Items Insights from the Social Sciences

Time 2020-09-22 15:04:47

Web Name: Items Insights from the Social Sciences

WebSite: http://items.ssrc.org

ID:55867

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With research on the social impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic now underway, Courtney Cogburn argues for examining who receives funding We learn of many crises only from the media—from far-way earthquakes to spectacular child abductions to life-changing national election results. In their essay for “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences,” Samantha Montano and Amanda Savitt break down the importance of event As the Covid-19 pandemic has forced millions to remain in their homes and restricted the capacity of public spaces, people have turned to online spaces Claudia Landwehr, Christopher Ojeda, and Oliver Tüscher ask how the effects on mental health from the Covid-19 crisis might be related to political participation. Drawing The Black Press in the United States has a long history of countering negative racialization of Black people’s health. In keeping with this history, the From Our Programs The Social Science Research Council Announces the Recipients of the Social Data Research and Dissertation Fellowships The intertwined dynamics of urban “revitalization” and the displacement and destabilization of African Americans in US cities is not a phenomenon new to twenty-first century New York City. Amanda Boston’s examination of the “redevelopment” of Downtown Brooklyn exposes the changing roles of government and the market in the erasure and destabilization of long-standing communities of color. As municipal government has moved from market regulator to market facilitator—inviting the influx of global capital and gentrification into majority-minority neighborhoods—the impact on the space has benefited the affluent (often white) residents and consumers of the city to the detriment of minority communities. A consideration of the construction of the Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn provides a close-to-home lens on the role of race and profit in the organization of urban space. Adapted from the introduction to Power, Culture, and Place, this article published in 1988 examines the importance of New York City as a site of social science research. John H. Mollenkopf, a member of the Council’s Committee on New York City (1985–1991), explains how, at the time, social science research despatialized its investigations with the aim of obtaining generalizable results; however, the interactions of power, culture, and economics do not happen in a vacuum. To better understand these and other social dynamics and relations, Mollenkopf argues for centering urban spaces, in particular New York City which has a rich social history and remains a key point in the flows of people, trade, and culture. Testing and models, medical and educational, have come under scrutiny during the Covid-19 pandemic. In particular, the coronavirus crisis has accelerated the conversation on the challenges of educational testing. Here, William Dardick looks at the reliability, validity, and fairness of educational assessments, and how these varied characteristics all factor into how policymakers employ testing and their results. In Zheng Wang’s contribution to our “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” series, he examines how the pandemic shapes relations between countries when governments deploy it as a symbolic tool of statecraft. He first discusses how a rhetoric of blame for the spread of the coronavirus has deepened tensions between China and the United States. He then contrasts this with the interactions between China and Japan in the early stages of the pandemic. Japan’s provisions of masks to China, and the use of a Chinese poem on the shipping packages, helped reduce tensions in a relationship historically marked by distrust and suspicion. What does it mean to wage a war against disease? Martial metaphors have pervaded the news since January 2020 when the coronavirus began to spread, from the rhetoric of political leaders to the imagery around the effort to contain the virus. Joining Jenny Reardon and Tim Hwang in examining these militaristic metaphors, Robert Peckham argues that such metaphors prevent us from engaging with the complexity of the pandemic and its long-term effects. For the “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” series, Ilmari Käihkö reflects on the effects of distance. Mirroring the author’s experience of research impacted by the Ebola epidemic in Liberia, Covid-19 too has forced a reckoning with the emergence of “new normalities” and the physical and social distancing imposed by viruses. Käihkö not only considers the work of ethnography from a distance, but also weighs the effects—and affects—of researching and writing in isolation. Misinformation can be deadly. The Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated that fact clearly and tragically. While the big tech companies have taken some steps to rein in misinformation and make credible organizations more visible, they lag far behind the pundits, scammers, and extremists who abuse trust on a global scale. It’s time for companies and researchers to take risks, make bold experiments, and rigorously test ways to slow the speed and spread of deadly deceptions. The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted epidemiological reliance upon models and statistics for understanding the impact and spread of the disease. Given the convergence of health and economics, it proves worthwhile to explore the origins, techniques, and status of econometric models as tools for health policy. For the “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” series, Bryan Dowd recounts the history of econometrics and describes recent developments, showing that it has become a standard tool for analyzing data and informing policy decisions. For the “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” series, Moshe Justman asks whether there may be tradeoffs in a model’s precision and its ability to inform policy. Justman explores the rise of randomized control trials (RCTs) in economics as the “gold standard” for inferring causality, and provides a detailed account of Project STAR—a landmark RCT study in education. A lesson for research informing policy on Covid-19, he argues, is that the messier models of epidemiologists are more useful to practitioners than the purportedly more rigorous RCTs designed by health economists. Mobilizing social science for the public good. The Social Science Research Council, an independent, international nonprofit, mobilizes necessary knowledge for the public good by supporting scholars worldwide, generating new research across disciplines, and linking researchers with policymakers and citizens. 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