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In the US and elsewhere, acceptance of public health measures, including vaccines often falls along partisan lines, with Republicans being more hesitant to receive the COVID-19 vaccine compared to Democrats. In new research Ian G. Anson and John V. Kane test whether partisanship can be used to encourage vaccine take-up. They find that framing getting … Continued

In Understanding Humans: How Social Science Can Help Solve Our Problems, David Edmonds curates a selection of interviews with social science researchers covering the breadth of human life and society, from morality, bias and identity to kinship, inequality and justice. Accessible and engaging, the research discussed in the book illuminates the crucial role of social sciences in addressing contemporary … Continued

In Understanding Humans: How Social Science Can Help Solve Our Problems, David Edmonds curates a selection of interviews with social science researchers covering the breadth of human life and society, from morality, bias and identity to kinship, inequality and justice. Accessible and engaging, the research discussed in the book illuminates the crucial role of social sciences in addressing … Continued

On September 28, CEGA hosted its annual Evidence to Action (E2A) conference, this year titled "Realigning Tech for Social Impact." It brought together researchers, policymakers, practitioners, funders, community members, and students to take stock of the benefits and harms technological interventions have had over the last two decades, with an emphasis on the experience of communities in low- and middle-income countries. Sean Luna McAdams, program manager for the Data Science for Development portfolio, shares key takeaways from the event.Carson Christiano (left), Executive Director of CEGA, and Mohamed Abdel-Kader (right), Chief Innovation Officer and Executive Director for the Innovation, Technology, and Research (ITR) Hub at USAID | Matt KrupoffNew technology benefits from a simple and powerful narrative: it can help solve complex problems, often by doing more with less. The printing press accelerated our ability to share information over long distances. Social media has made it nearly costless to communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world. But new technologies can have unintended effects. The cotton gin turbocharged an economic model that relied on enslaved African labor and ill-gotten land, with terrible consequences. More than one account at E2A emphasized this nuance of the effects of technological interventions.Over the course of the day, participants surfaced a set of complementary best practices when designing, testing, and integrating tech into existing policy, governance, and social welfare systems. The first speaks to the limits of expertise: a technically excellent product is necessary but not sufficient for social impact. Additionally, the ultimate goal of scaling a solution is often underspecified. Scaled by whom, for which communities, and at what scale (national, regional, global)? Making these answers explicit can improve estimates of the trade-offs to scaling and ensure the technological solution is the right fit for its intended problem.Beyond Technical ExcellenceAt E2A, the best examples of technology improving lives and achieving large-scale adoption in low- and middle-income countries relied on interdisciplinary teams, incorporated community input, and planned for maintenance and capacity building to ensure sustainability. Interventions developed with these elements can cultivate community trust, clarify their value proposition for potential users, and dynamically adapt and improve their product. Dan Fletcher, Professor of Bioengineering and Faculty Director at the Blum Center at UC Berkeley, reflected that the initial prototype of Cellscope failed during field testing despite its technical excellence because it was developed only by engineers. Subsequent iterations involved experts from the social sciences, improving the product and leading to greater success.Cellscope