Social Research: An International Quarterly

24/07/2025

What does it mean that conspiracy theories have infiltrated and steer our governing bodies? Are conspiracies a side effect of democracy, or are they virulent and unpredictable?

With contributions from Nancy L. Rosenblum, Nadia Urbinati, Jan-Werner Müller, and others, our Fall 2022 issue “Conspiracy Thinking” deals with QAnon, internet-fueled conspiracy theorizing, COVID-19 conspiracies, international manifestations of conspiracy thinking, and more.

Check it out here: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/48924

23/07/2025

How do we measure the “social world”? Surely, the measurement isn’t solely empirical, economic, or even qualitative, and it’s certainly not universally applicable or accepted.

Sociologist Martin Bulmer prescribes that “what is needed is more systematic attention to the processes involved in social classification in order to tackle some of the inconsistencies and inadequacies that result from the plethora of social measures in use, and to reduce the gap between the theoretical and empirical planes in empirical social inquiry.”

Read Bulmer’s contribution to our Summer 2001 issue (“Numbers”) here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40971466

22/07/2025

Sociologist Neil J. Smelser was born on this day in Kahoka, Missouri, in 1930.

He’s perhaps best known for his work applying sociological theory to social movements, economics, and collective behavior. He conceptualized the value-added theory, which explained that social movements were born from six converging factors, including social strain and participant mobilization. He’s the author of “The Theory of Social Behavior,” “The Social Edges of Psychoanalysis,” and many other books and publications.

Read Smelser’s “The Questionable Logic of ‘Mistakes’ in the Dynamics of Logic Growth in the Social Sciences” in spring 2005: https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sor.2005.0045

21/07/2025

Listen to this excellent podcast with our author David Hollinger, then read his article (in open access through Aug. 1), to understand why the right in the US, and the Republican Party specifically, fears and attacks higher education.
https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/961490

We kick off Season 4 of the Hopkins Press Podcast with a new logo and a fascinating interview with David Hollinger about what it means for academia that the U.S. Republican party has fallen under evangelical influence over the past few decades

Listen: https://tinyurl.com/4yfsy97h

David Hollinger's essay “The Evangelical Capture of the Republican Party and Its Implications for Academia” is part of a new special issue of Social Research exploring "The Embattled University"

This article is free to read on thru 1 Aug
https://tinyurl.com/bdfye3k4

20/07/2025

For this , we’re looking inward.

How do we characterize ourselves against an impossibly large backdrop of individual selves? How does the self factor into one’s art? How does the self drive a narrative?

Check out “Reflections on the Self,” our Spring 1987 issue, with contributions from David Polonoff (on self-deception), Michael Walzer (on self-criticism), and Jerome Bruner (on life as narrative).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/i40043638

18/07/2025

Nelson Mandela was born today in 1918. He was a radical anti-apartheid activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, and he served as South Africa’s first Black and first democratically elected president.

Although himself not a contributor to Social Research, Mandela’s tireless efforts have been celebrated, invoked, and analyzed by our authors. Today, we’re returning to “South Africa: The Second Decade” (Fall 2005) to honor his activism and democratic resonance.

🔗: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/28844

17/07/2025

Is social science a field isolated from political agendas? Contributor Theodore Porter argues that “the idealization of impersonal objectivity as the model of public rationality, sometimes even at the expense of accuracy, is not necessarily what champions of science have wanted.”

Read “Speaking Precision to Power: The Modern Political Role of Social Science” (Winter 2006) here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/527500/pdf

16/07/2025

“The higher education system has been split open by the engineered decline of public universities. . . . For the general public, the overwhelming consequence has been a loss of faith in the university as a space of knowledge and freedom.”—Supriya Chaudhuri

Read Chaudhuri’s analysis of India’s university system—how on-the-ground experience doesn’t embody India’s social imagination of higher education—in our Summer 2025 issue “The Embattled University.”

https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/961487

15/07/2025

Philosopher Jacques Derrida was born 95 years ago today in El Biar, Algeria.

Derrida wrote “Of Grammatology,” “Writing and Difference,” “Specters of Marx,” and several other books and essays. He’s known for assigning language to “deconstruction,” or the theory that examines the inconsistencies and incongruities in linguistic expression.

Derrida contributed “Sending: A Representation” to the issue “Current French Philosophy” (Summer 1982).

🔗: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40970865

14/07/2025

Today marks 236 years since revolutionaries stormed the Bastille Prison in Paris—igniting the French Revolution.

To commemorate today’s importance, we’re returning to our Spring 1989 issue, “The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity.” Contributors include Immanuel Wallerstein, Theda Skocpol, Eric Hobsbawm, and Charles Tilly.

Read here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/i40043646

13/07/2025

For this , we’re returning to our Winter 2022 issue, “Photography and Film as Evidence.”

What does it mean that a majority of the West has access to a cell phone which can capture “objective reality” through videos, pictures, and recordings? What is “reality” if—and when—it’s taken out of context? In our Winter 2022 issue, essayist David Levi Strauss used historic examples of recorded evidence, like JFK’s assassination in 1963, to analyze the piecemeal nature of “recorded reality.”

🔗: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/877236

11/07/2025

Harold Bloom, often dubbed the “most notorious literary critic in America,” was born on this day in 1930 in East Bronx, New York.

Bloom, a long-time professor at Yale, was known for his defense of the Western literary canon. He published The Western Canon and How to Read and Why, among several other influential works.

He contributed “Death and Native Strain in American Poetry” in our Fall 1972 issue, “Death in American Experience.”

🔗: https://www.jstor.org/stable/i40043608