“ If we are to seek new goals for our struggles, we must first reassess the worth of our racial assumptions on which, without careful thought, we have presumed too much and relied on too long.”— Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992)
“ Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking.”
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995)
The Challenge
The recent growth in research on ‘structural racism’ serves as a major case study in the broader challenges confronting social science. New data and approaches to study complexity in the social world has often been without a concurrent focus on the foundations of scientific inquiry, including complex thinking, broad causal thinking, attention to epistemic lens, and integrating multiple disciplinary approaches. Further, the academic research model, with its resource-segregated networks, discipline-specific training, and short-term productivity metrics, contributes to a fragmented and potentially misleading understanding of the social world.
Symposium Purpose
This meeting is intended to address the challenges to the social science literature on race. We will convene discussions about social scientific inquiry, the limitations of the academic research model, and innovative approaches to the study of racial patterns in social factors.