Introduction: The Many Crises of Middle East Studies

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seteney Shami ◽  
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
University Restructuring ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Middle East Studies

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to draw a portrait of the issues animating and challenging the field of Middle East studies (MES) in their academic and national contexts. The book presents some of the findings of a decade-long (2000–2010) research project organized by the Social Science Research Council in New York, which began with examining Middle East studies and expanded to investigate other area studies fields as well as the thrust toward the global in US universities. It is concerned with three main themes: the relationship between MES and various disciplines (political science, sociology, economics, and geography), current reformulations and new emphases in MES (in terms of university restructuring, language training, and scholarly trends), the politics of knowledge, and the impact on the field of MES of the many crises in the region.

Cross-Regional Approaches to Middle East Studies: Constructing and Deconstructing a Region

2007 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Kurzman
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Research Council ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
The Past ◽  
Chapel Hill ◽  
The Social ◽  
The University ◽  
Middle East Studies

The Middle East is deconstructing—that is, the concept of a coherent geographic entity with the label “Middle East.” A Thematic Conversation on this subject began at the 2005 MESA Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., and will conclude at the 2007 meeting in Montréal. These discussions grow out of efforts in the 1990s to rethink area studies globally, spurred by programs at the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council, among others. A variety of scholars have taken up these issues with regard to the Middle East specifically over the past decade, including the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which organized this Thematic Conversation.

Middle East Studies for the New Millennium: Infrastructures of Knowledge

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Mechanical Field ◽  
The Social ◽  
Institutional Contexts ◽  
Global World ◽  
Middle East Studies

This chapter deplores the state of Middle East social sciences, which is described as demoralized, lacking academic freedom and reliable research data, and functioning in a general climate of repression, neglect, and isolation. Such conditions call into question the extent to which future social scientists will be able to build supportive scholarly communities or develop critical perspectives so key to social science research and the investigation of questions of public import. Echoing discussions in this volume on methodological shifts in the social science disciplines, it argues that the quantitative turn has produced a narrow, mechanical field unable to move forward in ways that attend to the diversity of the social and political world. As the field has emphasized technical skills over moral imperatives, and as the institutional contexts of US universities has changed, the result has been a simultaneous narrowing of the field and a projection of greater universalization for a global world.

scholarly journals Has the Credibility of the Social Sciences Been Credibly Destroyed? Reanalyzing the “Many Analysts, One Data Set” Project

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 237802312110244
Author(s):  
Katrin Auspurg ◽  
Josef Brüderl
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Causal Reasoning ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Skin Tone ◽  
Data Set ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Many ◽  
Definition Of

In 2018, Silberzahn, Uhlmann, Nosek, and colleagues published an article in which 29 teams analyzed the same research question with the same data: Are soccer referees more likely to give red cards to players with dark skin tone than light skin tone? The results obtained by the teams differed extensively. Many concluded from this widely noted exercise that the social sciences are not rigorous enough to provide definitive answers. In this article, we investigate why results diverged so much. We argue that the main reason was an unclear research question: Teams differed in their interpretation of the research question and therefore used diverse research designs and model specifications. We show by reanalyzing the data that with a clear research question, a precise definition of the parameter of interest, and theory-guided causal reasoning, results vary only within a narrow range. The broad conclusion of our reanalysis is that social science research needs to be more precise in its “estimands” to become credible.

Social Science in the Courtroom

2021 ◽  
pp. 240-243
Author(s):  
Michael J. Rosenfeld
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
White Children ◽  
Same Sex Couples ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Many

Chapter 18 describes social science research of the 1940s and 1950s that showed how segregation harmed both minority and majority populations and thereby played a role in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. Between 1896, when the Supreme Court endorsed segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson to 1954, when the Supreme Court rejected segregation, social science had built a consensus about the many harms and costs that racial segregation imposed on Black and on White children. Like school desegregation, marriage equality’s victories in the courts were built on a social science consensus, specifically the social science consensus that children raised by same-sex couples have good outcomes.

scholarly journals A New Model for Industry–Academic Partnerships

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 703-709 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary King ◽  
Nathaniel Persily
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Data Access ◽  
Private Companies ◽  
Consumer Privacy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Charitable Foundations ◽  
Academic Partnerships ◽  
The Impact

ABSTRACTThe mission of the social sciences is to understand and ameliorate society’s greatest challenges. The data held by private companies, collected for different purposes, hold vast potential to further this mission. Yet, because of consumer privacy, trade secrets, proprietary content, and political sensitivities, these datasets are often inaccessible to scholars. We propose a novel organizational model to address these problems. We also report on the first partnership under this model, to study the incendiary issues surrounding the impact of social media on elections and democracy: Facebook provides (privacy-preserving) data access; eight ideologically and substantively diverse charitable foundations provide initial funding; an organization of academics we created, Social Science One, leads the project; and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard and the Social Science Research Council provide logistical help.

scholarly journals Dependency, History, and Scholarship: An Interview with Professor Stanley J. Stein

2010 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-392
Author(s):  
Vincent Peloso
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Social History ◽  
Latin American ◽  
American History ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
Latin American History ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Impact

Stanley J. Stein, Walter Samuel Carpenter III Professor of Spanish Civilization and Culture and Professor of History, Emeritus, at Princeton University, is a lifelong Latin Americanist. Together with his late wife Barbara, herself an accomplished bibliographer and historian of the region, Professor Stein wrote several books and articles that put their stamp on methods of writing the social history of modern Latin America, specifically on the impact of colonialism and industrialism in Mexico and Brazil in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is fair to say that no one who studied Latin American history over the last 35 years would have failed to engage the slim, elegantly written synthesis, The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective (1970). Recipients of grants and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, singly or together, the Steins were honored for their path-breaking studies with the CLAH Robertson and Bolton prizes, the Conference on Latin American History Distinguished Service Award (1991), and the American Historical Association Award for Scholarly Distinction (1996).

Pease Porridge in a Pot: The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa

1993 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 43-51
Author(s):  
Bruce Fetter
Keyword(s):  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
University Of California ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Monographs And Collections ◽  
Social Basis ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Press ◽  
Health And Healing ◽  
The Many

Pease porridge hot, pease porridge coldPease porridge in the pot nine days oldSome like it hot, some like it coldBut none like it in the pot nine days old.The recent flurry of monographs and collections relating to the social aspects of medicine and disease in Africa and elsewhere ensures that collections of essays on this topic will receive much attention and will be concomitantly influential. Under the circumstances it is particularly regretable that the volume under review has been published so many years after most of the essays in it were written, precluding their referring to the many recent advances in the field. Of the 21 articles and introductory essays in Steven Feierman and John Janzen, eds., The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), six (amounting to 24% of the text) are reprints, seven (35%) are revisions whose originals date from 1979 and 1981, and eight (41%) are originals. Of these latter, two chapters date from 1983, and two of the reprints have been supplanted by book-length monographs. One must therefore ask of the editors, the press, and the Joint Committee on African Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council whether such unusually delayed publication is justified.

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