AISSR Harvest Day 2024
Global Social Science
This year’s Harvest Day explored the promises and perils of global social science.
As social relations and problems span across national borders, how should social scientists adapt their frameworks and methods? How to take into consideration processes at the global level—such as climate change, the rise of authoritarianism, or international mobility—while accounting for contingencies, variations, and complexities?
Keynotes
Three keynote speakers discussed their research in light of these questions. Their lectures were followed by a conversation with an AISSR researcher.
Addressing Climate Injustices
Aftertalk with Catherine Wong
The planet's health and humanity are at risk as the degradation of global natural systems worsens energy, food, and water insecurity, heightening the threat of disease, disaster, displacement, and conflict. What are the earth-system boundaries, translations, and transformations?
Ethnography without 'race'?
'Race' is ubiquitous, so the argument goes, and producing ethnographies undone of this social fact is becoming academically unthinkable. Francio Guadeloupe will demonstrate how he seeks to circumvent race while putting racism front and center in the study of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
Aftertalk with Ruth Carlitz
Political Identities in Conflict
Aftertalk with Mieke Lopes Cardozo
Conflict is necessary in politics, but it can be productive or destructive. When and why do politicians and political parties invest in shaping political identities of mutual toleration? And when they fail to do so, and how we should study identities in conflict. Ursula will draw on work on conflict, violence, and identity from around the world to answer these questions and will advocate for a social science that resonates with diverse audiences.
Book videos
For this Harvest Day we further created six clips on books that exemplify a comparative or global perspective in social science research:
Exploring how digital technologies shape elder care when adult children and their aging parents live far apart.
Exploring current demographic conspiracy theories and their entanglement with different forms of racism and exclusionary politics.
A study of 300,000 years of human interdependence.
Providing a powerful new explanation for the rise of this anti-globalism in the West.
Debunking myths on migration, revealing it’s driven by complex realities, not fears or politics.
The Broken Promise of Global Advocacy
Examining if global advocacy favours wealthy nations and if it reflects a truly global civil society.