IBS Speaker Series: “The Knowledge Polity: Teaching and Research in the Social Sciences”

Zoom link: https://cuboulder.zoom.us/j/95260579117 – email ibs-contact@colorado.edu for password.

Speaker: Anand Sokhey

Abstract: Anand will be presenting his forthcoming book (The Knowledge Polity: Teaching and Research in the Social Sciences, Oxford UP). In The Knowledge Polity, Paul A. Djupe, Amy Erica Smith, and Anand Edward Sokhey envision academics as members of a polity where the primary output is knowledge and citizenship comes with rights and responsibilities. Leveraging the 2017 Professional Activity in the Social Sciences (PASS) Study, they develop a theoretically and empirically rich account of who produces knowledge, and how. The data enable an unparalleled understanding of the nature and sources of inequalities by gender and racial or ethnic identification in the disciplines of sociology and political science in the US. To explain those inequalities, the authors consider academics as embedded in institutional and social contexts-including their home lives-and carefully consider their personalities and changing compositions of the academic workforce. A comprehensive and wide-ranging analysis, this book documents patterns that have long been shrouded in anecdote and enables scholars from across the social and behavioral sciences to make empirically-grounded decisions about their individual and collective futures.

Bio: Anand Edward Sokhey (The Ohio State University, 2009) joined the CU faculty in 2009 after receiving his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. Anand specializes in American politics, and his research examines how formal and informal political conversations, interpersonal networks, and environments — whether defined in terms of organizations or geographic boundaries — independently and interactively shape opinion formation and decision-making.  His research intersects with scholarship on communication, gender, religion and politics, and political psychology, and much of it is characterized by original data collection.  He is the co-author of Politics on Display: Yard Signs and the Politicization of Social Spaces (2019, Oxford University Press), and his work has appeared in the APSR, AJPS and JOP, among other outlets.  He currently serves as the director of the Keller Center for the Study of the First Amendment, and is a faculty fellow at the Institute for Behavioral Science.