NIAS podcast: Room to explore

While colleges and universities no longer formally prohibit women and people of color from joining the faculty, recent research shows that those groups continue to face institutional barriers. Slow progress on integrating the professoriate, moreover, is undermining confidence in the university as a meritocratic institution. Meanwhile, the paucity of diverse role models in the professoriate discourages women and people of color from pursuing careers in academia and undermines the academic confidence of students from those groups.

NIAS Fellow Frank Dobbin is Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. He and his team have studied annual federal data on the composition of faculty at U.S. universities and on individual career histories of over 10,000 faculty. They have furthermore surveyed 670 universities on the history of their hiring, promotion, diversity, and work-life programs and policies. With this data in hand, they are analyzing the effects of dozens of different policies on the professoriate.

Their analyses suggest that many of the most popular programs, such as diversity and harassment training and grievance processes, have null or negative effects, leading to decreases in faculty diversity.  But other simple measures, such as targeted hiring, formal mentoring, diversity task forces, and work-life initiatives show robust positive effects on faculty diversity.

Security claims and thinking are dominant in most all aspects of modern culture, economy and our social and private lives – from airport security, to anti-war protests on campuses, to neighbourhood vigilantes. Not only is the security industry one of the world’s largest employers, the frame of security also contaminates and shapes sectors, experiences, policies and authorities we don’t readily associate with it.

Writer Ed Schwarzschild, anthropologists Tessa Diphoorn and Erella Grassiani, and sociologist Winifred Poster formed the NIAS Theme Group Re-imagining Security Labour to delve into a wide range of aspects of security work, politics and policies. In putting the lived experiences of security workers front and center, they paint a vivid portrait of the global security enterprise and the way it shapes countless lives.

How can we address the very real rise of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in Europe against the backdrop of the Israel-Hamas war? How can we avoid entrenched positions that frame the Israel-Hamas war as a war between Jews and Palestinians?

NIAS-fellows Aysenur Korkmaz and Jessica Feldman discuss the dangers of discursively conflating Jews with the state of Israel and Palestinians (and pro-Palestinian voices) with Hamas and consider how to more productively define, recognize, and protect against anti-Semitism (acts or speech against “Jews as Jews”) and Islamophobia in the current climate. This podcast was recorded at the NIAS library on the 22 January 2024.

Room to explore is researched and interviewed by Annick van Rinsum