A New Semester
A lot has happened since our last newsletter. Barack Obama has become the 44th President of the United States and the nation’s first African American president. His administration is now wrestling with the nation’s greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. As we move forward we look to the past for insight or further questions to ask.
Cases in point: ISERP seed grant recipient, Till von Wachter’s study of the long-term effects of layoffs in the 1980s will be highly relevant as unemployment continues to rise. Samuel Roberts’s new study of New York City’s drug treatment policies and professionals will also be apt as policy makers continue to review the nation’s narcotics addition treatments and policies. In examining hostilities around the world, Tanisha Fazal is taking a historical look at how, in some cases, formal declarations of war and peace treaties have been decreasingly used. With the United States engaged in two war zones, the soldiers and officers of our all-volunteer armed force have remained in center stage. Following in the tradition (of more than fifty years ago) of Samuel Stouffer’s, The American Soldier, and the late Samuel Huntington’s, The Soldier and the State, the results of Jason Dempsey’s “2004 Citizenship and Service Survey of Army Personnel,” conducted at ISERP, are reported in “The Army’s Hispanic Future” (in the current issue of Armed Forces & Society) and in his forthcoming book, Our Army: Soldiers, Politics, and American Civil-Military Relations (Princeton University Press). Dempsey is currently an Army infantry officer with the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan.
Other developments on the research front are new, driven by specific events, technological advances, and discoveries. As a result of the 2008 election, Carla Shedd will examine the effect of Obama’s presidency on the perceptions of public school children in Chicago (the president’s home turf) concerning economic and educational success, interactions with authorities, and injustice. Driven by questions raised about the effects of new technology, Christian Pop-Eleches found that giving computers to families in Romania did not positively affect educational outcomes. And at the cutting edge of sociological research, the intersection -and tensions-
between genetics and sociology, Peter
Bearman, Sara Shostak, and Molly Martin, coedited a special issue of The American Journal of Sociology devoted to “Exploring Genetics and Social Structure.”
The latter collaboration came directly out of ISERP’s Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar Program. We are looking forward to announcing our new cohort of Health & Society Scholars this spring. And we will also soon be reviewing applications soon for our undergraduate and high school summer internship program, as the Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences Program and the new Oral History Masters Program select new classes of students.
ISERP, like other parts of the University, will have to scale back expenditures due to the economic downturn, but its seed grant program, workshops, and grants administration will continue to have high priority. In planning ahead and following last year’s recommendation from the Arts and Sciences’ Academic Review Committee, ISERP has established an Interim Executive Committee to advise ISERP on programs and budget. Such a Committee should become institutionalized and serve as a governing structure for ISERP. I want to thank Professors Richard Clarida (Economics), Alice Kessler-Harris (History), Kenneth Prewitt (International and Public Affairs), Jack Snyder (Political Science), and Sudhir Venkatesh (Sociology), for agreeing to serve on this important committee.
This hits some of the latest highlights at ISERP. We are interested in your new ideas and thoughts as ISERP begins thinking about the next academic year’s activities.
Robert Shapiro, Director
Institute of Social and Economic
Research and Policy