is a mobile phone-based microscopy tool that helps health workers identify a variety of pathogens to more quickly diagnose and treat those affected and test the potability of water. | Cellscope teamHowever challenging, collaboration across disciplines is essential for successful interventions. Mohamed Abdel-Kader, Chief Innovation Officer and Executive Director for the Innovation, Technology, and Research (ITR) Hub at USAID, reminded us of the value of proactively including people "whose lived experience can provide different perspectives." For USAID, this means ensuring that 25 percent of its funding is dispersed to local organizations. Daanish Masood, Advisor on AI Alignment at the UN's Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, echoed this call by highlighting the importance of "epistemological pluralism" to more effectively engage community members who often perceive and value their world using different frameworks. By bringing together multidisciplinary teams, innovators can develop technologies that will better meet the social reality in which they will be deployed.Not only does diversity make technology more effective, it also helps to minimize potential harm. For example, Josh Blumenstock shared how his team gathered input from rural communities in Togo to inform the development of a social transfer targeting software his team co-created with the Ministry of Digital Economy and Transformation. Zoe Kahn, a PhD student on Blumenstock's team in Togo, conducted ethnographic research to better understand how members of rural communities would interact, understand, and appraise the digital social transfer system they were building.Finally, technically excellent solutions must build the social consensus and requisite buy-in across different contexts to tailor and maintain these tools iteratively. This requires planning for the long-term, building in plans for deprecation, and creating institutions — whether private companies, volunteer-based organizations, or capacity-building initiatives — to maintain and update these innovations to make them sustainable over the long-run.What Does Success Look Like?We should not assume that we have the same vision of a successful technological innovation in the social impact space. We often tout "scaling" as the final life stage of tech; for many, it serves as the ultimate goal and proxy of success. Yet, Brigitte Hoyer Gosselink, Director of Product Impact at Google.org, distinguished two paths to integrating technological interventions: a tailored, individualized solution in close partnership with a decision maker and centralized, replicable systems that can be deployed across time and space reliably.Our Technology Adoption for the Public Good panel delved into the public sector's challenges and opportunities in helping to scale proven solutions. | Matt KrupoffShould a technological intervention in global development be global in scope? We need a better sense of the trade-offs in scaling up from local to global to answer this question empirically. Some systems may be better suited to function at national or regional scales. Collaborators should plan to measure performance reliably across scale to tailor solutions accordingly.As Jane Munga, Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, reminded us: even if we develop good tech solutions for citizens who have a mobile phone and access to the internet now, there is a sizable portion of the world's most underserved who would be excluded due to lack of access. We need to expand the size of the pie, improve the quality of its ingredients, and increase the diversity of the culinary team that bakes it. Digital technology has a role to play in achieving more equitable social and economic development world-wide. How transformative that development will be depends on us.Technology Is Not a Panacea, but It Can Help Solve Specific Problems was originally published in CEGA on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Konsta's songs focus on Uzbek society, its problems, and the role of each individual in unfolding events.

