Social Science Space

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.

With a virus running rampant across the world, the value of a global perspective becomes obvious: We must remember to observe the nuances of cultural and […]

Leith Mullings, an anthropologist whose work on what she dubbed the Sojourner Syndrome created a baseline understanding of the “weathering” that the amplified stresses of race, class, and inequality have on African Americans, and in particular African American women, died on Cancer on December 12.

In the wake of COVID-19, researchers can become trusted figures of authority who can purposely use their institutional privilege and re-appropriate their research networks, skills and knowledge to better the lives of vulnerable populations during a pandemic.

In light of the global coronavirus pandemic, anthropologists around the world have been preparing to utilize knowledge gained from past […]

“You don’t have to go back many months,” says Hetan Shah, the chief executive of the British Academy, in this Social Science Bites podcast, “for a period when politicians were relatively dismissive of experts – and then suddenly we’ve seen a shift now to where they’ve moved very close to scientists. And generally that’s a very good thing.”

Being moved, touched, team pride, patriotism, being touched by the Spirit, burning in the bosom, the feels, or even nostalgia. Many names for what Alan Fiske and his colleagues have determined is one emotion. So theycoined a scientific term for it, ‘kama muta.’

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.

Burned out by the hamster-wheel of academe and the regime of metrics, John Postill decided the tonic would be to write a spoof spy thriller about a Spanish nerd with a silly name who moves to London in 1994 and accidentally foils a terrorist plot by an evil anthropologist.

Everyone is supposed to cheer for good guys. We’re supposed to honor heroes, saints and anyone who helps others, and we should only punish the bad guys. But is the expression ‘no good deed goes unpunished’ really accurate? New research shows we often do, in fact, punish those who do good deeds.

When discussing the nexus of computer science and social science, the transaction is usually in one direction – what can computer scientists do for social scientists. But a recent paper from Tufts University anthropologist Nick Seaver reverses that flow, using the tool of ethnography to interrogate the tools of engineering.

A connection can be made in between Ursula Le Guin’s fiction and her father’s groundbreaking work in anthropology. His ideas – which had a profound influence on his daughter’s writing – stemmed from an important development in the discipline of anthropology, one that viewed human culture as something that wasn’t ingrained, and had to be taught and learned.