All news items, blog posts, and feature stories.
Liam Downey received the Environment and Technology Section’s Allan Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award at the ASA annual meeting in Seattle August 20-23rd for his book Inequality, Democracy, and the Environment. Senior environmental sociology colleagues Liam talked with at the meetings described Liam’s book as making a critically important contribution to environmental sociology, as providing a great service to the field, and as moving the field forward in new and exciting ways.
David Pyrooz was recently quoted in the news. He spoke with a reporter from the Houston Chronicle about the Texas prison system’s gang renouncement program. He was also interviewed as part of NPR’s “code switch” podcast about how crime rates have changed in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, MO.
The National Science Foundation this month awarded $300,000 over three years to CU-Boulder to create the Rocky Mountain Research Data Center (RMRDC), which will be housed in the Institute of Behavioral Science (IBS). The center joins a relatively exclusive group of 19 others across the U.S. and is expected to be a boon for researchers and raise the profile of CU-Boulder to prospective faculty and graduate students.
“Graduate students’ ability to do original research will be much, much stronger,” said Keith Maskus, an economics professor and principal investigator on the project. “We will be training generations of graduate students who will have far better familiarity with data and how to use big data sets. That will lead them directly into new kinds of careers.”
Nearly all major research institutions near CU-Boulder will use and support the center, including the University of Wyoming, Colorado State University, University of Colorado Denver, the Anschutz Medical Campus, University of Colorado Colorado Springs, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Colorado state government.
“The new connections with universities and laboratories in Colorado and Wyoming will increase the breadth of our intellectual networks and the speed with which major social problems are analyzed,” IBS Director Myron Gutmann said.
Lori Hunter was an invited keynote speaker at a workshop on “Science needs in the context of tough choices in implementing the UN’s new SDG framework,” organized by Future Earth Germany and held in Villa Vigoni at Lake Como, Italy, April 18-21, 2016. Lori spoke on “The implications of migration for implementation of the SDGs. Lori and colleagues' Sustainable Development Goals are discussed in a DKN article.
Lori M. Hunter, professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder, has spent a semester prompting students to grapple with such questions as "What is colonization, and what does it mean to “decolonize” something?", "Beyond taking land, what other aspects of a culture can be colonized?", and "What does this have to do with yoga?." Her course is called “Yoga, Culture & Society,” an upper-division class designed to hone students’ critical-thinking-skills, and is discussed in depth in an article in Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine. This article generated so much interest that Lori is also featured in the Coloradoan ~ "A Yogi in the Classroom".
Between Armenia and Azerbaijan lies a contested territory controlled by an unrecognized state called the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR). In the early hours of April 2, violence exploded in this Armenian-supported statelet in the southern Caucasus. This festering conflict in former Soviet territory suddenly turned hot. John O'Loughlin and colleague Gerard Toal have researched in great depth the conflicts and political implications thereof in this region, and their findings are reported today in the Washington Post. Read the entire article here.
Krister Andersson, along with co-authors Pamela Matson and William C. Clark, has a new book just published: "Pursuing Sustainability: A Guide to the Science and Practice", Princeton University Press, March 2016.
Described as "A primer for students and practitioners who are seeking a more systematic and comprehensive platform on which to base their pursuits of sustainability", the book explores frameworks and approaches for understanding, analyzing, and effectively engaging in sustainability challenges, addressing the question of how to achieve sustainability, presenting that the ultimate determinants of intergenerational well-being should be thought of as the stocks of assets on which people now draw and will draw in the future to subsist and improve their lives – stocks that include natural, social, manufactured, human, and knowledge capital.
CUPC affiliates Ryan Masters and Stef Mollborn participated in “Advocacy Day” through the Population Association of America in Washington DC, late March 2016. Advocacy Day took place the day prior to the annual PAA meeting and Ryan and Stef met with staff in the offices of Senator Michale Barnett (CO), Senator Cory Gardner (CO) and Representative Diana DeGette (CO01). The conversations were designed to inform staff about population sciences in general, what population researchers are doing at CU-Boulder, and how population sciences benefit from the federal government (both directly through grants and indirectly through agencies). They also urged continued support for the agencies that support population sciences (e.g., NIH, NIA, NSF, the Census Bureau, NCHS, and other statistical and data-based agencies). The PAA specifically asked advocates to request the following: (1) support funding federal agencies related to PAA and population-based sciences in 2017, esp NIH, NSF, and Census; (2) oppose bills and amendments that are anti-behavioral science or anti-social science; and (3) oppose attempts to make the American Community Survey voluntary.
CUPC was well-represented at the 2016 annual meeting of the Population Association of America. Nineteen affiliates attended the meeting, including 9 graduate students. In addition to making research presentations, CUPC affiliates played important roles as session organizations, chairs and discussants. Click here for the list of attendees.
