Engineer Arati Prabhakar was confirmed by the Senate on September 20 to lead to White House’s Office of Science and Technology (OSTP). She will also serve as co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a role which President Joe Biden raised to a Cabinet-level position in 2021. This confirmation comes after her nomination in June 2022 and subsequent confirmation process.

The OSTP advises the executive branch of the U.S. government on the scientific, engineering, and technological aspects of the economy, national security, homeland security, health, foreign relations, and the environment.

Prabhakar was confirmed by a 56-40 vote in the Senate. Ten Republicans voted in support of Prabhakar, including senators Roy Blunt, Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Cynthia Lummis, Jerry Moran, Lisa Murkowski, Rob Portman, Mike Rounds and Thom Tillis. One Democrat, Joe Manchin, voted against her confirmation.

On the senate floor, Senator Maria Cantwell said, “Dr. Prabhakar has the exact experience we need to advise the President on semiconductor manufacturing, on bringing the supply chain security that we need here in the United States, and on continued growth in science and technology jobs that come along with it.”

Prabhakar succeeds sociologist Alondra Nelson, who served as the interim leader of the OSTP, and former National Institutes of Health director Francis S. Collins, who served as Biden’s acting science adviser, since February 2022, after geneticist Eric Lander stepped down due to bullying allegations by his subordinates. Nelson is expected to return to her prior role as the OSTP’s deputy director for science and society, and Collins is expected to return to retirement.

Nelson commented on Prabhakar’s confirmation in a press release, “The historic bipartisan confirmation of Dr. Arati Prabhakar is a testament to her sterling track record of leadership and innovation stewardship, as well as her extensive expertise in science and technology policy. We are thrilled to welcome her to OSTP and begin a bright new chapter.”

Prabhakar will be the first woman, immigrant and person of color to lead the OSTP. She headed the National Institute of Standards and Technology from 1993 to 1997 and the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency from 2012 to 2017. She also was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University from 2017-2018.

She is expected to begin serving in the role within the next two weeks.

The post Arati Prabhakar Named as Lead of White House’s OSTP appeared first on Social Science Space.

In the wake of challenges to intellectual freedom by government authorities and academics with opposing viewpoints, access to reliable sources and varying perspectives in academia can be difficult. “What’s the role of the Higher Ed community in supporting intellectual freedom?” a webinar held on September 22 as part of Banned Books Week, brought together academics to examine these issues.

Panelists Aaisha Haykal, an archivist at the College of Charleston, Emily Knox, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and John Burgess, a professor at the University of Alabama, joined moderator Camille Gamboa to discuss information ethics and navigating sources.

Haykal provided ways of how individuals can advocate and oppose bans on information.

“It’s about attending city council meetings [and] school board meetings to make sure if someone comes up with a book, you are there to counteract and provide the other side of the conversation,” she said

Knox spoke about how misinformation is often based on a consumer’s interpretation of facts.

“When I talk about misinformation and disinformation, it’s not about facts. It’s about the interpretation of those facts,” she said. “You can’t steer people away from misinformation because misinformation is how they are understanding what you are presenting to them”

Burgess reflected on how he believes the safeguarding of intellectual freedom is part of a larger process of societal change.

“The strategy is going to involve distributing equity, fairness and justice as broad as possible through our society,” he said.

This hour-long webinar was sponsored by SAGE Publishing, the parent of Social Science Space. 

Aaisha Haykal is the manager of Archival Services at the College of Charleston’s Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture. She has written for JSTOR Daily and research guides for subjects including African American Studies and Southern Studies.

Emily Knox is an associate professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her publications include the book, Book Banning in 21^st Century America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), and she served as an editor of Foundations of Information Ethics (ALA Neal-Schuman, 2019).

John Burgess is an assistant professor at the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alabama. His research has been featured in the Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy, the Journal of Information Ethics and MediaTropes.

The post Watch the Webinar: What’s the Role of Higher Ed in Supporting Intellectual Freedom? appeared first on Social Science Space.

Professors Kate Cooper and Rong Wang discuss their research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and answer questions on their paper, “From Reactionary to Revelatory: CSR Reporting in Response to the Global Refugee Crisis,” published in Business & Society.

This research stems from a project we began together while working as post-docs at Northwestern University in 2017. We found we had several interests in common – both of us were interested in nonprofit organizations, in interorganizational collaboration or networks, and social impact. We had both worked for international organizations before beginning our graduate studies. Now, having completed our PhDs at University of Illinois (Kate) and University of Southern California (Rong), we found ourselves working together on a large research project facilitated by the Network for Nonprofit and Social Impact (NNSI) lab at Northwestern.

At that time, we were consumed with the national and international headlines that detailed refugee movement around the world as well as some of the policy reactions to refugee issues. Rong suggested that we study the issue and, given our interest in interorganizational collaboration, we begin by looking at how corporations described their involvement in refugee issues. In reading about how corporations addressed – or didn’t address – refugee concerns, we came to see refugees as an “emerging social issue.”

Emerging social issues are controversial or have no public consensus, and, as a result, corporations may shy away from addressing them in their social responsibility efforts. Our exploration of refugee programming patterns resulted in a published paper in which we introduced a framework to explore how institutional and organizational factors shape CSR programming in response the global refugee crisis.

In this manuscript that appears in Business & Society, we expanded our data collection to capture Fortune 500 CSR reports between 2012-2019. We were particularly interested in the extent to which organizations described their programs, and whether they were “coupled” with CSR policies or outcomes – that is, whether CSR implementation should be linked to corporate policy (policy-practice coupling) or outcomes (means-ends coupling).

Questions about what and whom CSR programs are for are still up for debate. We explore both sides of this argument in our paper, going into more detail about the reasons that corporations may choose to engage a social issue and how they describe their motivations in their policy statements. We also provide examples of coupled and decoupled CSR programs from corporations themselves.

Ultimately, we suggest a typology that corporations as reactionary, recurring, relevant, or revelatory, depending on whether they engage refugee issues over time and whether their refugee program is coupled with policy and/or impacts. We draw on a constitutive perspective to highlight the power of how corporations frame their efforts, suggesting that how corporations talk about their efforts matters a great deal. We hope that this framework can be useful in considering not just how corporations might engage refugee issues, but in other emerging social issues such as gun control or reproductive rights.

For now, however, we’re continuing our work on interorganizational responses to refugee issues. We’re currently collecting data for a new project that explores how nonprofit organizations respond to refugee needs.

The post Examining the Nexus of CSR Reporting and the Global Refugee Crisis appeared first on Social Science Space.

Qualitative research presents unique challenges to researchers, including building trust with the study’s population, communicating effectively and navigating cultural differences.

“Qualitative Research in an Asian Context,” a video interview hosted by Social Science Space sister site Methodsapace on September 6, brought together the eponymous handbook’s co-editors for a discussion on its creation and the importance of having resources specific to an Asian cultural context.

Panelists Arceli Rosario, president of the Adventist University of the Philippines, and Safary Wa-Mbaleka, a professor at Bethel University, joined interviewer Janet Salmons to discuss the purpose of the handbook’s creation. This discussion came as part of Methodspace’s September Focus on the cultural dimensions of research and academic writing.

The handbook provides guidance on qualitative research in Asia and involving Asian immigrants, and addresses topics including climate change, scientific advancements and socioeconomic issues. Contributors were from diverse backgrounds, including several countries in Asia, as well as other continents.

Co-editors Rosario and Wa-Mbaleka created the handbook after both having taught and researched in Asia, which led them to recognize the need for resources to enable other researchers to be successful despite the challenges cultural differences can pose.

Rosario spoke about how being Filipino helped inform her about successful methodologies in qualitative research, including utilizing oral narratives.

