Extended Seminars

A more ambitious format for group projects with expanded scope and duration was introduced under the leadership of former director Doug McAdam and former associate director Mark Turner. These multi-year "extended seminars" feature periodic meetings over one to two years for a group of eight to ten scholars.  This leads to a residential year at the Center for a subset of the group, followed by a year of “dissemination activities” designed to make the new knowledge produced available to relevant scholarly and general audiences. Variations on the format may be guided by the group's agenda and timeline, such as consecutive years of different sets of residential Fellows associated with the extended seminar.

The designers envisioned at least three significant advantages of this new format. Most important, the extended seminars allow participating scholars far more time to pursue ambitious agendas than the one-year special projects do. Second, the larger size of the extended seminars allow for more diversity in these groups. Third, by explicitly building dissemination activities into the group’s agenda, we encourage much more contact between leading scholars and relevant audiences. This point brings us to another significant direction in the constitution of Center-based groups.

We plan to use the new model primarily to fund high-quality scholarship that considers pressing contemporary issues. We do not want to invoke a distinction between pure and applied research. Indeed, the clumsiness of this distinction is part of the problem. There is no necessary contradiction between first-rate scholarship and real-world relevance. Renowned sociologist Robert Merton—perhaps the pivotal intellectual architect of CASBS—recognized this interdependence long ago when he articulated the need for work that exhibited “potentials of relevance.” Much of the seminal social science of the 1950s and ‘60s was produced with an eye to its real-world relevance, but intellectual and political trends since 1970 have blurred this vision. We still believe deeply in it and wish to use the extended seminars program to signal our renewed commitment to high-quality scholarship infused with potentials of relevance.

 

Current and recent extended seminars

Comparative Perspectives on Adolescent Development in a Globalizing World: Changing Opportunities, Constraints and Pathways of Risk (2005-2008)

Jacobs Foundation, Marlis Buchmann (Univ. of Zurich, Switzerland) and
Suman Verma (Govt. College for Home Science, Chandigarh, India) co-organizers

CASBS residential members, 2007-2008: Buchmann, Verma, Martin Benavides (Group for the Analysis of Development, Lima, Peru), Carlos Costa-Ribeiro (Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Silvia Giorguli Saucedo (El Colegio de México, Mexico City, Mexico)

Ford Foundation, Lauren Edelman (law & sociology, UC Berkeley), Robert L. Nelson (law, American Bar Foundation/Northwestern University), Laura Beth Nielson (law and sociology, American Bar Foundation/Northwestern University)

CASBS residential members: Edelman (2004 & 2006 Fellow), Nielson (2006 Fellow)

Mass Killing and Genocide in the Long 20th Century (2001-2006)

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar Series, Norman Naimark (East European Studies, Stanford University) organizer
Other permanent members included Michael Mann (Sociology, UCLA),
Doug McAdam (Sociology, Stanford), Stephen Stedman (International Studies, Stanford, U.N.), Ronald Suny (History and Political Science, University of Chicago), Robert Zajonc (Psychology, Stanford)

CASBS residential members: McAdam (2001-2005 CASBS Director),
Naimark (2005 Fellow), Suny (2006 Fellow)