Social Science Space

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.

Martha Newson, linked to the universities of Oxford and Kent, describes how fans of football often fuse their own identities into a tightly bonded group (even as they retain their individuality).

In the context of human action, management professor at HEC Paris and former McKinsey senior partner Olivier Sibony defines “noise” as the unwanted variability in human judgment.

In this montage drawn from the last two years of Social Science Bites podcasts, interviewer David Edmonds poses the same question to 25 notable social scientists: Whose work most influenced your own?

When Jim Scott mentions ‘resistance,’ this recovering political scientist isn’t usually talking about grand symbolic statements or large-scale synchronized actions by thousands or more battling an oppressive state. He’s often referring to daily actions by average people, often not acting in concert and perhaps not even seeing themselves as ‘resisting’ at all.

The study of stigma, is, says Michèle Lamont, a “booming field.” That assessment can be both sad and hopeful, and in this Social Science Bites podcast the Harvard sociologist explains stigma’s manifestations and ways to combat it, as well as what it takes a for a researcher to actually study stigma.