After hosting three meetings that convened migration researchers from all over the world, INCITE's Research on Empirical Analysis of Labor Migration (REALM) project released its Request for Applications on March 15, 2016. The REALM team looks forward to reading proposals as they come in on June 15.

READ THE RFA

REALM will fund a series of substantively interlinked projects that share a data and administrative core. REALM aims to shed light on the processes that sustain unfair migrant labor by improving our empirical understanding of the structures and dynamics implicated in recruitment for temporary work in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries. While the focus is on sending countries, our analytical scope is expansive, ranging from individual motivations and expectations to meso-level processes of job matching and recruitment, and to the broader dynamics of labor supply and demand. Our goals are to review and collate existing knowledge, identify key empirical questions for further study, and support collaborative research that will advance our understanding of labor migration processes. In particular, we look to innovative ways to build data structures that can provide the foundation for robust, substantive and empirically grounded insights.

For more information, visit the project page.

This paper identifies the neural signature of social status and popularity in small groups. Using a new paradigm for social cognitive neuroscience, we show that social cognition regions of the brain track target popularity. Specifically, the more popular targets are, the more brain activation of perceivers in each region, linearly. This is also true for the valuation regions of the brain. Specifically, the more popular targets are, the more brain activation of perceivers in each region, linearly as well. Importantly, we find that the valuation system is the orchestrator of neural activity in response to status. The brain’s system for detecting goal-relevant – and therefore affectively salient – stimuli automatically appraises group members, translating their popularity into enhanced engagement of systems that analyze others’ faces and predict their mental states. One important implication of this work is that it is likely that the mechanisms we have uncovered play a role in the induction and reproduction of hierarchy, a stable and consistent feature of human and primate social groups. 

Check out coverage on the study in

• Jarett, Christian. "How Popular People's Brains are Different." New York Magazine, December 2015.
• Sapolsky, Robert M. "Brain Reflexes That Monitor the Pecking Order." The Wall Street Journal, December 9, 2015.

Read the paper:

Noam Zerubavel, Peter S. Bearman, Jochen Weber, and Kevin N. Ochsner. Neural mechanisms tracking popularity in real-world social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2015 ; published ahead of print November 23, 2015, doi:10.1073/pnas.1511477112.

To begin the 2015-2016 academic year, INCITE is pleased to welcome its new cohort to the Mellon Interdisciplinary Fellows Program. Read more about them here.

Two exciting workshop series begin on September 24, 2015. Check out the Oral History and Public Dialogue workshop series, hosted by our Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA) program at Columbia University, lineup for Fall 2015:

Thursday, September 24, 2015, 6 - 8 PM
Roots and Fruits of Activism in Washington Heights and New York City
Laura Altschuler, Sixto Medina, and Rob Snyder

Thursday, October 1, 2015, 6 - 8 PM
The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project: Oral History, Radical Mapping and Displacement in San Francisco
Manissa Maharawal

Thursday, October 8, 2015, 6 - 8 PM
Oral History and Cross-Cultural Dialogues: Building Bridges with Artistic Projects
Judith Sloan

Thursday, October 22, 2015, 6 - 8 PM
When Truth Is Justice: Narratives of Black Women and Sexual Assault Across Generations
Farah Tanis

Thursday, November 12, 2015, 6 - 8 PM
This Muslim American Life
Moustafa Bayoumi

Thursday, December 3, 2015, 6 - 8 PM
How You Sing Your Song: Miguel Zenón's Oral History-Based Music
Miguel Zenón with Erica Wrightson

Additionally, our Networks and Time lecture series continues:

September 24, 12:00 - 2:00 pm (Thursday), Knox Hall 509
Elizabeth Roberto, Princeton University
Spatial Boundaries and the Local Context of Residential Segregation

October 15, 12:00 - 2:00 pm (Thursday), Knox Hall 509
Benjamin Cornwell, Cornell University
A Day in the Life Course: Demonstrating a Network Approach to Studying the Social Structure of Time 

October 27, 12:00 - 2:00 pm (Thursday), location TBD
Robb Willer, Stanford University
The Declining Status of White Americans and the Rise of the Tea Party

Please mark your calendars - we look forward to seeing you in the room.

