Erkan's field diary

Surprising insights from the social sciences

IFPRI: 'Food crisis not over when prices come down'

While the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) does foresee an end to the current commodity price crisis, it underlines that the consequences will be visible for decades to come as children who have suffered from deficiencies in food, for even a couple of months, will never really recover. Von Braun was speaking to EurActiv in an interview.

From Metrosexual to Retrosexual: The Importance of Shifting Male Gender Roles to Feminism

By Katherine Noel Anderson

The study of gender in feminism should not only concentrate on female gender roles and queer transgressions of established gender roles, but should also include an in-depth discussion on male gender roles as they exist in society. This paper focuses on the metrosexual and the retrosexual trends which have recently affected the male gender role in society.

The re-transnationalization of literary criticism

By Carl Henrik Fredriksson

Critical and public discussion of foreign literature in newspapers and magazines has traditionally served as a source of information and guidance not only for a broad readership, but also for "people in the business", for publishers and authors. When that discussion disappears, or loses its perspectives and becomes one-sided, this has consequences for the literary institution as a whole.

Who Speaks for Islam?

By Ronald Lukens-Bull

Recently, all members of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion received a copy of Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think by John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed (2007), which is based on Gallup’s World Poll — specifically on polls conducted between 2001-2007 which included tens of thousand of face to face interviews. The authors identify nine counterintuitive discourses that emerged from the poll:

Art education, Science, Technology and Culture collide in a new book from Intellect

By INTELLECT

The future of art and education is evolving, propelling artists into unknown territory in the new media age.

Educating Artists for the Future edited by Mel Alexenberg offers ground-breaking guidelines for higher art-education, focusing on the way that contemporary education must accept and reflect changes in digital and cultural systems.

The Future of the Internet, by Jonathan Zittrain

By Philip Young

The full title of cyberlaw scholar Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It is stencilled across yellow and black warning stripes. The message is clear: something terrible is going to happen - unless...

Toward a More Public Social Science

By Maximilian Forte on SSRC

By SSRC President Craig Calhoun

I want to suggest four crucial ingredients of a more public social science that are not always stressed in such discussions.

1. Engagement with public constituencies must move beyond a dissemination model. It is not enough to say that first scientists will do whatever “pure” research moves them and then, eventually, there will be a process of dissemination, application, and implementation. Writing more clearly is good, but not the whole answer. For one thing, we should be cautious about assuming that social scientists should always write directly for broad publics; this may be more the task of some than others, and raising the standards for how journalists draw on social science may be equally important. As the crises of libraries and university presses reminds us, we have also failed to ask enough questions about what publications deserve public subsidies and which should proceed on market bases. In the process, we have made it hard for both ourselves and especially our nonspecialist readers to identify what is really worthwhile. We also need to bring non-scientific constituencies for scientific knowledge into the conversation earlier. Those who potentially use the results of social science in practical action, and those who mediate between scientists and broader publics, should be engaged as social science agendas are developed. Neither broader dissemination nor better “translation” of social science will be adequate without a range of relationships to other constituencies that build an interest in and readiness to use the products of research.

Remaking Turkey: Globalization, Alternative Modernities, and Democracies

By Reflection Cafe

In recent years there has been an upsurge of interest in Turkey's ability to create a secular, constitutional democracy within a predominantly Muslim population. Remaking Turkey provides a comprehensive and detailed account of how Turkey has achieved the possibility of modernity and democracy in a Muslim social setting, as well as the important problems and challenges confronting this achievement.