Cognitive Processes organized a landmark training institute, in partnership with RAND and codirected by Herbert Simon. The ambitious goal was to push the use of digital computers as key tools in modeling human cognition. Here, Hunter Heyck reflects on the legacy of the institute in advancing the use of computer-assisted “models” in the social sciences and how participants’ future work was shaped by the event. The institute was initially described in a 1958 Items report by Simon and Allan Newell, which we now republish to accompany Heyck’s essay.

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July 3, 2018

Interdisciplinarity as Collaborative Problem Framing

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Building on past contributions to our “Interdisciplinarity Now” series, Eduardo Brondizio emphasizes that interdisciplinary collaboration is fundamentally a reflexive intellectual and social process. Drawing from his own research and teaching experiences in environmental anthropology, Brondizio argues that disciplines, as domains of knowledge production, can serve as productive platforms of interdisciplinary work even as disciplinary organizational structures can be obstacles. A diversity of perspectives and approaches, even when in tension with each other, is essential for understanding fundamentally complex problems such as the environment.

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October 17, 2017

The Practical Effects of Comparative-Historical Sociology

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Ho-fung Hung makes the case for the continued relevance of comparative-historical sociology to our “Interdisciplinarity Now” theme. In ways related Steinmetz’s earlier contribution to the series, Hung illustrates the multiple ways in which the combination of historical work with a macrosociological framework yields deep insights into long-term processes that generate inequality and the responses to it. He also argues that this long-term and large-scale perspective is critical in the formation of policies and the strategies of social movements that pursue progressive social change.

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June 27, 2017

Doing What Comes Naturally, or, Being Interdisciplinary Isn’t All That Hard to Do

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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.

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January 10, 2017

Gender Equity and Interdisciplinary Collaboration

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Based on intensive research in interdisciplinarity in the natural sciences, Laurel Smith-Doerr and Jennifer Croissant engage the question of gender differences in the practice of interdisciplinary collaboration. This is a topic that receives relatively little attention, and the authors identify mixed signals for women scientists—a catch-22 in which women are, often simultaneously, expected to work in interdisciplinary ways (partly due to gender stereotypes), while also advised that doing so is too risky for career development.

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November 1, 2016
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