“As a people, we love to talk, and we love to share matters that are private to us. It’s natural for us [to talk] to people who may not be close to us… about feelings, or how we look at things,” she said. “When I did my master’s and my dissertation, I chose qualitative research because I felt it’s a natural thing for me to do that.”

Wa-Mbaleka emphasized the importance of cultural sensitivity in Asian qualitative research considering the diverse cultures, subcultures and linguistic groups present across Asia and Asian communities.

“In addition to having one thing we call a ‘national identity’ or ‘cultural identity,’ you still have some subcultures that, when we are conducting research… [you] need to know these differences,” he said.

This 40-minute webinar was sponsored by SAGE Publishing, the parent of Social Science Space. 

Arceli Rosario is the president of the Adventist University of the Philippines and serves as the president of the Asian Qualitative Research Association.

Safary Wa-Mbaleka is an associate professor at Bethel University and the founding president of the Asian Qualitative Research Association. He was previously the dean of postgraduate studies at the Adventist University of Africa.

The post Watch the Video Interview: Qualitative Research in an Asian Context appeared first on Social Science Space.

Education Minister Jason Clare has just announced an independent review of the Australian Research Council (ARC).

This is the body that oversees funding for non-medical research in Australian universities and plays a critical role in the careers of academics.

After years of concerns about the ARC – about political interference and low success rates – the review is a welcome step. But will it tackle the big issues?

ARC review

The review has been set up to look at the “role and purpose” of the ARC, its governance model and whether the ARC’s legislation creates an “effective and efficient university research system”.

However, this focus on operational issues is narrow and risks overlooking some of the most serious issues facing research in Australia. These include three ongoing challenges, as outlined in our recent paper.

1. Adequate funding

In Australia, the ARC does not usually fund the full cost of research. This is a mismatch identified as far back as the Bradley review of higher education in 2008.

This mismatch means government push funding back to universities, partly to save money and partly to encourage universities to be competitive to gain national and global ranking success.

As of 2018, universities spent about A$12 billion a year on research. About $6 billion came from the government while $6 billion came from universities’ own funds, of which $3 billion was from overseas student fees.

So universities must transfer funds from teaching overseas students to fund research grants. They then seek to attract overseas students based on research rankings. The risk here is that a decline in international student enrolments means a decline in research revenue – if one side fails so does the other.

For researchers, the task of funding projects is more complex and onerous than it should be. To even apply to the ARC, they have to be able to show the rest of the costs can be met by the university.

2. Political interference

All ARC research proposals need to include a “national interest test”. This is a 150-word statement that explains the benefit of the research to the Australian community.

Clare has recently said he will keep the national interest test, but make it “clearer”. This is a significant missed opportunity to abolish this problematic test.

The test was introduced in 2018 by then education minister Dan Tehan, who said it would “improve the public’s confidence” in why grants are awarded.

It followed a public outcry after his predecessor, Simon Birmingham blocked about $4 million-worth of grants in humanities subjects.

The national interest test has not stopped the vetoing of research (as this is allowed in the ARC’s legislation). But it has increased the justification for it. Former acting education minister Stuart Robert vetoed six grants in late 2021, including one on student climate protests. His spokesperson argued, the proposals did not “demonstrate value for taxpayers’ money nor contribute to the national interest.

This has only increased academics’ concerns about political interference in their research.

The role of security agencies in the ARC process is also a deeply concerning development, thanks to the secretive nature of vetting. In late 2020, Tehan blocked five grants on national security grounds.

On top of all this, the national interest test is a highly time-consuming and frustrating process, as there is often a cumbersome back and forth between the ARC, university and researcher to clarify the statement.

3. What is university research for?

There is a misguided view in Australian politics that university research is flexible and easily adaptable to whatever industry needs.

For example, in late 2021, the Morrison government announced $240 million in grants for universities that could commercialize research. The new Labor government wants to see research conforming to the national reconstruction fund priorities, which is geared at projects that expand Australian industry. Its focus is on areas including mining, transport, medical science, renewable energy, defense technology and robotics.

Clare has specifically told the ARC he wants to see “impact with industry”.

This emphasis is concerning because it sees research as a commercial, economic or “value-added” property, rather than something centered on discovering things in an independent, scientific way.

Governments also of course choose which industries they want to support based on their political priorities, which tend toward short-term objectives, based on the electoral cycle.

What next?

The new review began work in early September and will provide an interim report in December. A final report will be handed down in March 2023.

This review is important but it cannot obscure a much-needed debate about the purpose and value of research in Australia.

Australian researchers want to be able to do their work with secure, adequate funding. And they want to be able to do it independently of government. Meanwhile, governments want to be able to “use” the research to suit their own priorities. It is easy to see how the two don’t easily align.

The post What May the Review into the Australian Research Council Bode for University Research? appeared first on Social Science Space.

The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University and SAGE Publishing now are accepting nominations for the 2023 SAGE-CASBS Award.

Established in 2013, the SAGE-CASBS Award recognizes outstanding achievement in the behavioral and social sciences that advances our understanding of pressing social issues. It underscores the role of the social and behavioral sciences in enriching and enhancing public discourse and good governance.

“Social and behavioral science research produces foundational and applied knowledge, expertise, and evidence that make profound societal impact” SAGE Publishing CEO Blaise Simqu and CASBS interim director Woody Powell said in a joint statement. “SAGE and CASBS are both deeply committed to the goals underlying this award – celebrating scholarship that crosses disciplinary borders, generating new ways of thinking, and advancing academically derived work that informs and improves society as a whole.” (SAGE is the parent of Social Science Space.)

Past winners of the award include:

• Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, 2002 Nobel laureate in economic sciences and author of the acclaimed book Thinking, Fast and Slow (Watch SAGE’s founder interview Kahneman)
• Pedro Noguera, the sociologist, education rights activist, as well as Distinguished Professor of Education and Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean at the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California (Watch SAGE’s founder interview Noguera)
• Kenneth Prewitt, former director of the U.S. Census Bureau and the Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs at Columbia University (Watch the lecture)
• William Julius Wilson, the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, Emeritus at Harvard University (Watch the lecture)
• Carol Dweck, the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University (Watch the lecture)
• Jennifer Richeson, the Philip R. Allen Professor of Psychology at Yale University (Watch the lecture)

While having a connection to the CASBS or SAGE is not a requirement for the honor, Kahneman was a CASBS fellow in 1977-78; Prewitt in 1983-84; Wilson in 1981-82; and Richeson in 2021-22. Dweck was a consulting scholar in 2014-15.

In addition to a cash prize, the SAGE-CASBS Award winner will deliver a public lecture to be held at CASBS in spring 2023.

More details, submission criteria, and the nomination form are available here: 

The submission deadline is December 9, 2022.

The post Nominations Open for 2023 SAGE-CASBS Award appeared first on Social Science Space.

Amid an ever-increasing number of media outlets and social media platforms, the proliferation of misinformation makes evaluating information sources’ objectivity and reliability challenging. “Critical Thinking Skills in the Age of Misinformation,” a webinar held on September 14, brought this question to the forefront in a dialogue among the field’s experts. 

Panelists Tom Chatfield, an author and tech philosopher, and Eric Addae-Kyeremeh, a professor at the Open University, joined moderator Paulina Polyakova to discuss the dangers of misinformation, reliable sources and how to hone and pass on critical thinking skills to reliably evaluate and utilize information. 

Chatfield discussed how misinformation capitalizes on short-term news cycles and how to circumvent it by turning to more reliable sources, including books and peer-reviewed journals. 

“Almost all of the misinformation that is influential to some degree works around rapid emotive decision-making and trends,” he said. “Do plenty of slow reading. If all of your reading or browsing time is with things that are operating on a timescale of minutes or days — daily newspapers or trending Twitter feeds — you’ve got a real problem because you’re all noise and no signal.” 

