John Skrentny, professor at sociology, was featured in an article published by CNN titled “How Trump became ‘the white affirmative action president’.”
“It’s odd that Trump’s Justice Department is going after affirmative action while Trump is putting all of these people in positions of power and influence who are clearly not qualified for their positions,” said John Skrentny of Sociology and the Yankelovich Center to CNN.
Filed under Faculty
Premiering on UCSD-TV on Feb. 2: Literature professor emeritus Roddey Reid speaks about his new short book, “Confronting Political Intimidation and Public Bullying: A Citizen’s Handbook for the Trump Era and Beyond,” with Akos Rona-Tas of Sociology. The program is presented by the Division of Social Sciences, Division of Arts and Humanities and the Department of Literature.
Click here to watch it online.
Filed under Faculty
The Social Sciences and Social Good luncheon will be held on Friday of January 19th as a tribute event for the late Daniel Yankelovich, 1924-2017. The luncheon event will feature remarks from UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla, Hilary Pennington of the Ford Foundation and Will Friedman of Public Agenda, as well as Social Sciences Dean Carol Padden, former deans Paul Drake and Jeff Elman, and John Skrentny, director of the division’s Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research.
Click here for the event program/invite.
The event begins at 11:30 in the Faculty Club. Please RSVP to mlapthorn@ucsd.edu.
Isaac Martin, professor and department chair at sociology, has written an op-ed that was published in the New York Times. The article, titled “How Republicans Learned to Sell Tax Cuts for the Rich,” discusses the Republican tax strategy, rooted in the American populist tradition, which was first used to help the rich instead of the poor.
In the article, Isaac Martin argues that opponents of the current tax bill should reclaim their own populist roots. He writes:
It will not be hard. The tax bill pays for corporate tax cuts by increasing individual income taxes on poor and middle-class Americans in the long run. That tax increase will make people hopping mad. Another wave of economic populism is coming, and people who favor progressive taxation should not retreat to the seminar room.
Click here for the full article.
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Jennifer Nations of sociology was under the impression that she was going into a meeting with her dissertation adviser Isaac Martin when she was surprised with an award and $20,000 prize. Nations, who recently received her PhD at the UC San Diego Department of Sociology, was selected as the first recipient of the Dean’s Fellowship Award for Humanistic Studies.
Nations said that it was both “gratifying and a little surreal.”
The Dean’s Fellowship Award for Humanistic Studies was created by an anonymous donor with the passion to support graduate students. It is described as a gift to benefit the recipient, which is selected selected on the basis of academic merit as well as demonstrated perseverance to overcome personal hardship. This award celebrates PhD students in Anthropology, Communication, History, Linguistics, Literature, Philosophy and Sociology, recognizing these fields as ones who help to “drive creative innovation in our society” and are “intrinsic to campus enrichment and critical to our shared future.”
Jennifer Nations, who studies social inequality and public policy, explores in her dissertation how it is that states have wound up with wildly different approaches to helping their citizens afford the costs of college. Isaac Martin, in nominating her for the surprise fellowship, wrote both about Nations’ stellar scholarship and about how she’s been raising three young children in sometimes challenging financial circumstances. He also noted that she goes out of her way to help undergrads who are struggling for one reason or another.
A campus photographer snapped pictures of the shock, the smiles, the tears and more smiles.
Photos by Erik Jepsen/UC San Diego Publications.
Click here to read the full article.
Filed under Awards, Faculty, Fellowship, Uncategorized
Martha Lampland, professor at UCSD’s Sociology Department, received Honorable Mention for the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize for her book The Value of Labor: The Science of Commodification in Hungary, 1920-1956.
Established in 1983, the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, sponsored by the Association for Slavic Studies, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) and the Stanford University Center for Russian and East European Studies, is awarded annually for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences published in English in the United States in the previous calendar year. The Vucinich Book Prize carries a cash award and is presented at the Annual Convention.
John Evans, professor at the department of sociology, will be serving as one of the inaugural co-directors of the Institute for Practical Ethics along with Craig Callender of Philosophy.
Hosted in the Division of Arts and Humanities, the mission of the institute is to develop and promote cross-disciplinary research on ethical issues facing the public, with special emphasis on fostering deliberation amongst ethicists, scientists and policy makers. The aim of the Institute for Practical Ethics is to help close the gap between the pace of innovation and our ability to deal with these questions responsibly. The institute will host speakers, convene interdisciplinary research groups and create publicly available analyses of cutting-edge ethical issues generated by UC San Diego’s research activity.
To learn more about the Institute for Practical Ethics and connect to its activities, go to ipe.ucsd.edu or contact the institute at ipe@ucsd.edu.
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Professor at UCSD department of Sociology, Amy Binder, and Sociology graduate student Daniel Davis‘s paper was selected for James Coleman Award for best article in the field of sociology of education. Amy Binder and Daniel Davis, together with former graduate student Nick Bloom worked on the paper “Career Funneling: How Elite Students Learn to Define and Desire ‘Prestigious’ Jobs,” which has been selected for the annual award this year.
Read more about the James Coleman award and past recipients here.
John Skrentny, a professor in the Sociology Department, was appointed as Director of the Division of Social Sciences‘ Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research. The office of the dean of the division of social sciences stated:
We are grateful to fellow sociologist Lane Kenworthy for stewarding the center for the past two years. We are excited about the future of the Yankelovich Center at UC San Diego and look forward to building new partnerships in the region and beyond.
The Yankelovich Center at UC San Diego – founded in 2012 by Daniel Yankelovich, who in 2016 also established a planned gift to sustain the center into perpetuity – is dedicated to developing practical solutions to our nation’s most pressing problems.
John’s plans for the Yankelovich Center include taking the findings of the commission out to the public and, in partnership with Public Agenda, a nonpartisan non-profit organization in New York City, testing which solutions have the most promise in terms of political feasibility and public support. In addition to the center’s existing executive board, John is also putting together a regional advisory board of community stakeholders. Cities and rural regions, he says, are the new laboratories of democracy – and we can best make national progress by beginning on a regional level and then scaling up best practices and solutions.
To learn more about the center and to connect: http://yankelovichcenter.ucsd.edu/
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Professor of Sociology and co-director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies David FitzGerald was featured in a San Diego Union-Tribune article titled “‘You’re just there, trapped’: Why one Mexican woman decided to ‘self-deport,’ long before Trump.” In the article, David writes:
These policies are designed to increase anxiety, they’re designed to create fear in immigrant communities. The government knows they’ll never be able to go out and deport the unauthorized population – and one of their stated hopes is that people will self-deport.
Filed under Faculty
