Sociology Department Colloquium: Mitchell Stevens

Please join us for a colloquium being given by Mitchell Stevens, Associate Professor of Education at Stanford University.

Why US Social Scientists Neglect the Rest of the World

Despite decades of philanthropic and intellectual encouragement for cosmopolitan inquiry, scholarship produced by academic economists, political scientists, and sociologists in the United States remains preponderantly focused on stateside phenomena.   This parochialism has three major sources: the organization of university academic activity along a binary of departments and not-departments; the prestige of social-science scholarship based on large-scale quantitative datasets; and fierce competition for tenure-line appointments in the US academic world. Together these factors make for startlingly large lacunae in the stock of social-science knowledge and constrain the professoriate's ability to influence conventional wisdom. Findings are based on a multi-method study of leading academics at eight US research universities.