Social Science Space

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2019 (commonly known as the Nobel Prize for Economics) has been awarded to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.” Through the award, the Nobel committee recognized both the significance of development economics in the world today and the innovative approaches developed by these three economists.

Alejandro Portes will be recognized for his award in October. He is the Princeton/University of Miami sociologist behind concepts such as the ethnic enclave and segmented immigration.

The late South African musician Johnny Clegg was also an anthropologist both formally, as a lecturer on ethnography, and informally as he continued a teaching career from the stage.

Text Wash, a new software tool that anonymizes personally identifiable text data, making it accessible to social scientists without compromising its usability for research, has just won the SAGE Concept Grant. This year’s award comes to roughly $30,000.

While ”corporate social responsibility’ is a staple of conversations in the business world, CSR isn’t necessarily on the lips of those outside the boardroom. That guided Janis Teruggi Page and Lawrence J. Parnell as they wrote the new intro to strategic public relations textbook. That message must have resonated, since the TAA honored the book with one of its Most Promising New Textbook Awards.

“Writing a textbook,” says Tom Heinzen, “is a foolish idea.” It’s an enormous undertaking and the rewards a few. But there are some rewards, and Heinzen and Wind Goodfriend, the authors of the new intro textbook ‘Social Psychology,’ are reaping one of them: their book received a Most Promising New Textbook Award from the Textbook & Academic Authors Association, or TAA.

Ian Ross is a development economist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where his studies and work as a research degree student focuses on the financing of water, sanitation and hygiene, or WASH, services. His PhD topic, and doctoral studentship from the Economic and Social Research Council, looks at cost-effectiveness of sanitation in Maputo, Mozambique, and one aspect on this is also the subject of this co-winning essay from the ESRC Better Lives Writing Competition. The competition asked PhD students who have received money from the ESRC write short essays about how their research leads too better lives.

Rosie Cowan ticked numerous beats in her journalism career: politics for the Press Association, business for The Belfast Telegraph, and Ireland and later crime for the Guardian. Now a postgraduate research student in the School of Law at Queen’s University Belfast, she displays both her subject-matter expertise and writing skills in this co-winning essay from the ESRC Better Lives Writing Competition. The competition asked PhD students who have received money from the ESRC write short essays about how their research leads too better lives.

Celia Robbins, a PhD student at the University of Exeter, spent 25 years working in environment and sustainability. In this shortlisted essay from the ESRC Better Lives Writing Competition, she examines how wind energy has been playing out in Cornwall, and what that means for renewables beyond that bucolic county.

Social anthropologist Chloë Place, a research student at the University of Sussex, had both worked for the National Health Service working with older people with dementia and spent a lot of time living in Andalusia when she became interested in studying approaches to aging in the Andalusian context. In this shortlisted essay from the ESRC Better Lives Writing Competition, in which PhD students who have received money from the ESRC write short essays about how their research leads too better lives, she describes how her ethnographic look at kinship care in a rural Spanish setting influences her perspectives on care elsewhere.

As part of a pioneering effort to systematically use privacy-protected Facebook data to study the platform’s impact on democracy, the Social Science Research Council and its partner Social Science One have named the inaugural recipients of the Social Media and Democracy Research Grants.

Sociologist Lauren O’Connell, a postgraduate research student at the University of Essex, holds a scholarship from the Economic and Social Research Council for her doctoral research exploring how clinical diagnosis and treatment shapes the experience of anorexia nervosa. In this shortlisted essay from the ESRC Better Lives Writing Competition, in which PhD students who have received money from the ESRC write short essays about how their research leads too better lives, she details how her own experiences influenced her work.