Addae-Kyeremeh discussed how to impart critical thinking skills to students, emphasizing the importance of academic prudence and critical analysis. 

“To teach critical thinking well, one must realize they must lead by example and thinking critically as well,” he said. “It also involves intellectual courage, which is more or less being willing to be challenged in terms of your own beliefs.” 

This hour-long webinar was sponsored by SAGE Publishing, the parent of Social Science Space. 

Panelists 

Tom Chatfield is an author and tech philosopher. His books include How to Think (SAGE Publishing, 2021), How to Thrive in the Digital Age (Pan Macmillan, 2012) and Live This Book! (Penguin, 2015). Additionally, he has partnered with SAGE to develop textbooks and online courses focused on critical thinking. 

Eric Addae-Kyeremeh is the head of School in the School of Education, Childhood, Youth and Sport at the Open University. His research has been featured in the journal Management in Education and the book Professional Learning Communities and Teacher Enquiry. 

The post Watch the Webinar: Critical Thinking Skills in the Age of Misinformation  appeared first on Social Science Space.

Imagine you have years-worth of research and it is dismissed by a 15-word rejection letter from a journal editor. That has happened to us.

Or peer reviewers write demeaning, anonymous commentary about your work. That has also happened to us.

Or student evaluations critique your appearance or the way you speak. Yes, that’s also happened to us.

Academics also get negative feedback on research grants and funding applications, conference submissions and mainstream writing outlets, like The Conversation. And, yes, we’ve experienced all this, too. And we are not alone.

We are experts in management and psychology. The good news is, there are strategies available to help you overcome and even use negative feedback to your advantage.

Feedback is unavoidable

Feedback is a key component for any academic career. It is part of how the profession maintains rigor and quality in what it does.

While it can of course be positive, research shows, it tends to be negative. And this comes at a cost to individuals, their sense of self worth and their mental health.

Academia is not alone here. Managers across all industries use feedback to enhance workplace performance and online reviews are a fact of life for businesses. Yet, despite this, not many people know how to do it well. And, the receivers are not always able to use the feedback in the way it was intended.

On top of calls to improve training for academics, managers and leaders on how to provide helpful feedback (we do this here and here), being able to use the feedback we get is also important for our wellbeing.

Tough feedback can hurt and shake our confidence. Yet it may be necessary to process this feedback to grow and develop as professionals. And this is where positive psychology can help.

Positive psychology is the study of strengths and virtues over human deficiencies and diagnoses. It focuses on promoting strengths – like courage, optimism, and hope – as a buffer against mental ill-health.

6 things to do when you get negative feedback

1. Empathize with the person giving feedback

Do you remember receiving formal training for providing feedback? Probably not. It is likely the reviewer or person giving you feedback did not either.

And humans have a bias toward negative information too. Perhaps this is an evolutionary challenge, with early humanity needing to fixate on dangerous and threatening matters to survive.

A reviewer or manager’s potential lack of training and natural bias does not excuse their harmful comments, but it might help us to empathize with their circumstances.

Academics have complex, very busy careers. When anonymous reviews are negative, it might have more to do with their (lack of) experience and heavy workloads, rather than our work.

2. Pause

When dealing with negative feedback, it can help to pause, take a walk around the block or grab a cup of tea. One of the authors of this piece has the practice of reading a review and then putting it in a draw for a week before she begins to address the feedback.

Distance allows us to gain perspective and think through the parts of the feedback that are valuable and worth addressing. This puts us into a positive state of mind and prompts us to consider solutions as a way of coping.

3. Talk about what happened

Vent to some friends or your colleagues.

Affective labeling theory says when people talk about their feelings, they feel better about them. A Geneva Emotion Wheel might help label more complex emotions.

You can also try self-affirmations, the practice of recognizing the value of one’s self. Affirmations may not suit everyone’s style but if you think they will work for you, useful self-affirmations may include: “I am getting better as a researcher” or “this obstacle will help me grow.” (You can look at some more examples here).

Positive affirmations give rise to more positive emotions and this is useful because positive emotions boost our problem-solving skills.

4. Address your inner critic

Our inner critic is often an ally who motivates us to achieve. It can sometimes be toxic though, especially when receiving unwanted feedback. The inner critic prompts cognitive distortions, such as catastrophizing (“I’ll never be published”) or assigning self-blame (“I’m not smart enough”).

As we know, distortions are not true and they stop us seeing the situation clearly. When these voices are left unchecked, it can lead to mental health problems.

Instead, we need to practice self-compassion. This could include, visualizing positive and non-judgmental images. Perhaps visualizing a walk on your favorite beach, without a care or concern.

Talking back to our inner critic (verbally or non-verbally) also helps. Cognitive reappraisal is the practice of identifying a negative thought pattern and changing the perspective. In response to “I’m not smart enough,” try “This time, this work was not valued, but it is valuable, and I can grow from the feedback.”

5. Reframe what happened

Our brains almost prime us to take negative feedback personally at first.

When receiving negative feedback, the primal (“fight or flight”) and emotional (“do they hate me?”) parts of our brain often jump to respond first.

But we can deliberately look for benefits, upsides and lessons if something bad happens. This is what psychologists call “positive reframing.”

For example, if you get unhelpful personal feedback on anonymous student feedback forms, it might prompt you to talk with your next group of students about the purpose of this feedback and about the importance of them being professional and constructive.

6. Look for opportunities

Each strategy above is designed to help you cope with and accept feedback. The final strategy is to focus on the opportunity.

Despite the negativity or the difficult conversation, someone took time to give this feedback. What is it that can be learned? Or done better next time?

All of this is of course assuming the feedback was constructive. Sometimes negative feedback is just toxic. In these cases, submit your work somewhere else!

The post Feeling Saved by Feedback? Six Strategies That Help Academics to Cope appeared first on Social Science Space.

Banned Books Week is an annual event, typically held the last week of September, celebrating the freedom to read. The celebration sponsored by the American Library Association brings together the larger book/text community including, but not limited to, authors, publishers, librarians, booksellers, journalists, readers of every type—anyone really—who supports the freedom to read what one chooses and the freedom to seek out and speak out ideas without limits.

It started in Plymouth. Those Puritans were more than a little upset with Thomas Morton when he didn’t follow the rules. But when he wrote a three-volume work titled New English Canaan (1637) which includes favorable observations about Native Americans, a celebration of nature, and a critique of Puritan customs and power, they banned his work and exiled the writer. Of course, at that time Plymouth was not yet the United States. Nonetheless, the practice of one group seeking to control access to information and ideas is not a new one in this country.

The next couple hundred years included various efforts to silence voices and control access to information, but many historians consider Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) the first book to be banned on a national scale. Harriett Beecher Stowe’s novel was barred from stores by the Confederacy because of its pro-abolitionist agenda and because it evoked heated debates about slavery.

Challenging books and attempting to control which ideas are available to the public waxed and waned over the next century. The practice experienced a lull in the more permissive 1960s and 1970s, which saw a dip in the instances of book bans.

Although he did not run on an agenda of book banning, when Ronald Reagan became U.S. president in 1981, his followers were emboldened. The number of book challenges rose to new levels, reaching over 700 per year, a marked resurgence in attempts to control access to books.

This new wave of book challenges prompted the American Library Association (ALA) in 1982 to launch the first Banned Books Week as a celebration of the freedom to read.

And what about now?

In August 2022, USA Today reported that book bans and challenges doubled from 2020 to 2021 with a notable uptick in challenged books over the past year. PEN America reported an unprecedented 1,586 book bans in 86 school districts across 26 different states between July 1, 2021, and March 31, 2022. Over the past year we have witnessed more coordinated harassment of teachers and librarians. The desire to restrict access, to pull books from curriculum and library shelves is becoming more intense. notes the efforts have moved beyond challenging a single title to shaping public policy.  Florida, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah are among the states that have enacted legislation that limits access to books and other reading materials.

