Social Science Research Council

Work at the SSRC is focused on four program areas: Global Security and Cooperation; Migration; Knowledge Institutions; and the Public Sphere. These program areas support working groups, conferences, and fellowships, and a wide range of other research activities.

Global Security and Cooperation: The SSRC has a long-standing commitment to developing better understanding of problems of global security and cooperation, from work on arms control and nuclear proliferation, to emerging social, political, and religious movements, global public health challenges, and persistent forms of conflict and threats to human security.

Migration: International migration is at historically high levels. Enormous movements of people are changing the demographic composition of host and sending societies, with profound implications for economic, cultural and political life. The SSRC organizes and sponsors research on migration that focuses both on the experiences of individual nations and localities and on the comparative and collaborative dimensions of immigration across nations and regions.

Knowledge Institutions: Technological, social, political, and economic conditions are changing the production of knowledge in contemporary societies. Traditional institutions of science and education are being transformed and new ones created. The Knowledge Institutions Program Area works to understand these shifts and their implications. It affirms a commitment to rigorous social science that can inform public and private sectors on topics related to mounting challenges in public higher education, changing models of undergraduate and graduate training, new practices of scientific research, and emerging partnerships in K-12 education.

The Public Sphere: The "public" is distinct from community or even civil society in general. Publics connect people who are not in the same families, communities, and clubs; people who are not the same as each other. As such, they are central to the functioning of modern societies. What are the forms, locations, and conditions of public life? How do publics work, how are they supported by different kinds of physical and virtual communicative spaces, how do they figure in political and cultural life? And what are the consequences of the unsettling of familiar boundaries between the public and the private as we begin the 21st century? Several Council programs deal with these and related questions.

STRATEGIC EMPHASES:The SSRC emphasizes three strategic goals in its work that cross-cut its thematic foci and are enduring concerns: international collaboration, capacity building/fellowships, and communications.

International Collaboration: This emphasis reflects our commitment to help build a social science adequate to contemporary social change by supporting participation of scientists from a wide variety of cultural, geographic, and institutional locations; by building stronger networks of international communication and collaboration; and by ensuring that global issues are viewed from different perspectives and as they are materially different in different settings.

Capacity Building and Fellowships: This emphasis stresses that while we need social science knowledge now, we also need to strengthen the individual and institutional capacities that ensure it will be available in the future. To this end, the SSRC seeks through all its work to provide fellowships to support young researchers, to conduct training programs, and to strengthen the institutions within which knowledge is produced and communicated. Social science knowledge, now, and the capacity for its generation in the future, form the irreducible bases for responsible and effective action to improve the world.

Communications: Dedicated to making the expertise of social scientists available and intelligible to a wide reading public, the SSRC produces a range of printed books and digital publications. These include the Council's imprint, SSRC Books, publications with major university and independent presses, and various online products such as SSRC forums, the quarterly Items and Issues, and digital books. SSRC publications are quality productions that inform public debates and discussions, bringing timely and necessary knowledge to the public sphere.