Social Science Space

The knowledge economy. Intellectual property. Software. Maybe even bitcoin. All pretty much intangible, and yet all clearly real and genuinely valuable. This is the realm where economist Jonathan Haskel of Imperial College London mints his own non-physical scholarship.

Sheila Jasanoff is a pioneer in the field of STS. That acronym can be unpacked as either ‘science and technology studies’ or ‘science, technology and society.’ Jasanoff — who describes herself as a sociologist of knowledge and a constructivist, trained in law, working in the tradition of the interpretive social sciences – is content with either use.

Behavioral economist John List talks about his work on field experiments and how research done in the natural world can lead to insights that otherwise might be hard to tease out in a lab.

Kathelijne Koops, a biological anthropologist at the University of Zurich, works to determine what makes us human. And she approaches this quest by intensely studying the use of tools by other species across sub-Saharan Africa.

The idea of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes is often trotted out as a metaphor for understanding empathy. […]

In this podcast, Northwestern University’s Joel , Mokyr tells interviewer Dave Edmonds, “I use economics to understand history, and I use history to understand economics.”

In this Social Science Bites podcast, social anthropologist Karin Barber offers a specific case study of the application of the verbal arts by examining in depth some of the genres common in the Yoruba-speaking areas of Western Africa.

COVID-19 has changed everything, including how we work (and to be more precise, are employed). But in order to best […]

Jeffrey Ian Ross, a professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Baltimore, is one of the originators of the concept of ‘convict criminology.’

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Molefi Kete Asante offers an insiders view of the growth of the Afrocentric paradigm, from the founding of the Journal of Black Studies a half century ago to the debates over critical race theory today.

There is inequality in the United States, a fact most people accept and which data certainly bears out. But how bad do you think that inequality is, say, based on comparing the wealth held by the average Black person in America and the average white person?

The twin prods of a U.S. president trying to rebrand the coronavirus as the ‘China virus’ and a bloody attack in Atlanta that left six Asian women dead have brought to the fore a spate of questions about Asian Americans in the United States.
Sociologist Jennifer Lee is answering those questions.