Social Science Research Council
Knowing the Enemy
Submitted by David C. Engerman, Brandeis UniversityIn the summer of 1953, a major military-academic project came under attack on Capitol Hill. The target was Harvard University’s Refugee Interview Project, sponsored by…
Essay Archives
Arguments For and Against Minerva
January 23rd, 2009
December 30th, 2008
Building Bridges and Communities
Submitted by Dr. Tom Mahnken, Department of DefenseThe US government has always turned to the nation’s scholars and intellectuals for help in times of national crisis or emergency. Many of our most…
December 11th, 2008
The Minerva Controversy; a Cautionary Tale
Submitted by Ron Robin, New York UniversityThe Minerva initiative has elicited several warnings of creeping contamination. Hugh Gusterson describes Minerva as a lethal vector not unlike the cancer-spreading tobacco industry’s contagion…
November 14th, 2008
Minerva and Critical Public Engagement
Submitted by Robert Albro, American UniversityThere are a myriad of reasons for the social sciences to be skeptical of developing closer working relationships with the military by cashing in on…
November 10th, 2008
Scholars and Security
Submitted by Paul Bracken, Yale UniversityThe results of U.S. national security policy since 9/11 speak for themselves. There’s little point for me to throw more gasoline on this fire. My…
November 6th, 2008
The Perils of Pentagon Funding for Anthropology and the Other Social Sciences
Submitted by Catherine Lutz, The Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown UniversityThis spring, the US Department of Defense announced an initiative to put up to $18 million annually toward social science research on issues of “national…
October 29th, 2008
The Military-Social Science Interface
Submitted by Ian Roxborough, Stony Brook UniversityIf social scientists are to have a more effective engagement with the military we need to understand them better. It is not enough simply to…
October 27th, 2008
Possibilities for Partnerships?
Submitted by Victor P. Corona, Columbia UniversityFour years ago, Berkeley sociologist Michael Burawoy called for a “public sociology” that increased interaction between publics and sociologists.[1] The idea encountered both vigorous opposition[2]…
October 17th, 2008
The Forgotten History of Knowledge and Power in British Iraq, or Why Minerva's Owl Cannot Fly
Submitted by Priya Satia, Stanford UniversityIn its lofty attempt to restore wisdom to war, Project Minerva promises to harness the formidable intellectual powers of the American university to the anti-intellectual…
October 9th, 2008
Skewing Scholarship
Submitted by Conor Gearty, Centre for the Study of Human Rights-LSEIt strikes me immediately that the Minerva project represents simultaneously something of an advance and also a retreat. On the one hand it is a…
Subscribe to the RSS feed for