School and classroom libraries are being scrutinized book by book to weed out anything that may be deemed inappropriate. And librarians, teachers, administrators, and vendors may face punitive measures. PEN America reports that many of the books challenged focus on one or more of the following: communities of color, the history of racism in America, LGBTQ characters, books by authors of color or LGBTQ authors, and topics that include sexuality, gender, or history.

Teachers have reported that the books in their classroom libraries have to be reviewed, cataloged on forms, and vetted before being made available to students. All this tension and anxiety can leave us feeling defeated and overwhelmed, but there are many who are pushing back and fighting for the freedom to read.

What are others doing to push back?

Here is a brief list of efforts from across the country:

• Students are forming banned book clubs.
• A high school student in Flagler County, Florida led a protest outside a school board meeting and has received national media attention.
• A group of Texas librarians formed #FReadom Fighters and, among other actions, deluged Texas lawmakers with tweets and emails. See the link in the resource list for several suggestions for responding to challenges.
• Students have organized protests and have spoken at school board meetings. PEN America offers a tip sheet for students responding to book bans.
• Parents and teachers have suggested buying banned books as gifts.
• Red Wine and Blue, a national advocacy network of Democratic suburban parents, holds a weekly training for parents and community members on how to rally other parents, speak at school board meetings, and lobby school board members and school leaders to oppose book bans.
• A group of parents organized an Amazon wish list of challenged, banned, and diverse books to place in little free libraries throughout the community.
• Parent-student book clubs have formed to read and discuss challenged or banned books outside of school.
• Parent groups have organized book clubs with educators to read and discuss the merits of challenged books.
• Some communities have led petition drives.
• One Louisiana librarian sued two men for defamation after they accused her of advocating to keep “pornographic” materials in the kids’ section at the parish library.

The final section of this post contains several links to resources – from history of banned books to overviews of legislation to ideas to push back. If you, like me, feel compelled to ensure children see themselves, their peers, and their families in the reading materials at school, these links can be a starting place for action.

Want to learn more about intellectual freedom? Register for the Banned Books Week webinar, hosted by SAGE Publications. Learn more here: https://group.sagepub.com/events-calendar/banned-books-week-webinar

Resources

A Brief History of Book Banning in the US

• “The History (and Present) of Banning Books in America” | LitHub
• “The History of Banned Books” | Pima Community College
• “The Little-Known History of Banned Books in the United States” | Reading Partners

Banned or Challenged Books and Legislation

• “These 4 Florida Bills Censor Classroom Subjects and Ideas” | PEN America
• “Ban on 52 Books in Largest Utah School District is a Worrisome Escalation of Censorship” | PEN America
• “Tennessee School Board Votes Unanimously to Ban Book About the Holocaust” | Today
• “How the New Banned Books Panic Fits into America’s History of School Censorship” | Vox
• “Why Book Ban Efforts Are Spreading Across the U.S.” | The New York Times
• “The History of Book Banning” | Publishers Weekly
• “Op/Ed: Let’s Build Trust Instead of Banning Books” | Essential Partners
• “Top 10 Most Challenged Books Lists” | ALA

Reporting a book challenge to the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom or PEN America

• ”Challenge Reporting” | ALA
• “Book Bans” | PEN America

Responding to questions/challenges to library resources:

• “How to Respond to Challenges and Concerns about Library Resources” | ALA
• ”Steps to Take When Materials Are Challenged,” – Cooperative Children’s Book Center (wisc.edu)
• “Fight Censorship” | ALA
• “School Libraries and Controversial Books: Tips From the Front Lines” | Edweek
• ”Dohle Book Defense Fund Established to Combat Rising Threats to Free Speech and Open Discourse” | PEN America
• “Nationwide effort to ban books challenges freedom of speech” | PBS NewsHour

Responding to the book bans:

• “How some students are fighting back against book bans in their schools” | Yahoo News
• “Flagler teen fights back against book bans nationwide” | WESH News 2
• https://www.freadom.us/
• https://www.freadom.us/home
• To order a shirt: https://www.freadom.us/merch
• “In the Face of Book Banning, Librarians Are Joining Forces to Fight Back” | Reader’s Digest
• “Book Bans Are on the Rise, but Students Are Fighting Back” | CNET
• “As Book Bans Spread, Suburban Moms Who Oppose Them Are Fighting Back” | Edweek
• “’A Small Comeback’:Pennridge parents fill little libraries with diverse books” | WHYY
• “Librarians Fight Back Against Efforts to Ban Books in Schools” | Edweek
• “How Some Students are Fighting Back Against Book Bans in their Schools” | Today
• “Are you Mad About Banned Books? Take Action by Buying Them” | Today
• “Book Bans Author Tip Sheet” | PEN America

The post Banning Books Threatens the Freedom to Read appeared first on Social Science Space.

Matthew Hall, assistant professor of marketing at Oregon State University, talks DIY service failures and discusses the paper, “Service Provider to the Rescue: How Firm Recovery of Do-It-Yourself Service Failure Turns Consumers from Competitors to Satisfied Customers,” he and Jamie D. Hyodo saw published in Journal of Service Research.

As do-it-yourself (DIY) continues to gain popularity, consumers sometimes try to bite off a bit more than they can chew. When this happens, consumers often opt to then hire a professional to complete the job. In such cases, these DIYers are not simply naïve customers seeking a service offering. Rather, they are customers who have recently had a personal encounter with the service task. Thus, this research started as a way to understand how consumers’ DIY experiences, specifically DIY failure, carry over to influence their evaluations of subsequent professional offerings.

What made this especially interesting (and personal) was that one of us had a DIY failure experience (trying to fix a leaking drainpipe). After this failed attempt, he hired a plumber to do the job, and was quite satisfied with the plumber’s services. Shortly thereafter, one of our colleagues had a very similar DIY failure experience, but reported not having a great experience with the plumber. The question was, did these two plumbers provide different services? Or was there some difference between the author and their colleague that drove these varied responses to their respective service interactions?

As we explored these DIY failure experiences, we (unsurprisingly) found that people don’t enjoy failing. However, we also found that consumers often use failure as an opportunity to increase their understanding of the task. This is important in the DIY domain, as learning and skill development are critical to peoples’ DIY identities. Thus, when people experience DIY failure, there is tension between frustration with failure (a negative outcome) and learning related to the task (a positive outcome). Interestingly, DIY failure elicits both responses simultaneously, but in varying degrees depending on each consumer’s outlook on ability and skill (i.e., their mindset). Those who believe ability and skill can be improved through effort (i.e., growth-minded consumers) focus more on the learning opportunity their failure provides, leading to a greater appreciation of the provider’s abilities and increased satisfaction with the post-failure service interaction. Alternatively, those who believe skills and ability cannot be easily improved (i.e., fixed-minded individuals) not only fail to learn from failure, but they also dissociate from the failed task and do not carry their DIY experience over to the subsequent service interaction. 

By examining these divergent responses to DIY failure, we highlight how important it is for service providers to understand their customers’ prior experiences with the service task. If the customer has failed the task prior to the service interaction, service providers should validate the customer’s attempt and highlight the positives that can emerge from failure (learning, growth, improvement, etc.). We also highlight how much DIY consumers value learning and how service providers can provide basic instruction during service interactions to educate customers about the task. This firm-provided instruction can foster increased customer appreciation for the service providers’ ability, and ultimately promote customer loyalty to the service provider. 

