Ideas

Geoff Mann, Member in the Institute for Advanced Study's School of Social Science (2023–24), describes his interest in modeling how the world works, and how uncertainties in this modeling process can be channeled from scientific research through the policy world and into the realm of politics.

During the 2023–24 academic year, the School of Social Science hosted a special theme year titled PLATFORM. To offer a view into their work, some of the theme year participants share thoughts on what the word "platform" means to them, and how "platform" serves as a useful concept in their research.

After the COVID-19 pandemic saw public health erupt into the world’s consciousness, Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science, gave a series of lectures at the Collège de France in Paris proposing a new analysis of the moral and political issues at stake in the practice of public health. The lectures have been published by Polity Press in a book titled The Worlds of Public Health: Anthropological Excursions.

While some people were baking sourdough bread during the pandemic, Kristen Ghodsee, Member (2006–07) in the School of Social Science, studied utopian communities. In this interview, she discusses the resulting book, Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life, and her efforts to engage a non-academic audience through her writing and even TikTok!

Lindsey D. Cameron, Member in the School of Social Science, studies Uber. "Well, I don’t study strictly Uber per se," she says, "but it’s easier to digest than saying I study the rise of the platform economy and algorithmic management, and its implications on labor."

After the death of several dozens of refugees, most of them fleeing Afghanistan, in a shipwreck off the coasts of Calabria, in the South of Italy, on the 26th of February 2023, Lorenzo Alunni, current Member in the School of Social Science, and Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor, wrote a column for Le Monde, analyzing how Europe had shifted from a politics of rescue to a criminalization of humanitarianism.

Lynne Huffer and Andreas Folkers, current Members of the School of Social Science, join Distinguished Visiting Professor Timothy Mitchell to discuss the important and varied work of the Members participating in the School's theme seminar on Climate Crisis Politics, and consider what it looks like to live in and beyond climate crisis.

Based on her firsthand experience of shadowing workers on construction sites in Qatar, Natasha Iskander, Member (2022–23) in the School of Social Science, reveals how climate change and climate migration were exploited for profit at the 2022 World Cup. She highlights that climate change has a face, and that its consequences are made through specific economic and organizational practices.

Lesyle Obiora, Visitor (1998) in the School of Social Science, describes her time at the IAS as "a gift that has just given perpetually in my life."

"There is a uniquely U.S. story to the legal undoings following Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The American divide on abortion finds its contested space reinvigorated by the recent majority decision from the U.S. Supreme Court that overturned Roe and Casey. This distinctly American institution of politically appointed judges is unparalleled to any other top courts in other liberal democracies."