Keynotes in the Social and Behavioral Sciences
2018 Social and Behavioral Sciences Dean's Distinguished Lectureship Series
SBS economicsEconomics
Fiscal Therapy: Curing America’s Debt Addiction and Investing in the Future
William Gale
Arjay and Frances Fearing Miller Chair in
Federal Economic Policy
The Brookings Institution
4:30 - 5:45pm, Wednesday, March 4, 2020
Rutgers Academic Building, Room 1180, College Avenue Campus
William Gale is the Arjay and Frances Miller Chair in Federal Economic Policy at the Brookings Institution. He is co-director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, and President of the National Tax Association. He received his PhD in economics from Stanford University.
Gale is a leading authority on how tax and budget policy affects the economy. He will present an overview of his new book, Fiscal Therapy: Curing America's Debt Addiction and Investing in the Future. America currently faces two distinct but related fiscal challenges: tackling rising government debt while also restructuring taxes and spending for a more equitable and growth-oriented society. Gale will discuss these challenges and possibly policy responses in his lecture.
SBS CJCriminal Justice
Confronting Mass Incarceration
James Forman Jr.
J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law Yale Law School
4:00 - 5:30pm, Thursday, February 27, 2020
Busch Student Center, Room 116ABC
How did the United States come to lock up more of its citizens than any other nation on earth? What can we do to change that? Yale Law Professor James Forman, Jr. will diagnose America’s criminal justice crisis with both data and human stories. He will draw on his life experience as the child of a civil rights workers and his work as a public defender. He will also discuss research from his Pulitzer-prize winning book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. Forman will leave the audience hopeful and armed with concrete ideas for how they themselves can contribute to change.
SBS geographyGeography
Landscapes and Livelihoods: How global drug policies and criminal networks shape smallholder trajectories in Central America
Dr. Kendra McSweeney
Professor, Department of Geography
The Ohio State University
4:00 - 5:30pm, Wednesday, October 2, 2019
Cook Student Center, George H. Cook Room
Dr. McSweeney’s primary interest is in human-environment interactions, with focus on issues in cultural and political ecology, conservation and development, resilience, demography, and land use/cover change. Current projects include tracing the socioecological impacts of drug trafficking through Central America, and studying the nature and implications of demographic change among Latin America's indigenous populations.
SBS poliSciPolitical Science
The Far Right Today
Cas Mudde
Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF Professor of International Affairs
University of Georgia
4:30 - 6pm, Wednesday, April 1, 2020
New Brunswick Theological Seminary, Hageman Hall, 35 Seminary Place, New Brunswick, NJ
Cas Mudde was born in the Netherlands, where he gained his M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science at Leiden University. Mudde was the first chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Antwerp (Belgium) and the co-founder of the ECPR Standing Group on Extremism & Democracy. His research agenda aims to address the question: how can liberal democracies defend themselves against political challenges without undermining their core values? He has published widely on topics such as (un)civil society, democratization, Euroskepticism, extremism and democracy, political parties, and populism.
SBS sociology
Sociology
Intellectual, Political, and Ethical Challenges in the Study of Contemporary White Supremacism
Kathleen Blee
Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Bettye J. and Ralph E. Bailey Dean Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences University of Pittsburgh
4:00 - 5:30pm, Thursday, March 5, 2020
Followed by a reception
Douglass Lounge, Douglass Student Center
Dean Kathleen Blee received her BA in sociology from Indiana University in 1974 and joined the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Sociology at the rank of Professor and as Director of the Women's Studies Program in 1996. She served as chair of the Department of Sociology, Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research, before being appointed Dean in 2017. A highly productive scholar, Blee won the 2013 Charles Tilly Award
for Best Book from the American Sociological Association and the 2012 Outstanding Book in Nonprofit and Voluntary Action Research Award from the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action for her book Making Democracy: How Activist Groups Form (Oxford UP, 2012). Her latest book, Understanding Racist Activism: Theory, Methods and Research, was published in 2017 by Routledge Press.
Anthropology
2017 SBS Anthropology
Anthropology of Metabolism in Epigenetic Times
Hannah Landecker
Professor of Sociology
Director of the Institute for Society and Genetics
University of California, Los Angeles
5:30pm, Wednesday, February 26, 2020
Douglass Campus, Ruth Adams Building, Room 001
Hannah Landecker uses the tools of history and social science to study contemporary developments in the life sciences, and their historical taproots in the twentieth century. She is currently working on a book called “American Metabolism,” which looks at transformations to the metabolic sciences wrought by the rise of epigenetics, microbiomics, cell signaling and hormone biology.
Abstract: Professor Landecker will present ethnographic observations from spaces of contemporary biomedical science where the relationships between industrialization, work, energy, food, and metabolic disorder are being actively rethought and redrawn. She argues that the contours of a postindustrial metabolism are coming into view, in which concerns about asynchrony, dysbiology, instability, and regulatory crisis displace the traditional concerns of labor, fatigue, caloric energy, and production.