Summary
George Mason University’s Center for Social Science Research (CSSR) is committed to conducting publicly engaged social research that can promote social justice and inform equitable social policy. Housed within the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, the CSSR builds on a long tradition of social science research for the public good. At its center are thematic research hubs focused on quantitative, qualitative, community-engaged research, and program evaluation.
Amy Best is the director of the Center for Social Science Research.
OnAir Post: CSSR – Center for Social Science Research
About
Source: Website
Our Priorities:
- Creatively marshal social science research for problem-solving ends.
- Strengthen civil society by supporting research initiatives that serve the public, build sustainable communities, and promote dignified lives.
- Promote interdisciplinary engagements among scholars and practitioners to respond to deep challenges confronting local and global communities.
- Draw stakeholders beyond the university and equitably engage a diversity of perspectives and expertise to build community capacity through social science knowledge.
- Support students seeking careers in the social sciences through professional development programming.
Our Research Hubs:
- Education & Health Research Hub
- Global South Collective Research Hub
- The Movement Engaged Research Hub
- Urban Research Hub
Our Initiatives:
- Democratizing NOVA
- Revolutionizing Research for Social Change Workshop
- Social Science Research Lab
- Youth Research Council
- Next System Studies
Web Links
People
Full-time Faculty
Amy L Best
Director
Professor
Education, social inequalities, youth, identity and intersectionality, children’s health, community sociology, micro sociology, cultural sociology, sociology of everyday life, consumer markets and commercial life, sociology of food, farm to school, food access and food insecurity, feminist and qualitative approaches to social research, ethnography, program evaluation
Jeremy M. Campbell
Instructor
Culture, land tenure, and the environment in Amazonia; Indigenous and local knowledge systems; environmental justice; sustainability science and policy; ethnography and sociocultural theory.
John G. Dale
Associate Professor
sociology of human rights; political sociology; social movements; global and transnational sociology; science, knowledge, and technology; law and transnational conflict; critical sociology of development; community and urban sociology; comparative and historical sociology; and area specialist in Burma/Myanmar.
Shannon N Davis
Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs, George Mason University, Korea
Sociology of families and intimate relationships, gender ideologies, gender inequality, research methods
Nancy W Hanrahan
Associate Professor
critical theory, cultural sociology, feminist theory, music and the arts
Cortney Hughes Rinker
Associate Professor
Medical anthropology, aging and end-of-life care, pain management, reproductive health, Islam, technology, gender, Middle East and North Africa, the United States
Dae Young Kim
Associate Professor
Immigration, ethnicity, race, Asian American studies, and globalization
Maurice Kugler
Professor
Professor, Public Policy
Brian Louis Levy
Assistant Professor
Inequality, Poverty, Mobility; Neighborhoods; Community and Urban Sociology; Race, Class, and Gender; Education; Social Demography; Quantitative Research Methods; Causal Inference
Akila-Ka Ma’at (Jennifer R. Warren)
Assistant Professor
Black Women’s Health: Maternal Mental and Perinatal Health, Tobacco/Nicotine Product Use, Infectious Disease, Health Seeking Behavior, Identity Negotiation in Health Contexts, Agency & Self-Determination, Community-Based Participatory Research
Ben Manski
Assistant Professor
social movements; next system studies; sociology of constitutions and constitutionalism; democratization; environmental sociology; federalism and municipalism; philosophy of social science.
Manjusha Nair
Associate Professor
Globalization, Political Sociology, Comparative and Historical Sociology, Development, Labor Movements, India, China, Ethiopia, South Africa
Amaka Okechukwu
Assistant Professor
Social Movements, Race and Ethnicity, Political Sociology, Urban Sociology, Qualitative Methods, Black Politics, Ethnography, Oral History
Rashmi Sadana
Associate Professor
Urban space, gender, and social mobility; infrastructure, design, and the built environment; language politics and ideologies; cultural identity formation; ethnography of literature; postcolonial theory, globalization, India
Blake Silver
Assistant Professor
Higher education; inequality and mobility; culture; race, class, and gender; parent and family involvement in education; transition to adulthood; research methods; second-generation immigrant students
Elizangela Storelli
Associate Professor
Sociology of aging, including global population aging, well-being and retirement, sociology of family, gender inequality, international development, Latin and America, and quantitative studies.
