Social Science

Diana Graizbord, Member in the School of Social Science, is writing her first book "Indications of Democracy: Expertise and the Politics of Accountability," which examines how policy evaluation techniques have been adopted by the Mexican state and...

Marion Fourcade is Visiting Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. A professor at the University of California, Berkeley, she is studying new forms of social stratification...

Didier Fassin is James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. An anthropologist and sociologist, he was trained as a physician in internal medicine and...

Sociologist Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, is an expert on the intersection of race, inequality, science, and...

In my lifetime, academic freedom has been repeatedly under threat. In the 1950s, in the McCarthy era, hundreds of teachers were interrogated about their political beliefs and summarily fired, whether or not those beliefs had anything to do with the...

I spent part of my childhood living with my grandma just off Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles. My school was on the same street as our house, but I still spent many a day trying to coax kids on my block to “play school” with me on my grandma’s huge...

As sociologists have reminded us, race, like power, is a relational concept. A so-called race is invariably defined in distinction to other presumed races. Where racial reasoning and the practice of comparison have combined in modern politics is in...

Originally published in 1971, Political Action: A Practical Guide to Movement Politics by Michael Walzer, Professor Emeritus in the Institute’s School of Social Science, was republished by New York Review of Books in 2019. The following is Walzer’s...

Like many Americans, my family and I were riveted by the Roots miniseries when it first aired in January 1977. I vividly recall sitting in front of the television with my mother, father, sister, and two brothers, watching the story of Alex Haley’s...

In 2019–20, Julia Ott, Member in the School of Social Science and Associate Professor at the New School for Social Research, is examining the origins of venture capital as an idea, as a form of investment, and as an organized industry.