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Agota Szabo explores the notion of “good governance” in boardrooms and discusses the paper, “In the Boardroom: How Do Cognitive Frames Shape American and Dutch Hospitals’ Responses to the Pressure of Adopting Governance Best Practices?” she and Riku Ruotsalainen wrote in the Journal of Management Inquiry.

Understanding the decision-making process of a boardroom is one of the most fascinating parts of organizational research. We are all interested in power games, team dynamics and how the external environment could influence the decision of directors. One of the important buzzwords of today is “good governance” and many boards face a lot of societal pressure to implement best practices of governance. It goes beyond regulatory requirements and boards need to take a different perspective on integrating governance codes and best practices in their organizations. In this study, we focused on the role of individual directors in developing organizational responses to that pressure. More specifically, we looked at how directors’ own cognitive frames of governance influence the way boards choose best practices.

One of the most interesting findings of the research was to realize how often directors take a one-dimensional view on good governance. Some of the connections might look obvious to you, like legal background often determines strict compliance focus in board governance, but most directors had a strong preference for one specific angle in governance. For example, they described being responsible to the community or running the organization in the most efficient way as leading principles when selecting best practices. Many directors, who are chairs of their boards, had the most comprehensive view on governance and were able to navigate between the often conflicting demands of various stakeholder groups. It was also interesting to see that having board experience in the specific sector had a big impact compared to having extensive board experience in other sectors.

They are all very valid perspectives, however; you also run the risk of having a one-dimensional board if many similar cognitive frames are present. Understanding your own cognitive frame of governance is a must for every board member, as it will guide largely the choices of good governance practices. Bringing this awareness to the team level is equally important. Having directors with different frames of good governance in organizations is very common, therefore, it is important to understand the set-up of the board from this perspective as well. Being a diverse board from a governance-framing perspective would mean that you are able to oversee the value of implementing a large set of best practices and successfully align them with the current and future organizational goals. Implementing best practices is not a goal on its own, but they could help you to create more efficient and effective organizations. Regular talks on how boards envision their own governance preferences could help to avoid being blindsided in important areas of good governance and to shed some light on which governance areas did not get the necessary attention from the board.

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Research is highly difficult during global crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, but at the same time essential, again as COVID has shown. With this in mind, the European Commission is funding the PREPARED – Pro-active Pandemic Crisis Ethics and Integrity Framework — project.

According to a description of PREPARED on the website of the University of Central Lancaster Cyprus, where the initiative will be headquartered, the three-year project will bring together 16 partner teams from three continents. Their outputs will an interdisciplinary and jargon-free code of conduct for research during global crises, ‘how to’ guidelines to support the needs of research teams, and devising training and capacity-building materials to be disseminated across the globe.

The majority of team leads are women, and the consortium will be supported by two European artists and an African photographer and documentary maker.

To kick off PREPARED, 50 experts and stakeholders from around the world are meeting from September 27-29 at the United Nations University in Bonn to develop an ethics and integrity framework for global crises. Social Science Space’s sister site, SAGE MethodSpace, will Zoom into the meeting on September 29 to hear selected delegates (identified below) provide statements on the difficulties of research during global crises and suggestions on how stakeholders can work together better in the future. Questions will be fielded from online participants as well as the room at the UN University.

The webinar will start at 2:30 UTC on September 29 (find your time zone here). Registration will be available soon.

Delegates Presenting

Doris Schroeder is coordinator of the PREPARED project and professor of moral philosophy at the University of Central Lancaster Cyprus School of Law. She is also the lead author of Global Code of Conduct for Research in Resource-Poor Settings.

Charles Weijer is a professor of medicine, epidemiology and biostatistics, and philosophy at Western University in London, Canada. He is a leading expert in the ethics of randomized controlled trials.

Michael Makanga is the executive director of the EDCTP, a clinician-scientist from Uganda with 25 years of professional experience working on health and poverty-related diseases in sub-Saharan Africa.

Joshua Kimani is the clinical director of PHDA, a clinical epidemiologist by training who serves a cohort of around 40,000 sex workers in and around Nairobi.

Joyce Adhiambo Odhiambo is an HIV champion and peer educator at PHDA, supporting research involving 40,000 sex workers in and around Nairobi.

Dorian Karatzas is the head of ethics and integrity at DG Research and Innovation of the European Commission.

Klaus Leisinger is the president of the FGVA and former personal advisor on corporate responsibility to Kofi Annan and Ban Ki Moon.

Janet Salmons, webinar moderator, is the research community manager for SAGE Methodspace.

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Simon F. Oliai discusses the rise of populism in contemporary societies and answers questions on his book review, “The Road to Perdition: David Owen on Hubristic Mendacity in Contemporary Populisms,” published in Leadership.

The rise of Donald Trump to power in the United States was an unexpected shock. It was difficult to believe that a major American political party, however structurally “weak” to echo Jeffrey Sachs, had let itself be dominated by such an unfit and mendacious demagogue. Even more shocking is the fact that, despite the glaring incompetence which marked his chaotic term of office, Trump remains an influential political actor in the United States. Indeed, he is no less than an unrepentant liar who poses a serious threat to American democracy and world peace.

In the same period, I also watched with disbelief the unfolding of the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom. One which ultimately led to the departure of this quintessentially European country from the European Union. A hitherto fringe nationalist idea on the euro-skeptic right of the British Tory party had suddenly become a rallying cry for “independence” to nearly half of the population of a country that had greatly benefited from its EU membership. It was clear that the success of Trump in the US and that of London’s notoriously buffoonish and dishonest former mayor, Boris Johnson, in the UK had less to do with what they advocated than with how they advocated “it.” I thus had to understand how two such shameless liars had become politically decisive in very different political contexts.

Lord David Owen (CH) is a former British foreign secretary with whom I had collaborated on a book. In it, David Owen had analyzed the impact of physical illness on important political leaders of the 20th and 21st Centuries. He also theorized the fundamental “sickness” of the powerful which he terms “hubris syndrome.” Powerful decision-makers display hubris when they arrogantly and fatefully ignore the normative limits within which socio-political reality is constituted.

Since classical antiquity, hubris has inflicted irreversible damage on those subjected to its consequences. Hubris is a noticeable change of behavior which continental European philosophy should phenomenologically conceptualize. Despite their obvious dissimilarities, both Trump and Johnson have displayed a similar sort of arrogance with which they uphold their damaging lies. To borrow David Owen’s expression, their common trait is their hubristic mendacity.

I believe this concept shall prove crucial in studying the evolution of advanced contemporary societies. Societies in which truth has lost its erstwhile simple connotation whilst those invested with the authority it once conferred have suffered irreversible loss of influence. As a phenomenologist, I also contend that one must resist the naïve scientism which would reduce this complex phenomenon to neuro-biological factors. I would encourage young researchers to draw upon the rich heritage of European philosophy in interpreting this phenomenon by reconstructing, to echo Merleau-Ponty, its historically complex “flesh.” For only a conceptually sophisticated conception of history could help our contemporary societies avoid the violence that hubristically mendacious “populist” leaders often stoke. Perhaps, that is equally how philosophy of history could illustrate that, to echo Orwell, ignorance of history is not strength.

