Summer Workshops 2009

How did three teams that brought together more than 30 of the nation's most respected social science scholars tackle the task of designing a multi-year effort to create new fields or transform existing ones? We asked the leaders of our three Collaborative Ventures Summer Workshops 2009 research teams to fill us in.

Race and Inequality in Education: Reframing a Research and Policy
Agenda for the 21st Century

READ MORE >>		 Researching the Built Environment:
Spatial Methods & Public Practices

READ MORE >>		 Developing the Field of Computational Journalism

READ MORE >>

 

"After a week discussing the ambitious goal of reframing public debates about race and educational inequalities in the U.S., we will never think of our own work exactly the same. We spent much time 'reframing' ourselves and our complicit role as researchers in shaping current understandings; this was perhaps the most valuable outcome of our week together 'on the hill.'" -- Research Team Leaders Prudence Carter, sean f. reardon and Amy Stuart Wells
 
Research Team Leaders (front row) sean f. reardon, Stanford University; Amy Stuart Wells, Teachers College, Columbia University; and Prudence Carter, Stanford University; with workshop consultants (back row) john powell, Ohio State University and Lani Guinier, Harvard Law School.


Race and Inequality in Education: Reframing a Research and Policy Agenda for the 21st Century

PROJECT SUMMARY:
Recent social science evidence on the beneficial outcomes of school desegregation contrasts sharply with the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision that race should not be a deciding factor in student assignments to public schools. While in residence at CASBS, this team’s summer 2009 workshop gathered together researchers from diverse disciplines, with diverging methodological approaches and macro as well as micro perspectives. The team drew upon social science research on racial and social class inequality in its effort to reframe the public debate on the salience of race in education and generate policy recommendations for reducing the on-going opportunity gap.

 "Thanks to dead malls, the mortgage meltdown, and stalled efforts to rebuild Ground Zero, many Americans are curious about the making and unmaking of buildings and public spaces. The humanities offer methods for analyzing physical places that change relatively slowly over time. The social sciences offer methods for exploring the much faster pace of human behavior in space. Working together across fields, we believe we can extend research to engage the largest political implications of scholarship on the built environment in the United States." -- Research Team Leaders Setha Low, The City University of New York (CUNY) and Dolores Hayden, Yale University


Researching the Built Environment: Spatial Methods and Public Practices


PROJECT SUMMARY:
 Research on the built environment takes place in the social sciences, the humanities, and the design professions, yet often these efforts are not connected. This team’s summer 2009 workshop drew together respected scholars from the social sciences and humanities who have produced innovative work on subjects including main streets, downtowns, public parks, subways, farm workers’ housing, suburbs, and sprawl. They explored how spatial theory and qualitative spatial research methods are employed most effectively across urban history, geography, anthropology, architecture, and environmental psychology, particularly in defining inequalities of gender, race and class. The group also examined how scholars of the built environment contribute to practices that involve research, including public history, people’s geography, and rapid ethnographic assessment. The team plans to produce a book intended to be used across disciplines in courses on spatial research methods. The working title is The Making of American Space.

"With reductions in reporting staff around the country, accountability and watchdog coverage is threatened. Computational journalism holds the promise of becoming a form of public interest data mining. Paul Starr indicates that the decline in newspapers may usher in a new era of corruption. If Computational Journalism lowers the cost of discovering what government is doing, it may help make government more transparent and more responsive.

Although the contributions of computational journalism are easy to envision, collaboration among social scientists, computer scientists and journalists is rare. Because CASBS has a history of drawing together researchers from multiple fields to tackle current policy questions, it was easy for us to recruit workshop participants from diverse fields. Our Collaborative Ventures summer 2009 workshop was an interdisciplinary meeting ground of respected researchers and several Silicon Valley participants representing leading media and internet companies. Together, we left the workshop with a heightened interest in how our disciplines and businesses can serve as sources for innovation that will speed the growth of watchdog algorithms and technologies. "
-- Research Team Leaders: James T. Hamilton, Duke University and Fred Turner, Stanford University


Developing the Field of Computational Journalism

PROJECT SUMMARY: The media’s watchdog role constitutes a significant service to society. But currently this function is at risk due to declining revenues at many traditional media sources. Recent advances in computing and data availability have the potential to harness innovations in data analysis to computerize and enhance watchdog coverage by the media and the public. While in residence at CASBS, this team’s summer 2009 workshop catalyzed a new research area which merges advances in computer science, social science and communications to develop computational tools that will help society monitor the performance of public and private institutions. This emergent field requires approaches from fields that seldom collaborate: computer science, social science, communications, and legal scholarship.




(Interviewed in summer 2009)
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