Wenjing Wang
Postdoctoral Fellow
Anthropology: Social Complexity and Inequality, Social Interaction, Regional Demographic Analysis, Population Centralization and Decentralization, Quantitative and Spatial Analysis
James Witte
Professor
Use of the world wide web to collect survey data, comparison of online and off line societies, immigration, Pakistan
Research Faculty
Katie Kerstetter
Affiliate Faculty
Sociology: poverty and inequality, education, health disparities, and community-based and participatory approaches to research
Jason A. Smith
Affiliate Faculty
race/ethnicity, media policy, media sociology, representation, civil society
Josh Tuttle
Affiliate Faculty
Migration, religion, authoritarianism, critical theory
Wenjing Wang
Postdoctoral Fellow
Anthropology: Social Complexity and Inequality, Social Interaction, Regional Demographic Analysis, Population Centralization and Decentralization, Quantitative and Spatial Analysis
Affiliate Faculty
Nobuhiro Aizawa
Affiliate Faculty
Marisa Allison
Affiliate Faculty
Dhiman Das
Affiliate Faculty
Eleanor Finley
Affiliate Faculty
social movements, democracy studies, social and political ecology, anthropology,
Raluca Grosescu
Affiliate Faculty
social mouvements, international criminal law, business and human rights, political sociology
LeNaya Crandall Hezel
Affiliate Faculty
Sociology of Education, Military-Connected Communities, Equity and Inclusion among Intersectionality of Identities, Institutions and Inequality
Katie Kerstetter
Affiliate Faculty
Sociology: poverty and inequality, education, health disparities, and community-based and participatory approaches to research
Ivan Kislenko
Affiliate Faculty
Jason A. Smith
Affiliate Faculty
race/ethnicity, media policy, media sociology, representation, civil society
Roberta Spalter-Roth
Senior Research Fellow
Josh Tuttle
Affiliate Faculty
Migration, religion, authoritarianism, critical theory
Michele Waslin
Affiliate Faculty
immigration policy, gender-based asylum, federalism, executive authority
Research Hubs
What is a research hub?
Central to the vision of the Center for Social Science Research (CSSR), research hubs are organized based on core areas of research specialization. In these hubs, faculty, students and alumni have opportunity to pursue individual research and conduct collaborative research projects, network, workshop current work, and engage in open dialogue. Currently, the research hubs include Education & Health, Global South, Movement Engaged and Urban.
How can students get involved?
We envision the CSSR hubs as opportunities for students to work directly with faculty on research projects in fields related to their theses and dissertations. Students hone skills in different research methods, learn about the process of grant writing, and conducting ethical and effective social science research, while also developing expertise and knowledge in substantive fields in the social sciences.
How can alumni get involved?
Many of our students and alumni work in public or private research organizations in DC and beyond. CSSR research hubs are spaces to form a durable student/alumni/faculty network, link academic and applied sociology, support resilient community organizations, enhance students’ and alumni early-career professional development, and further our commitment to public social science. Sociology Ph.D. alumni may request to affiliate with CSSR to support research and professional development.
Education & Health
Source: Web page
The CSSR research hub for Education & Health brings together faculty, graduate students, community partners, and alumni affiliates at George Mason University to collaborate on research, inquiry, and organizing around social and community-engaged aspects of education and health. To foster research in this space, the hub aims to leverage these connections to spark multidisciplinary dialogue and bring funded research opportunities to the university community and our community partners. We are especially interested in the ways social science can support community-engaged research, and our ongoing — individual and team-based — projects support this mission.
Global South
Source: Web page
The Global South Hub is a meeting place for faculty, students, alumni, and others to foster research on the Global South, which we consider as all those spaces and people, including in the United States, that are in the peripheries of the world order. Global solidarity networks, such as the Bandung Conference, have historically served as the meeting points of people in Africa, Asia, Middle East, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Pacific Islands, to reflect on and imagine their position in the world. We hope to continue this tradition and think of the hub as a safe and inspiring space for us to share our work and support and cooperate with one another and look for like-minded people elsewhere. Our research topics vary from globalization and new subjectivities, global dispossessions, Afro-Asian solidarities, the Syrian refugee crisis, digital colonialism, humanitarian aid and human rights, to name a few. Along with workshops discussing critical methodologies, research overlaps, and ideas for collaboration, in the future, we intend to apply for grants for transnational research, engage with other similar groups and organizations, invite scholars, and fund students.
Movement Engaged
Source: Web page
Movement Engaged is dedicated to disciplined movement-engaged research relevant to social movement activists and policymakers. Housed within the Center for Social Science Research, we are a hub where scholars, activists, and other partners within and beyond George Mason University combine their experience, knowledge and skills in creating ideas, understandings, networks, and infrastructure to renew social movement theory and practice. We work to deepen democracy in formal politics, the economy, and in the broader civil society. Thus, through intentional engagement with community, constituency, and transnational organizations and networks, we seek to engender new visions, practices, relations, institutions, and systems that liberate human potential and emancipate our global society.
Our Initiatives:
Urban
Source: Web page
The Urban Research Hub brings together faculty, students, and community partners in individual and collaborative research projects on cities and urban life, as well as critical discourses on development, mobility, and capitalism. We are interested in sociological, anthropological, historical and other approaches to defining and understanding cities, their limits and borders, as well as their relationships to and implications for the peri-urban and rural. Ongoing projects include analyses of neighborhood stratification through metrics of mobility and vitality; the use of GIS mapping tools to understand issues of race and class over time; vernacular cosmopolitanisms in world cities, gentrification in Washington D.C. and National Landing in northern Virginia, and geographies of urban protest in the U.S. and abroad.
Initiatives
- Creatively marshal social science research for problem-solving ends
- Strengthen civil society by supporting research initiatives that serve the public, build sustainable communities, and promote dignified lives
- Promote interdisciplinary engagements among scholars and practitioners to respond to deep challenges confronting local and global communities
- Draw stakeholders beyond the university and equitably engage a diversity of perspectives and expertise to build community capacity through social science knowledge
- Support students seeking careers in the social sciences through professional development programming.