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I never met the late Queen Elizabeth. I did, however, once try to bar Charles’s entry to the Cambridge Union Debating Society…

The King and I were contemporaries at Cambridge. I had a sufficient, albeit lowly, degree of engagement with the Union to be enlisted as a volunteer doorkeeper on big debate nights. Once the chamber was full, latecomers were directed to the bar, where there was a relay. That evening’s programme was the term’s traditional humorous debate, led by professional comedians. This always attracted a full house. Every seat was taken half an hour before the start. I had the tedious task of re-directing various bluffers, chancers and drunks who turned up late and demanded entry. By five minutes to the hour, I was pretty fed up and not disposed to be friendly to someone who pitched up with a small group and declared loudly in a gilt-edged voice that they had reserved seats. I gave him my best jobsworth response and pointed to the bar entrance. He was insistent and edged to one side, at which point I realised that the party contained a very embarrassed prince. I quickly reversed and directed them upstairs to the gallery where they said seats were being kept. I chose not to leave my post because chamber overcrowding was a sensitive safety issue. Moments later, the Society Clerk, the permanent administrator, shot out of his office because he had heard that the Royal party were standing at the back of the gallery alongside ordinary members, because their seats had been taken. He charged upstairs and sorted the situation – and had the grace to apologise that no-one had briefed me to expect the late arrival.

I recall this story occasionally, mainly because I think it speaks to Charles’s attempt to engage with student life to the greatest degree compatible with security – and how light those concerns were even in the university troubles of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He may have enjoyed the privilege of turning up late and reserved seating – but with minimal fuss and no pulling rank to insist on moving people from those seats.

The prince was commonly seen around town on a bicycle like the rest of us, although I understand that he rarely attended lectures and had private meetings with tutors. He got a decent grade for studies in anthropology and history, which would probably have been better if he had not had to spend a term in Aberystwyth learning Welsh. That grade has its own integrity. In the UK, teachers do not grade their own courses. This is a collective process, massively reducing opportunities for corruption. At the time, Cambridge was making a transition from students writing their names on examination scripts to anonymising them. The history faculty had been late adopters, holding that they were all gentlemen who could be trusted not to penalise or reward students on the basis of their reputations. When the question of grading Charles arose, however, the faculty realised that their judgement would never be trusted unless they joined the movement to anonymisation.

The new King is probably the best educated monarch since the first Queen Elizabeth. Although previous princes had spent time at either Oxford or Cambridge, their lives had been much more insulated and their studies fairly token. The evidence of impact is clear in Charles’s fascination with other cultures and alternative ways of thinking about the world – occasionally eccentric and vulnerable to mockery but genuinely anthropological. Recent days have also made evident his sense of history, reinforced, of course, by a repertoire of symbols that few living people will previously have seen. Perhaps nothing illustrates this better than the Royal Beekeeper ceremonially informing the bees about the death of their mistress and urging them to be good for their new master. The hives will be draped in black ribbon for the period of Royal Mourning.

There has been predictable criticism of UK Royalty for failing to denounce slavery, colonialism, class inequality, etc. but this misunderstands constitutional monarchy. What any incumbent says publicly is absolutely controlled by the government of the day – or in the case of overseas visits by consultation between the UK and host governments. If there is a Royal tour of the Caribbean that says nothing explicit about slavery, for example, this is because the respective governments have chosen not to include it in the script. This means that we often have to look at the monarch’s actions and symbols.
The Queen conspicuously refused to endorse Imperial nostalgia in supporting the transition from the British Empire to the Commonwealth (now not even the British Commonwealth), from a collection of colonies to a voluntary association of nation states, many of which do not have the British monarch as their head of state. The Queen’s choice of a hat in EU blue with gold stars for the State Opening of Parliament in 2017 was widely seen as a statement on the result of the 2016 referendum. Readers can decode for themselves the significance of wearing a brooch gifted to her by Barack Obama for her first meeting with Donald Trump. I suspect that King Charles III will continue to push forward visibly with Green projects on his personal estates, even if the government does not allow him to make speeches about the urgency of responding to climate change.

It would be naive to suppose that any British monarch is going to profess radical political views in public, any more than any serious US aspirant to the Presidency is going to brand themselves as a socialist. However, the monarch can stand for values rather than policies, of a kind that would probably best be captured in traditional, one-nation kinds of conservatism that used to be found in the Republican Party. Integrity, public service, concern for the natural world and for the socially excluded are fundamental to market societies – greed is not good for social cohesion and the maintenance of order by acts of state power rapidly becomes a source of conflict and a drag on the economy. Soft social control may not be our preference but it has had a remarkably good run. King Charles is likely to understand better than most, as his mother did, that a constitutional monarch stands for values rather than policies.

The post Encounters with (Constitutional) Monarchy appeared first on Social Science Space.

From the COVID-19 pandemic to the war in Ukraine, misinformation is rife worldwide. Many tools have been designed to help people spot misinformation. The problem with most of them is how hard they are to deliver at scale.

But we may have found a solution. In our new study, we designed and tested five short videos that “prebunk” viewers, in order to inoculate them from the deceptive and manipulative techniques often used online to mislead people. Our study is the largest of its kind and the first to test this kind of intervention on YouTube. Five million people were shown the videos, of which one million watched them.

We found that not only do these videos help people spot misinformation in controlled experiments, but also in the real world. Watching one of our videos via a YouTube ad boosted YouTube users’ ability to recognize misinformation.

As opposed to prebunking, debunking (or fact-checking) misinformation has several problems. It’s often difficult to establish what the truth is. Fact-checks also frequently fail to reach the people who are most likely to believe the misinformation, and getting people to accept fact-checks can be challenging, especially if people have a strong political identity.

Studies show that publishing fact-checks online does not fully reverse the effects of misinformation, a phenomenon known as the continued influence effect. So far, researchers have struggled to find a solution that can rapidly reach millions of people.

The big idea

Inoculation theory is the notion that you can forge psychological resistance against attempts to manipulate you, much like a medical vaccine is a weakened version of a pathogen that prompts your immune system to create antibodies. Prebunking interventions are mostly based on this theory.

Most models have focused on counteracting individual examples of misinformation, such as posts about climate change. However, in recent years researchers including ourselves have explored ways to inoculate people against the techniques and tropes that underlie much of the misinformation we see online. Such techniques include the use of emotive language to trigger outrage and fear, or the scapegoating of people and groups for an issue they have little-to-no control over.

Online games such as Cranky Uncle and Bad News were among the first attempts to try this prebunking method. There are several advantages to this approach. You don’t have to act as the arbiter of truth as you don’t have to fact-check specific claims you see online. It allows you to side-step emotive discussions about the credibility of news sources. And perhaps most importantly, you do not need to know what piece of misinformation will go viral next.

A scalable approach

But not everyone has the time or motivation to play a game – so we collaborated with Jigsaw (Google’s research unit) on a solution to reach more of these people. Our team developed five prebunking videos, each lasting less than two minutes, which aimed to immunize viewers against a different manipulation technique or logical fallacy. As part of the project, we launched a website where people can watch and download these videos.

We first tested their impact in the lab. We ran six experiments (with about 6,400 participants in total) in which people watched one of our videos or an unrelated control video about freezer burn. Afterwards, within 24 hours of viewing the video, they were asked to evaluate a series of (unpublished) social media content examples that either did or did not make use of misinformation techniques. We found that people who saw our prebunking videos were significantly less liable to manipulation than the control participants.

But findings from lab studies do not necessarily translate to the real world. So we also ran a field study on YouTube, the world’s second-most visited website (owned by Google), to test the effectiveness of the video interventions there.

For this study we focused on US YouTube users over 18 years old who had previously watched political content on the platform. We ran an ad campaign with two of our videos, showing them to around 1 million YouTube users. Next we used YouTube’s BrandLift engagement tool to ask people who saw a prebunking video to answer one multiple-choice question. The question assessed their ability to identify a manipulation technique in a news headline. We also had a control group, which answered the same survey question but didn’t see the prebunking video. We found the prebunking group was 5-10% better than the control group at correctly identifying misinformation, showing that this approach improves resilience even in a distracting environment like YouTube.

Our videos would cost less than 4p per video view (this would cover YouTube advertising fees). As a result of this study, Google is going to run an ad campaign using similar videos in September 2022. This campaign will be run in Poland and the Czech Republic to counter disinformation about refugees within the context of the Russia-Ukraine war.