Natalia Zaitseva-Chipak is a sociologist and a professor in the Department of Sociology at the Ukrainian Catholic University. Her scientific interests focus on problems of modern Ukrainian society and individual social groups, such as youths or internally displaced persons (IDPs). She has been a non-resident Fellow and member of the Prisma Ukraïna War, Migration, Memory research group since 2022.

The ability to manipulate and generate images with new technologies presents various challenges to traditional media reporting and also scholarly communication. However, as Joshua Habgood-Coote discusses the history of fake images shows, rather than heralding a mass breakdown in trust, technological innovations have fed into ongoing social problems around the production of knowledge. We seem … Continued

The next issue of "Constellations" (vol. 40, no. 4) features articles on The Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt am Main) and the Frankfurt School:"The Institute for Social Research at 100: Continuity and Transformation"Eleven articles are now available online:* Axel Honneth - "The Institute for Social Research on its 100th birthday. A former director's perspective"Excerpt: "There are deeper, less superficial reasons for being skeptical today with regard to the potential of this tradition to guide us in our social–theoretical attempts to comprehend the present situation in a fruitful way, both philosophically sound and empirically productive. In the following, I want to discuss three challenges resulting from structural changes in our social and intellectual environment that make it more and more difficult to preview a fruitful, productive, and energizing future for Critical Theory in its traditional form. These three challenges stem from (1) the growing awareness of the endurance of the colonial past of Western societies, (2) the unmistakable importance of the ecological question, and, finally, (3) the growing uncertainties about the exact format and arrangement of interdisciplinary research."* Rainer Forst: "The rational critique of social unreason. On critical theory in the Frankfurt tradition"  [open access]Excerpt: "In my view, then, critical theory must be reconfigured as a critique of relations of justification. This calls, on the one hand, for a critical social scientific analysis of social and political relations of domination that includes cultural and, not least, economic structures and relationships. In this regard, two dimensions of domination must be distinguished: subjugation to unjustifiable norms and institutions, and subjugation to conditions that prevent practices of justification. Such critical analysis must be combined with a discourse-theoretical, genealogical critique of the justifications and justification narratives that confer legitimacy on unjustifiable relations. On the other hand, we must pose the constructive question of how a "basic structure of justification" can be conceived as a requirement of fundamental justice and be realized in social practice - not as an ideal or a model to be imposed on societies, but as a normative order to be developed autonomously. Essentially, a theory we call critical ought to be based on the principle of criticism itself. Its medium is reason striving for practices of autonomous justification among equals."* Alessandro Ferrara - "If Foucault, why not Rawls? On enlarging the critical tent"Excerpt: "It is undeniably among the aims of critical theory to envisage a society in which diversity can exist in the absence of oppression. Now, it's all too easy to merely invoke the ideal of equals living together with their diversity (ethnic, ethical, religious, cultural, or of gender, lifestyle, sexual preference) and without oppression. Deconstructionists, post-colonial theorists, and theorists of recognition often emphatically do so. However, when it comes to specifying concretely which institutions should form the basic structure of such a society, how they should relate to one other, what rights and liberties (and how limited and balanced) citizens should have, and what democratic legitimacy means, it is a whole different story.On the nuts and bolts of an oppression-free society the entire first generation had little to offer, to say nothing of the cauldron of the "verwaltete Welt" (Adorno). Habermas has quite a lot to say, in Between Facts and Norms and in his exchange with Rawls. Among the younger critical theorists who long for reviving the earlier program of the Frankfurt School, few even attempt to say anything. This is the problem, instead, on which [John Rawls's] Political Liberalism, not A Theory of Justice, offers an elaborate theory unmatched by any other to date (....) Critical theory can only gain from enlarging its tent to include also some of Rawls's concepts - reasonability, civility, reciprocity - and from launching empirical research on the conditions of the possibility for them to maintain traction in the challenging decades ahead of us."* Maeve Cooke - "Social theory as critical theory: Horkheimer's program and its relevance today"Excerpt: "Since formalist models of politics abstain from critique of the prevailing deep-seated ethical-existential values and from recommendation of alternatives, they are conducive toward unquestioning acceptance of the ethical-existential values undergirding the established political procedures, facilitating the reproduction of the political status quo. Against this, I take the view that contemporary critical theory must engage with ethical-existential questions, not least if it is to meet the challenges posed by our disastrous ecological situation. This requires it, in turn, to engage with the question of ethical-existential validity. Given the challenge of value pluralism, therefore, a key task for contemporary critical theory is to elaborate a conception of ethical validity that is at once universalist and attentive to the plurality of ethical values and worldviews."