This study reveals that the entry into World War I in 1917 indexed the decisive transition to the modern period in American political consciousness, ushering in new objects of political discourse, a more rapid pace of change of those objects, and a fundamental reframing of the main tasks of governance. We develop a strategy for identifying meaningful categories in textual corpora that span long historic durées, where terms, concepts, and language use changes. Our approach is able to account for the fluidity of discursive categories over time, and to analyze their continuity by identifying the discursive stream as the object of interest.

A synoptic picture of the evolution of American politics is presented, based on analysis of the corpus of presidents’ State of the Union addresses, 1790–2014. The paper presents a strategy for automated text analysis that can identify meaningful categories in textual corpora that span long durées, where terms, concepts and language use changes, and evolution of topical structure is a priori unknown. Discourse streams identified as river networks reveal how change in contents masks continuity in the articulation of the major tasks of governance over US history.

Read the article:

Rule, Alix, Jean-Phillipe Cointet, and Peter S. Bearman. 2015. "Lexical Shifts, Substantive Changes, and Continuity in the State of the Union Discourse, 1790-2014." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Published online before print, August 10, 2015. doi:10.1073/pnas.1512221112. 

A team of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars, led by Dr. Jonathan Zelner, published a study in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

Identifying hotspots of multidrug resistant tuberculosis transmission using spatial and molecular genetic data

The authors aimed to identify and determine the etiology of ‘hotspots’ of concentrated multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) risk in Lima, Peru. Methods: From 2009-2012, we conducted a prospective cohort study among households of TB cases from 106 health center (HC) areas in Lima, Peru. All notified TB cases and their household contacts were recruited and followed for one year. Individuals with TB symptoms were screened by microscopy and culture; positive cultures were tested for drug susceptibility (DST) and genotyped by 24-loci MIRU-VNTR.

Findings reveal that localized transmission is an important driver of the epidemic of MDR-TB in Lima. Efforts to interrupt transmission may be most effective if targeted to this area of the city. 

Read the article.

Jonathan L. Zelner, Megan B. Murray, Mercedes C. Becerra, Jerome Galea, Leonid Lecca, Roger Calderon, Rosa Yataco, Carmen Contreras, Zibiao Zhang, Justin Manjourides, Bryan T. Grenfell, Ted Cohen. 2015. "Identifying hotspots of multidrug resistant tuberculosis transmission using spatial and molecular genetic data." Journal of Infectious Diseases. Published July 14, 2015.

From March 11 to 13, 2015, INCITE faculty and staff traveled to Beijing to teach a three-day social science research introductory workshop, introducing the topic of "urban change" to high school students from all over China. This workshop was condensed version of our Social Sciences Summer program for Chinese high school students, in which students use the neighborhood of Harlem as a laboratory to begin to tackle complex social realities such as gentrification.

Students from Beijing 101 Middle School and their advisor, Emerson Miller

After reviewing the basic concepts of social science research in a lecture entitled The Social World, and learning Chicago-style field note-taking in Introduction to Fieldwork in Urban Environments, students sorted into smaller groups to explore a neighborhood in Beijing and practice taking their own field notes.

INCITE Assistant Director Michael Falco leads a discussion on his group's neighborhood, Qianmen

Students also practiced their interviewing skills with handheld audio recorders.

Two students interview each otherINCITE Mellon Fellows and TAs Abby Coplin and Kristin Murphy demonstrate an interview

Students also tried a hand at interview coding, using an excerpt of an interview from the Columbia Center for Oral History Research's Apollo Theater Oral History Project.

Audrey Augenbraum and Abby Coplin explain codes

The pleasure of working with such fabulous students made us very excited for the two upcoming iterations of our Social Science Summer program this year, from July 12 to July 28 and July 30 to August 12!

Special thanks to ICProjects and the Columbia Global Center East Asia for facilitating and hosting this workshop. All photographs by Zhuang Han.

The latest study in INCITE's ongoing Understanding Autism project has been published in the American Journal of Public Health!

In this study, the authors assessed the association between assisted reproductive technology (ART) and diagnosed autistic disorder in a population-based sample of California births. They concluded that the association between ART and autism is primarily explained by adverse prenatal and perinatal outcomes and multiple births.

Read the article.

Christine Fountain, Yujia Zhang, Dmitry M. Kissin, Laura A. Schieve, Denise J. Jamieson, Catherine Rice, and Peter Bearman. (2015). Association Between Assisted Reproductive Technology Conception and Autism in California, 1997–2007. American Journal of Public Health. e-View Ahead of Print. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2014.302383.

