Social Science Space

Two academics who have integrated what might have once seemed like non-economic externalities into economic models have been awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics. The winners are William D. Nordhaus of Yale University, cited for integrating climate change into macroeconomic analysis, and Paul M. Romer of New York University’s Stern School of Business, cited doing the same with technological innovations.

Five people with backgrounds in social, behavioral or data science were among 25 named in the 2018 class of MacArthur Foundation fellows. The fellowship and grant program, sometimes referred to as the “genius grant,” awards exceptionally creative people with $625,000 – no strings attached — in expectation that based on their track record they will achieve something important in the future.

The longtime director of the Royal Geographical Society, Rita Gardner CBE, will be the new chief executive of the United Kingdom’s Academy of Social Sciences. She fills the vacancy created by the retirement of Stephen Anderson after more than 10 years.

In launching its first-ever task force report on Monday, the 95-year-old Social Science Research Council made clear it gets by with a little help from its friends. Collaboration, said sociologist Alondra Nelson Nelson, the president of the SSRC, is the byword of the report, To Secure Knowledge: Social Science Partnerships for the Common Good.

U.S. government-funded research that on its face looked only at fame, names and gender turned out to be pioneering work into implicit bias. This year a Golden Goose Award went to three researchers who developed the concept of implicit bias and then made a huge impact on popular culture by giving the world a test to measure it.

Sociologist Wendy Larner, provost at Victoria University of Wellington, began her three-year term as president of New Zealand’s Royal Society […]

The British Academy is honoring political journalists Zeinab Badawi and Dame Frances Cairncross among a number of individuals awarded for their services to the humanities and social sciences.

Sheila Sen Jasanoff, the founder and director of Harvard University’s Program on Science, Technology and Society, will receive the Social Science Research Council’s highest honor, the Albert O. Hirschman Prize, and deliver the Hirschman lecture — “Theory, Critique, and Discipline in a Post-Truth Age” — on November 30

Have you ever wanted to engage with thousands of individuals from the evaluation community? Perhaps gather for a shared experience […]

Noted science communicator and political scientist Arthur ‘Skip’ Lupia will take the reins of the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences starting in September.

Ziyad Marar, the president of global publishing for SAGE, explains how SAGE’s values and its mission “to build bridges to knowledge” overlap with the intent of the United Kingdom’s Evidence Week, which takes place later this June.

In the coming weeks, Social Science Space will publish a series of interviews on academic capitalism and academic resistance. These interviews pertain to the event “Between the discourse of ‘resilience’ and death by committee – Reclaiming collective spaces for academic resistance,” organised by the Early Career Forum of the British Sociological Association and hosted by Newcastle University.