* Samuel Moyn - "Critical theory's generational predicament" [Link]Excerpt: "(....) it seems clear that the principal cause of the lack of interest in critical theory for younger generations - the lack of zeal to perpetuate or even study it - is that the votaries of the tradition conformed unreflectively to "the end of history" in the 1990s. They had essentially nothing to say about American unipolarity and the militarism that has so clearly accompanied it. Worse, for one-time Marxists, they never formulated an analysis or critique of economic neoliberalism. Yet these are the causes at the center of the activism and theorizing of many who lived through the past decade and forging a critical perspective on their times."* Martin Saar - "Rethinking Critique and Theory" [open access]Excerpt: "Benjamin's partisanship for the perspective of the defeated in historiography, Adorno's and Horkheimer's insistence on the deep ambivalence of enlightenment ideals, and Marcuse's clear-sighted perception of the central role of the excluded and marginalized, whom the capitalist system cannot even properly exploit, are starting points for a radical self-critique of the Western liberation movements, which have yet to admit their own entanglement in domination elsewhere and thus should actually make way for an even more radical, decentered enlightenment and liberation."* Frank I. Michelman - "Totality, morality, and social philosophy"Excerpt: "We thus see the Institute for Social Research, at a signal moment in its early history, posing for itself the dialectic of human individual agency and environing social totality - with neither element placed at the other's disposal - as a main topic for pursuit by social philosophy and its connected program of social research. It is by pursuit of that topic that the Institute's engagements over the decades of my own academic career have figured, importantly for me, in my work (not generally classified as "Frankfurt School") on liberal constitutional theory. Most pointedly it has done so in undertakings by Jürgen Habermas to explicate a moral point of view from which citizens in a political society encounter one another as each a free and equal person commanding full respect as such - but to explicate that morality, as I have sought to explain, not as a view "that philosophy independently discovers," but rather as one that lies embedded in a historically particular social totality."* Cristina Lafont - "The return of the critique of ideologies" [open access]Excerpt: "(....) I shall focus on just one issue: the recent revival in critiques of ideology. In my view, this type of critique is an important task of critical theory and remains one of its most significant legacies. Yet, if one focuses on the work of critical theorists over the past decades, this statement is far from obvious. In fact, the second generation of the Frankfurt school,most notably Habermas in his Theory of Communicative Action, explicitly rejects ideology critique as obsolete in the context of contemporary societies. Even though in the 1960s and 1970s, he had embraced the classicalMarxist approach to ideology critique, he ultimately rejected it. It was the explicit attempt to rebut objections that had plagued this approach that brought about the so-called "democratic turn" of critical theory characteristic of Habermas's work from the 1980s onward and in which the critique of ideologies no longer plays a role."* Christopher F. Zurn -  "We're not special: Congratulations!"Excerpt: "It is fine, then, to get right to work on current social movements - Occupy Wall Street and other Square movements, Black Lives Matter, the Sunrise and Third Act movements, MeToo, the Arab Spring, or the Mahsa Amini protests - and on pressing contemporary social problems - climate change and human adaptation, deepening material inequality, the erosion of constitutional democracy, artificial intelligence and human de-skilling, global migration and refugee waves, the transformation of the Westphalian international order, the resilience and resurgence of patriarchy, and so on - without worrying how to fit these movements and problems into the architectonic of Dialectic of Enlightenment or Theory of Communicative Action. To be sure, we need not ignore the conceptual resources and insights of our tradition when they are relevant and enlightening. But we need to take interdisciplinarity seriously by looking to the much broader currents of critical thought on social formations and the changing horizons of human emancipation."* Peter E. Gordon - "The animating impulses of critical theory"Excerpt: "For some readers, this generational shift - between the first and second generations of critical theory - is overdramatized into a stark contrast between totalizing negativism and restorationist optimism, both of which seem to hover at too great an altitude above social reality. Needless to say, this contrast does an injustice to both parties. Adorno and Horkheimer are far more committed to reason's self-reflective possibilities, while Habermas remains far more attentive to reason's systemic distortion. They converge at a point of dialectical mediation, whereas neither pure negativism nor pure idealism would serve as a viable groundwork for critical theory. In what follows I wish to suggest that Horkheimer's original model of social philosophy, as animated by a rational but materialist ideal of emancipation, still has enduring merit."* William E. Scheuerman - "Horkheimer's unrealized vision"Excerpt: "Horkheimer's idea of a mutually constructive exchange between philosophy and critical social science has too often been rare and ephemeral. And this should worry us if you believe, as this author does, that Horkheimer was right to see such an exchange as indispensable to critical theory. (....) Only in 1962 did Habermas, in an appropriately interdisciplinary study that relied heavily on research from legal scholars, political scientists, and sociologists, begin to revitalize Frankfurt critical theory. Not only did his landmark Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere take the social sciences seriously, but its young author seems to have implicitly grasped that critical theory could only flourish on the basis of an authentically cooperative, mutually beneficial relationship between philosophy and the social sciences. Horkheimer's original interdisciplinary vision clearly inspired the young Habermas. When properly reconstructed, it should inspire us today as well."