Are assisted reproductive technology (ART) treatment factors or infertility diagnoses associated with autism among ART-conceived children?

Our study suggests that the incidence of autism diagnosis in ART-conceived children during the first 5 years of life was higher when intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) was used compared with conventional IVF, and lower when parents had unexplained infertility (among singletons) or tubal factor infertility (among multiples) compared with other types of infertility.

Read the article.

Kissin, D.M., Y. Zhang, S.L. Boulet, C. Fountain, P. Bearman, L. Schieve, M. Yeargin-Allsopp and D.J. Jamieson. 2014. "Association of assisted reproductive technology (ART) treatment and parental infertility diagnosis with autism in ART-conceived children," Human Reproduction; doi: 10.1093/humrep/deu338.

In a breathtaking chronicle, Anand Gopal traces in vivid detail the lives of three Afghans caught in America’s war on terror. He follows a Taliban commander, who rises from scrawny teenager to leading insurgent; a US-backed warlord, who uses the American military to gain personal wealth and power; and a village housewife trapped between the two sides, who discovers the devastating cost of neutrality. Through their dramatic stories, Gopal shows that the Afghan war, so often regarded as a hopeless quagmire, could in fact have gone very differently. Top Taliban leaders actually tried to surrender within months of the US invasion, renouncing all political activity and submitting to the new government. Effectively, the Taliban ceased to exist—yet the Americans were unwilling to accept such a turnaround. Instead, driven by false intelligence from their allies and an unyielding mandate to fight terrorism, American forces continued to press the conflict, resurrecting the insurgency that persists to this day.

This book was recently announced as a finalist in the 2014 National Book Awards for Nonfiction.

Selling Our Soulsis an in-depth investigation into how hospital organizations and the people who work in them make sense of and respond to the modern health care market.  Health care costs make up nearly a fifth of U.S. gross domestic product, but health care is a peculiar thing to buy and sell. Both a scarce resource and a basic need, it involves physical and emotional vulnerability and at the same time it operates as big business. Patients have little choice but to trust those who provide them care, but even those providers confront a great deal of medical uncertainty about the services they offer. Selling Our Souls looks at the contradictions inherent in one particular health care market—hospital care. Based on extensive interviews and observations across the three hospitals of one California city, the book explores the tensions embedded in the market for hospital care, how different hospitals manage these tensions, the historical trajectories driving disparities in contemporary hospital practice, and the perils and possibilities of various models of care.

A study by Health & Society scholar Adam Reich was published in the American Journal of Sociology.  The “moralized markets” school within economic sociology has convincingly demonstrated variation in the relationship between economic activity and moral values. Yet this scholarship has not sufficiently explored either the causes of this variation or the consequences of this variation for organizational practice. By examining different moral-market understandings and practices in the context of a single market-based organizational field, this article highlights the contradictory character of processes of commodification, as different historically institutionalized ideas conflict, in different ways, with the market logic that increasingly organizes the field as a whole. The article examines the contradictory commodification of hospital care in three hospitals within one Northern California community.

The Huffington Post published its listing of oral history projects to watch and featured INCITE's Summer for Respect program. The two-month program has sent 20 interns to five sites across the United States: Dallas, Central Florida, Chicago, Cincinatti, and Southern California.

Read the full article.

During the 2014 summer INCITE will host several training programs that aim to provide researchers and students with an understanding of the principles and skills to design and conduct social research.

The summer programs include: Summer for Respect, a summer-long internship program co-sponsored by OurWalmart; The Summer Institute, a two-week oral history training program; and Social Sciences Summer, a training program of high school students from China interested in pursuing social sciences in college.

Peter Bearman, PhD., Director of INCITE and Jonathan R. Cole Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of his distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

Election to the NAS is one of the highest honors in science. Each year the Academy elects no more than 84 new members, who must be U.S. citizens, and 21 foreign associates. NAS has about 2,200 members and 400 foreign associates; approximately 200 have received Nobel prizes.

A recipient of the NIH Director's Pioneer Award in 2007, Bearman is currently investigating the social determinants of the autism epidemic.

A specialist in network analysis, he co-designed the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and has used the data extensively for research on topics including adolescent sexual networks, networks of disease transmission, and genetic influences on same-sex preference. He has also conducted research in historical sociology, including Relations into Rhetorics: Local Elite Social Structure in Norfolk, England, 1540-1640 (Rutgers, 1993). He is the author of Doormen (University of Chicago Press, 2005).