Our Initiatives:
Democratizing NOVA
Democratizing NOVA (DNOVA) is a community-engaged civic research project of Next System Studies and the Center for Social Science Research (CSSR) at Mason dedicated to deepening democracy in northern Virginia (“NOVA”). We engage with efforts to build community, economic, and political democracy in northern Virginia.
To this end, our team is looking for current and past initiatives in and around northern Virginia that increase the participation and ownership of ordinary people of the institutions and communities where they work, learn, eat, sleep, play, pray, and otherwise live their lives.
If you are aware of such an initiative, please contact us.
Examples might include:
- campus-community collaborations that further community development and democratization;
- worker, consumer, resident, and community cooperatives and credit unions;
- publicly and/or community owned and operated services, utilities, banking, and enterprises;
- community controlled currency, exchange, trading, and supply chain management systems;
- community property, land trusts, and commons;
- community owned and operated media;
- exercise of Indigenous sovereignty for future generations;
- participatory alternatives to policing and militarism;
- participatory forms of public administration and governance;
- open government policies and other transparency reforms;
- expansion of the franchise, citizenship, residency, and personhood;
- voter initiatives, referenda, and other forms of direct democracy in elections;
- mutual aid networks and organizations;
- home rule and community rights laws; and many others.
By taking an inventory of current and past initiatives in these and related areas, we hope to gain a sense of present actual and potential ingredients for achieving a broader systemic democratization of the political economy of northern Virginia. This in turn should allow us to develop and implement plans for collaborative research and long-term campus-community alliances leading to regional democratization.
Democratizing NOVA is inspired by the advancements of transition efforts across the United States that present a number of alternative models for regional democratization. These include institutional models, such as the Evergreen Cooperatives, which form the body of what scholars have called “The Cleveland Model” for bringing to bear the resources of anchor institutions such as hospitals, universities, and local governments in driving cooperative economic development and neighborhood stabilization. They also include movement models, such as Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi and other such projects linked together through the Solidarity Economy Network, New Economy Coalition, the Transition movement, and other networks. And they include organic models involving adaptation, evolution, and the growth of a cooperative culture and knowledge base in a particular region, as seen in Madison, Wisconsin’s worker cooperatives, housing and consumer cooperatives, municipal and academic support for coops, credit union movement, CSAs, and more.
Social Science Research Lab
The Social Science Research Lab (SSRL) is a collaborative research group where undergraduate and graduate students learn and practice the skills of social science research in a team-based setting.
The collaborative approach developed by SSRL focuses on bringing multiple perspectives to the process of asking research questions, developing a research protocol, collecting/analyzing data, and communicating research findings.
Led by Dr. Blake Silver and three Public Sociology doctoral students: Tharuna Kalaivanan, Fanni Farago, and Kellie Wilkerson, SSRL represents a partnership between the Department of Sociology & Anthropology, the Honors College, and the Center for Social Science Research. While the lab focuses on social science research, students from any major are invited to join. Currently, SSRL has members from sociology, creative writing, biology, computer science, government, economics, neuroscience, and criminology to name a few. The full lab membership meets once a month during the academic year, with additional ad-hoc meetings for smaller groups to work on focused elements of research projects.
Over the past four years, SSRL has used collaborative approaches to social science research to support several projects on educational transitions. These projects have provided opportunities for students to present work at regional and national conferences for scholars and practitioners, including at the annual meetings of the:
- Eastern Sociological Society (ESS)
- National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) Region II & III,
- American Educational Studies Association (AESA),
- American College Personnel Association (ACPA),
- and Mid-South Sociological Association (MSSA),
Moreover, members of SSRL have published their research in several peer reviewed journals. Our recent publications can be found in:
- Qualitative Sociology,
- Journal of Women and Gender in Higher Education,
- Journal of the First-Year Experience & Students in Transition,
- Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice,
- and Journal of College Student Development.
Finally, SSRL emphasizes public sociology, working to include a diverse range of communities in the production of knowledge and to share that knowledge with communities where it can have an impact. For instance, the members of SSRL have developed research workshops for students at Mason, including Sociology Capstone students, the Honors College Peer Mentors, and several OSCAR URSP students. SSRL also shares its findings with practitioners and is currently developing programs to foster dialogue on the experiences of college students.
Youth Research Counci
Source: Web page
The Youth Research Council (YRC) is a research collaborative and community-based experiential learning innovation. Launched in the Fall 2021, the Youth Research Council is a partnership of the Sociology and Anthropology Department’s Center for Social Science Research (CSSR) and the Mason’s Early Identification Program (EIP).
Mason’s YRC embraces a scaffolded model of learning with the goal to integrate students at various stages of the social science pipeline. High school students serve as YRC Fellows, while undergraduate and graduate students serve as research mentors and research assistants.
The YRC also aims to act in an advisory capacity to local and regional organizations, school districts, and governments as they conduct research about youth and advise university faculty and students on how to conduct research that speaks to the needs and builds on the strengths of youth.