Violence and crime contribute to one of Latin America's most pressing social problems. This book provides an overview of this issue, while establishing the broader contexts of how it came to be.

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People increasingly blame climate change, pollution, poverty and corruption on capitalism and pressure firms to address social problems. Donald Siegel and R Michael Holmes Jr write that business leaders must change the public perception of pervasive corporate malfeasance and the impression that firms do not advance the public interest. They say that to regain trust and … Continued

Contributor(s): Stephan Chambers, Dr Christian Busch, Dr Juli Huang, Dr Jason Hickel | Welcome to LSE IQ, a new monthly podcast from the London School of Economics and Political Science. This is the podcast where we ask some of the leading social scientists - and other experts - to answer intelligent questions about economics, politics or society. Over the last couple of decades Western aid agencies, the World Bank, NGOs and business schools have all enthusiastically embraced the concept of social entrepreneurship. This takes the methods and energy of business entrepreneurship and applies them to often intractable social, or environmental, problems. Social enterprises hold the promise of developing financially sustainable solutions and of providing dignity, rather than just charity, for those they seek to help. In this episode of LSE IQ, Sue Windebank asks, 'Could social entrepreneurship be the answer to world poverty?' This episode features: Dr Christian Busch, researcher, LSE Innovation Co-Creation Lab; Stephan Chambers, Director, Marshall Institute for Philanthropy and Social Entrepreneurship; Dr Jason Hickel, Fellow, LSE Department of Anthropology and; Dr Juli Huang, Lecturer in Anthropology of Development, The University of Edinburgh. For further information about the podcast visit lse.ac.uk/iq and please tell us what you think using the hashtag #LSEIQ.

Many stakeholders agree that the WHO has not been able to adequately address the political and social problems, global health emergencies triggered or exacerbated by epidemics and pandemics, malnutrition, and access to clean water in recent years. Against this backdrop, there is a widespread call for more equity and solidarity in the global health system. Most of the proposals concerning the reform of the WHO deal with the possible goals and outcomes of such a reform. However, it is just as important to consider how such a reform should be carried out so that the ambitious goals are not compromised by the implementation process itself.

 In my last post, I said that I didn't think that contemporary political problems in the United States are a reflection of social problems (the loss of meaningful connections) or economic problems (lack of growth in working-class standards of living), but of failures of political leadership.  But that raises the question of why political leadership has become worse. One part of the answer is a combination of American political institutions and changes in the nature of parties.  The institutions worked reasonably well when parties were loosely organized and not very ideological, but when the parties are ideological, they create bad incentives for politicians.  One reason is the dominance of the two-party system means that negative partisanship can be at least as effective as trying to make a positive appeal.   Another is that the complexity of the system means that there are lots of ways to try to manipulate the rules to your benefit.  Complexity also means that there are opportunities to take a symbolic stand without worrying about the consequences--you can leave it to someone else (often the courts) to do the "responsible" thing.  An example of that is the Texas v. Pennsylvania suit, which was supported by most Republican attorneys general and members of the House of Representatives:  they knew that the Supreme Court would decline to hear it, so it wouldn't really make any difference but they would get credit with the "base."  But all of these have the effect of making the public more discontented with politics, and therefore more likely to support outsiders who promise to cut through the partisan wrangling but usually make it worse.  These considerations apply to both parties, but there is a difference between the way that they've responded.  Republicans were more vigorous in playing "constitutional hardball" even before the 2020 election.  Also, there's a difference in their treatment of extreme positions.  Few Democratic politicians expressed support for "defund the police," and those who did tried to say that they didn't mean it literally, they just wanted to move some resources from policing to social service.  But in every race for the Republican presidential nomination, some candidates will propose abolishing the IRS, or several cabinet agencies, cutting the federal workforce in half, etc..  Another way to look at it is that it's fairly common for Democratic politicians or pundits to say that the party needs to move to the center on certain issues, but Republicans almost never say that--even proposals for reform are presented as something uniquely conservative, not as moves to the center.  I think that the explanation for this difference is that American conservatism sees itself as being in opposition to the "elites."  William F. Buckley is generally agreed to be the founder of the modern conservative movement, and his first two books were not about New Deal policies, or labor union power, or policy towards the Soviet Union, but about Yale University and "McCarthy and his enemies"--that is, both were directed against what he called "our disintegrated ruling elite."  That sense of alienation has grown as "elites" have moved towards the left.  Consequently, conservative politicians don't feel much obligation to be "responsible"--they are just interested in expressing opposition.  

Few academics, students or policymakers would dispute the value of addressing societal problems by setting them in the context of 'the dynamic relationship' between different disciplines. Christopher Daley and Linda Hantrais argue that interdisciplinarity, however defined, should not be used as a measure of the quality of research and teaching in global university rankings. In … Continued