This talk presents arguments from an ongoing book project that compares the role of the Internet in India and in China. For China, the main questions about the internet so far have been about censorship and surveillance, a rather narrow scope. For India, research about the role of the internet has been scarce. Social theories have focused on the internet in Western democracies, and there is abundant research. How are theoretical comparisons possible under these circumstances?
Kirstin Krusell, PhD Candidate, recently won two awards in support of her dissertation research comparing doomsday preppers across the political spectrum.
1.) 2024 Mike Synar Graduate Research Fellowship from Berkeley's Institute for Governmental Studies.
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PhD student Daniel Lobo was accepted to the Summer Institute on “Organizations and Their Effectiveness” hosted by the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University.
https://casbs.stanford.edu/programs/institute-organizations-and-their-effectiveness
Congratulations Daniel Lobo!
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Wikipedia is an exemplar – a digital poster-child -- of Robert K. Merton’s 1936 essay on exclusion as unanticipated consequence of purposive action. Editorial practices, algorithms, and communities typically undermine the representation of notable women and minorities on academic Wikipedia and thereby create new gender and racial inequalities in on-line encyclopedias and their digital cousins. This is not invariably the case, however. What practices make for more -- or even less --- accurate forms of disciplinary knowledge?
Social scientists distinguish between predictive and causal research. While this distinction clarifies the aims of two research traditions, this clarity is being blurred by the introduction of machine learning (ML) algorithms. Although ML excels in prediction, scholars are increasingly using ML not only for prediction but also for causation. While using ML for causation appears as a category mistake, this article shows that there is a third kind of research problem in which causal and predictive inference form an intricate synergy.
Podcast interview with Yan Long, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley specializing in the politics of public health in China. Formerly holding the same position at Indiana University and serving as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society, she earned her PhD at the University of Michigan and her master’s and bachelor’s degrees at Beijing University.
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PhD Student Emily Ruppel has an article published in Work and Occupations. Read abstract below, and click the link to read the full informative article.
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PhD Student Ángel Mendiola Ross has an article published on Social Problems. Read the abstract below, and click the link to read the full enthralling article.
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Abstract: This talk focuses on the key role of medical experts in changing ideas about gender and the body in Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the political upheaval of the 1960s. The fashioning of one’s body and its cultivation, criticized as a bourgeois holdover in the Stalinist 1950s, came to be demanded from below and promoted from above as part of socialist lifestyle in the 1970s.