Over the course of the past year, Theda Skocpol, Harvard social scientist and a great friend of TSP, has been working to create a network of publicly minded social scientists to help bring scholarly research and expertise to bear on issues of public importance and political significance. She calls it the Scholars Strategy Network, or SSN for short. Given our commitment to public engagement and with a regional branch here in the Twin Cities, we’ve been following this initiative closely and indeed trying to contribute in our own small ways. Not even a year old, the SSN now boasts over 100 members and has eight regional chapters. And perhaps most notable of all (at least from our web-centric view), this week marks the launch of the Network’s new website: http://www.
Over the next few days, Skocpol and other members of the network will be in Washington, introducing the site and a few of the research briefs that are its most useful and impressive feature to representatives of the 100 or so organizations that attend the weekly Common Purpose meetings. They also plan to make an appearance at Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro’s supper seminar for House members and staffers, and present to the White House Outreach Office. “So,” as Skocpol puts it, “the word will be getting around fast. People will be looking at our site, downloading our briefs, and getting a sense of who and what we have to offer.”
We invite you to take a quick sneak peak for yourselves. You’ll see that more than a few friends of and contributors to TSP are involved, including Minnesota’s own Larry Jacobs, one of the four featured scholars for the inaugural month of June. You should also be able to scroll through SSN’s brand new collection of original research briefs. These short, accessibly written briefs summarize key research findings, present basic facts on timely topics, and spell out policy options on issues of immediate public and political concern. Written by a stellar cast of leading scholars, these are really great and useful pieces. There are almost 90 available on topics ranging from jobs creation and economic growth to health and education reform, to immigration policy, elections, and the environment.
To help promote and disseminate this work, our plan here at TSP is to use our “Reading List” feature to highlight some of the best and most relevant of these briefs over the summer months. We hope you find these pieces as interesting, informative, and accessible as we do. You can also check the Network out on Twitter: @SSNScholars.
Comments 2
a — June 11, 2012
This article is less informative than what I've come to expect from TSP. It sounds like legalese... lots of polysyllabics but nothing to help explain the actual subject. The phrase "to help bring scholarly research and expertise to bear on issues of public importance and political significance" could be talking about honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder and the new, very infectious virus just found in Varroa Mites.
Whoever wrote this is too entrenched in their own viewpoint to make it accessable to others. I'm sure it's a great article from the inside, though.
Chris Uggen — June 19, 2012
I'm usually more prone to polysyllabism than Doug, but your point about accessibility is both fair and important. This post is really just trying to introduce the new Scholars Strategy Network, whose goal is to help connect the research that we're doing as social scientists to the folks who are actually implementing policy. We'll be featuring some of the SSN research briefs on our Reading List in coming months. Two that we won't be featuring are our own, but we both tried our best to avoid too much academic jargon in crafting them:
http://www.scholarsstrategynetwork.org/sites/default/files/ssn_key_findings_hartmann_on_talking_about_diversity.pdf http://www.scholarsstrategynetwork.org/sites/default/files/ssn_key_findings_uggen_on_opinion_on_disenfranchisement.pdf