Dear CISSR Community,
In these unprecedented and chaotic times, our first hope is that this message finds you safe and healthy. While the University works to implement major changes to our usual routines, we all are feeling the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic — both at home in our personal lives and on campus with respect to our teaching and research. In step with what you’re witnessing worldwide, CISSR's planned programs, events, conferences, and travel have been canceled, suspended, and postponed. This makes for a pretty brief Digest — a mere skeleton of our usual offerings. But the bones are still in place, and we’ll adapt to advance our mission to fuel social science research on an international scale in the face of these new challenges.
We do not yet know exactly what forms our research initiatives will take in the coming weeks and months, but we know that social science research will only become more relevant to the collective task of understanding the patterns and consequences of a borderless medical emergency that is socially patterned, politically managed, historically situated, and economically consequential.
Upcoming Digests will be brief this Spring Quarter, as classes move online and the gatherings we usually organize and promote will be limited. But we will continue to share Digests on a bi-weekly basis, with the goal of connecting scholars to one another and maintaining a sense of community among CISSR fellows and friends.
We’ve been heartened by the good energy, humor, and compassion members have shared with us in the past week. We’ll close by sharing two very specific digital interactions that brought smiles to our faces: Rudolph Field Research Fellow Pranathi Diwakar’s playlist for pandemic times and CISSR Board Member Paul Poast’s endlessly energetic and informative Twitter feed.
Wishing you peace and good health in this uncertain moment, Jenny Trinitapoli, CISSR Director & Alexis Puzon, CISSR Center Supervisor
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