When you are trying to build resilience, it is useful to avoid being too direct in telling people what to believe, because that might trigger something called psychological reactance. Reactance means that people feel their freedom to make decisions is being threatened, leading to them digging their heels in and rejecting new information. Inoculation theory is about empowering people to make their own decisions about what to believe.

At times, the spread of conspiracy theories and false information online can be overwhelming. But our study has shown it is possible to turn the tide. The more that social media platforms work together with independent scientists to design, test and implement scalable, evidence-based solutions, the better our chances of making society immune to the onslaught of misinformation.

The post ‘Prebunking’ on YouTube in the Fight Against Misinformation appeared first on Social Science Space.

This summer I performed my own one-woman show at the 75th Edinburgh Fringe – a sentence I never thought I would write in my 17 years of living in the UK. But there I was, a Syrian academic on stage in Edinburgh in front of a microphone, high on adrenaline, ready to go.

It was both thrilling and terrifying, but the significance of this experience transcended public engagement and the buzz of performing on stage. As a former refugee driven by my own migrant experience, taking part in The Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas (CoDI) in the city I now call home was an act of resistance and activism.

CoDI was established in 2003 as a collaboration between Edinburgh-based universities and the Festival’s Fringe, to provide academics with the space to engage with the public by “performing” their research on stage to a general audience. Academics are supported throughout, and comedian Susan Morrison is there to offer encouragement and, if any hecklers are around, protection.

All I needed was a sufficiently dangerous, stage-worthy idea that I could develop for my show. And so, “Become a Sexy Refugee in 5 Easy Steps” was born.

I wanted to expose the double standards that exist both at the UK border and in the media’s portrayal of refugees. This was my chance to speak out publicly about the injustices committed against migrants, refugees and asylum seekers and reflect on how we think and speak of them in our everyday conversations.

Dressed in a headscarf, I stood on stage that evening and asked: why is it that faces of displaced people like me do not elicit the world’s empathy like a fair-skinned face does? Why does the world respond differently to certain people? Is one war “sexier” or more appealing than another? Is one human’s suffering more “deserving” of our compassion than another?

Identity and belonging

CoDI provides a great platform for academics to share our research with the public. My work sits within migration studies, exploring concepts of identity, difference, belonging and power relations in the context of being displaced.

In a research paper I published in 2021, I discussed the urgency of bringing the migrants’ stories to people’s attention – in other words, ensuring the voices of the displaced are listened to and heard. But I also needed to speak of my experience beyond the usual academic sphere, so CoDI was the ideal platform.

I am frustrated with the way the world behaves towards various groups of refugees. I watched the reaction of unprecedented empathy to the plight of Ukrainian refugees by the same world that averted its eyes from refugees in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and Sudan.

I witnessed this disparity first-hand in Calais earlier this year, when I spent a week volunteering with Care4Calais to support people from Africa and the Middle East who have been in limbo for years in northern France, after fleeing persecution in their countries.

Narratives and stories are major themes in my research because they are central to the human experience. The power of storytelling in creating social and political change cannot be underestimated, especially in our social conversations and research about refugees and human migration.

More than one narrative

As a keen narrative ethnographer, I believe that changing harmful discussions around refugees begins with challenging the myth and tyranny of the narrative that puts all refugees in “one boat” – and I am fully aware of the pun here.

I too have been subject to this imposed narrative that so often misrepresents and homogenizes Syrian refugees. My personal stake provided the backbone of a show that focused on the marginalized experience of migrants.

I stood on stage and explained my need to challenge the stereotypes and preconceptions that have been attached to me over my time in the UK. Microaggressions such as “you don’t look like a Syrian,” “but you seem like a decent person,” and “but you speak very good English” pointed to a toxic singular narrative that all Syrians – all refugees – are one amorphous mass of people, rather than individuals in their own right with lives, children, careers, homes, hopes and dreams.

Such a reductive narrative, fortified by years of media bias, right-wing populism and refugee panic, flattened my experiences and reduced my rich and multifaceted heritage to “swarms of migrants,” “dinghy people,” or a mere “threat or victim” binary.

This oppressive and untruthful narrative required me to tell a different story that demonstrates there are diverse ways of being and becoming in this world.

The refugee voice

The message I wanted to share with my audience was simple: stories are a human right and a responsibility – but most importantly, stories are a privilege that the majority of refugees do not enjoy. Without someone listening, storytelling is a fragmented and futile human endeavor.

What refugees need the most is for the world to actively listen and practice cultural humility – a curious and respectful attitude towards other cultures. Like Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I am fully aware of the need to stop the popular story from becoming the only story.

She strove to find her “authentic cultural voice,” as have I. This is possible through initiatives such as CoDI that empower marginalized groups to have agency over our stories, and to reclaim power and control over how we are presented to the world. These stories also evoke human emotions that are more complex and generous than pity.

My show was a combination of humor, evidence and personal experience which I feel received a positive response from the audience. When asked, most agreed that refugee stereotypes breed prejudice and that hearing a different story of strength and hope is important. A Scottish woman came up to me after the show, embraced me and said thank you. The sense of real connection was palpable and it felt empowering. There was no place for pity.

Pity is a pretty useless emotion that deems refugees distant and alone in their suffering. Empathy, by contrast, offers solace and support; it says we are all in it together, and there for the grace of God go all of us. Empathy helps people to see the human – and the story – in every refugee.

The post A Social Scientist, A Syrian Refugee – and Now a Fringe Festival Act Reclaiming Her Story appeared first on Social Science Space.

Authors Matthew L. Sheep, Alexandra Rheinhardt, Elaine C. Hollensbe, and Glen E. Kreiner discuss research on organizational identity following a watershed event in the Episcopal Church and answer questions about their new paper, “‘Tearing the Fabric’ or ‘Weaving the Tapestry’? A Discursive Resources Approach to Identity-Implicating Organizational Events,” published in Management Communication Quarterly.

Our title, “’Tearing the Fabric’ or ‘Weaving the Tapestry’” came directly from the data of our study. Although a stark contrast, both phrases refer to the same organizational event: the 2003 election of The Episcopal Church’s first openly gay bishop, The Rt. Reverend V. Gene Robinson, at its triennial General Convention. That such different metaphors could be used to allude to the impact of the same event indicates other underlying processes that produce contested versions of “reality” across the organization.

Headquartered in the United States (but with international provinces), The Episcopal Church (TEC) is part of a global religious body known as the Anglican Communion. In 2004, the Communion issued a report that predicted some potential effects of this event—that it “might tear the fabric of our Communion at its deepest level” (The Windsor Report, p. 18). In contrast, an Episcopal Church leader that we interviewed framed the event as evidence of the Church’s “comprehensiveness” that would create “a very colorful tapestry.”

As our research team was granted wide access to interview key leaders of TEC—both clergy and laity—we embarked upon a years-long study to understand the impacts of this event on TEC’s organizational identities as constructed by its leaders, members, and church documents. Most importantly, we wanted to understand better why and how events would make any difference to organizational identities. David Whetten noted in 2006 that “profound organizational events” can “have the potential to alter the collective understanding of ‘who we are as an organization’” (Whetten, 2006, p. 221). However, we sought to learn more about how this actually happens. Why should events necessarily impact identities? Aren’t identities more stable than that? Is it the event itself, or is it how the event is constructed in terms of its implications for identity in members’ everyday talk?

The latter question steered us toward a discourse analytic perspective—more specifically, a discursive resources approach. That is, discourse constitutes both the meanings of events and their implications for the organization’s identity. From a discourse perspective, research questions focus on what the discourse is doing to accomplish the construction of different versions of identity vis-à-vis implicating events.

