Social Science

The disciplines in Social Science seek to deepen our understanding of how people behave in a wide variety of contexts and to assess the consequences of an individual, group, and societal decisions. Collectively, Social Science seeks to explain and investigate the functioning of society and address the vast array of pressing contemporary issues that affect individual and societal well-being.

• How does our broader environment affect how we develop as individuals and behave collectively in our communities?
• Why do our societies look the way they do, and why do they differ?
• What drives pervasive inequality within and across regions, and what policies and institutions affect this?

Social Science Faculty News Highlights

• John O'Brien's Keeping It Halal: The Everyday Lives of Muslim American Teenage Boys awarded the Distinguished Book Awards by the Religion Section of the American Sociological Association.
• Swethaa Ballakrishnen wins JPO Best Paper Award on her article, 'She Gets The Job Done': Entrenched Gender Meanings and New Returns to Essentialism in India’s Elite Professional Firms.
• Daniel Karell wins JPR Best Paper Award on his article, Aid, exclusion and the local dynamics of insurgency in Afghanistan.
• Quartz identifies, Bob Allen, Global Distinguished Professor of Economic History, as one of 13 economists on the research that shaped our world in 2017. 
• ThePrint spoke to some of the biggest names in Indian intelligentsia and asked who are the brightest minds on the horizon. Rahul Sagar named one of the next generation of Indian intellectuals.
• Leonid Peisakhin awarded the Gregory Luebbert Best Article Award from the APSA’s Comparative Politics Section on the paper 'The Legacy of Political Violence Across Generations'.
• Peter Van der Windt receives Annual Bruce Russett Award for his article, Crowdseeding in Eastern Congo: Using Cell Phones to Collect Conflict Events Data in Real Time in the Journal of Conflict Resolution.

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