For example, consider this interview quote from one of our participants who was responding to the implications of the event for the “welcoming” (inclusive) identity of TEC:

I think we’ve reached the crossroads, and the crossroads is “OK, does the Episcopal Church welcome you?” And what does that welcome entail? …What does that mean? What is “welcomes you?” Is it just hello, how are you, good day? Have a nice day? Or is it “welcomes you into the full body of Christ?” “Welcomes you into the leadership of the body of Christ.”

Note that the “welcoming” identity is presented as a series of open-ended questions, not fixed categorizations, opening a space for varying versions of TEC identity as impacted by the event.

We invite you to read the full study to learn more about the ways we discovered that organizational identity work is accomplished discursively vis-à-vis organizational events. Rather than identity coherence, on which theories of identity have typically focused, we found that interviewees constructed identity incoherence to foster both positive and negative views of the event. The upshot is that identity-implicating organizational events may not always be viewed as widescale opportunities or threats generating uniform implications for the organization, but they may have more complex implications for organizational identity reinforcement or change.

The post Exploring Organizational Identities of The Episcopal Church appeared first on Social Science Space.

The annual American Academy of Political and Social Science’s Moynihan Prize was created to recognize social scientists, public officials, and civic leaders who champion the use of informed judgment to advance the public good.

Currently, the academy, known as AAPSS, is seeking nominations for its 2023 award. This year’s award has gone to children’s activist Marian Wright Edelman, who will deliver the annual Moynihan Lecture when she officially receives the prize next month.

Nominations for the 2023 prize will be accepted through October 26; the nomination form can be found here. Candidates, according to AAPSS, should have made substantial contributions to public policy, such as in the alleviation of poverty, the health of populations, the design of the built environment and public works, the improvement of race and ethnic relations, the pursuit of effective international relations and the conservation of natural resources. They may also include those whose careers have exhibited a dedication to strengthening the use of statistical evidence and quality data in the policy process.

As AAPSS Executive Director Tom Kecskemethy explained to Social Science Space in 2020, “There is a clear intent to recognize what some might call the ‘value proposition’ of Pat Moynihan’s professional life: that civil service is best-done when policymakers pay attention to social research and to evidence; and that social research stands to benefit when it pays attention the most important questions facing policymakers.

“[The late] Senator Moynihan,” Kecskemethy continued, “was a remarkable figure – at various times in his career, he was a public servant who worked for both Republican and Democrat presidents, a university professor, an ambassador, and finally an elected official. He was a significant presence both in public life and in scholarship (his good friend George F. Will famously quipped that Moynihan ‘wrote more books than most senators have read’), and in him, we saw this extraordinary intellectual curiosity and nimble intelligence combined with the ability to gainfully apply the life of the mind to public service. He walked in the worlds research and policy as if there was little barrier between ‘ – that’s an exceedingly rare quality, and with a prize named for him, we aim to recognize people who carry on that model in some respect.”

The American Academy of Political and Social Science created the Moyhihan Prize in 2007. Previous recipients include John Holdren, former director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz; sociologist and Harvard professor William Julius Wilson; Samantha Power, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations; and climate economist and Nobel laureate William Nordhaus. A full list of prize recipients can be found on the AAPSS website.

Candidates must be willing to accept the award in person at the annual awards ceremony and must be willing to deliver a major public policy address, the Moynihan Lecture. The winner also receives a prize of $20,000.

The post AAPSS Seeks Nominations for 2023 Moynihan Prize appeared first on Social Science Space.

Shirley Malcom originally studied zoology, earned a Ph.D. in ecology from Penn State, and taught biology at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington for a year. But the animal she knows best is the human one, and in the years since leaving Wilmington in the mid-1970s she’s focused her formidable talents on the intersection of people and science – whether through social and behavioral science, promoting science literacy or working to include all people into the scientific enterprise.

Malcom will address those topics in this year’s Henry and Bryna David lecture, an annual event sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences’ Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education (DBASSE) and Issues in Science and Technology magazine. Her talk, “DBASSE: Where Science and Society Meet,” takes place on October 12.

Malcom is currently senior adviser to the CEO and director of the SEA Change initiative at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS. That initiative aims to advance institutional transformation in support of diversity, equity, and inclusion, especially in colleges and universities. She is a trustee of Caltech, a regent of Morgan State University, and serves on the boards of the Heinz Endowments, Public Agenda, the National Math and Science Initiative and the Kavli Foundation. Malcom has received a number of honors over the years, notably election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and receiving the 2003 Public Welfare Medal, the highest award presented by the National Academy of Sciences.

The lecture takes place at 5 p.m. ET on October 12 at the  National Academy of Sciences, 2101 Constitution Avenue Northwest in Washington, D.C. 20418.

The annual Henry and Bryna David lecture has been endowed to bestow an annual award to a leading researcher who has drawn insights from the behavioral and social sciences to inform public policy.

Henry David was a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, executive director of the Assembly of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council, Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University, president of the New School for Social Research, dean of the graduate faculty of political and social sciences at Columbia University, and executive director of the National Manpower Council. Bryna David was also active in public policy, working as an assistant to Eleanor Roosevelt during the 1948 UN General Assembly in Paris, as a scholar in residence at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy, and as director of the National Manpower Council.

Past David Lectures

Like Wildfire: How Climate Justice Should Change Disaster Response | Michael Méndez

A Coming Youth Wave? Mobilizing Young Voters in a Polarized Political Environment | Sunshine Hillygus

The post Shirley Malcom To Discuss DBASSE at Henry and Bryna David Lecture appeared first on Social Science Space.

In honor of Peer Review Week (September 19-23), the next in SAGE Publishing’s series of ‘how to get published’ webinars will shed some light on how to navigate the peer review process. The free event takes place on September 21 at 8 am PT / 11am ET / 5 pm CET.

Oftentimes, once you submit a paper to a journal, it may be unclear what is going on behind the scenes. How long does it take for a manuscript to go through peer review? How can you better outline your paper to ensure all goes smoothly in the peer review process? Does it matter whether you submit to a single or double anonymous peer review model?

Send in your questions via Twitter and Instagram using the hashtag #SAGEHowToGetPublished

Jessica Lipowski manages a range of science and medicine journals as a publishing editor on the STM Journals Editorial team. At SAGE, she has worked closely with the author team to create and develop resources to help early career researchers across disciplines better understand the publishing process and publish their research.

Jill L. Adelson is the president and CEO of Adelson Research & Consulting, LLC. Her research interests include applying advanced statistics to study gifted and mathematics education. Adelson is the co-editor of Gifted Child Quarterly. Papers she has co-authored received the American Educational Research Association Pyryt Collaboration Award and the Gifted Child Quarterly Paper of the Year award in 2013 and 2009.

Vicky Crittenden is a professor of marketing and Babson Research Scholar. She is currently the editor of the Journal of Marketing Education and has edited several books. Crittenden has received numerous teaching and research awards, including the American Marketing Association Higher Ed SIG Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021 and the Babson College Senior Scholar Award in 2020.

Brittney Stewart is a peer review manager at SAGE Publishing. Since joining SAGE in 2020, she has supported the SAGE Track support team and provides a rich understanding of publication ethics and peer review best practice.

HOW TO GET PUBLISHED WEBINAR SERIES

June 22 (past) – How to select a journal and relevant metrics

July 20 (past) – How to write a journal article and advice on revisions

August 24 (past) – Mentorship and general drop-in session

September 21 (upcoming – see above) – How to navigate the peer review process as an author

October 19 (upcoming – register) – Open access and author rights, in honor of Open Access Week

November 16 (upcoming – register) – How to promote your article and increase citations

The post Webinar Takes a Deep Dive into Peer Review appeared first on Social Science Space.