Faculty Afoot

Dr. Lisa Gilman, Professor of Folklore and English at George Mason University and IIR Faculty Affiliate, has released the Dzaleka Art Project website. The art project is a community-based collaborative project by and about the arts and artists living as refugees in the Dzaleka camp in Malawi.

Congratulations to Dr. Roberta Spalter-Roth, faculty affiliate with the Institute for Immigration Research and Center for Social Science Research, for being named winner of the 2023 Stuart A. Rice Merit Award for Career Achievement from the District of Columbia Sociological Society (DCSS).

The Center for Social Science Research is pleased to announce that two of our partner-based initiatives, The Summer Institute in Anti-Racist and Decolonizing Research https://cssr.gmu.edu/initiatives/revolutionizing-research-for-social-change-workshop and the Youth Research Council https://cssr.gmu.edu/initiatives/yrc have been awarded a $50,000 seed grant from Mason’s Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence (ARIE) Task Force for 2023. The Summer Institute and Youth Research Council were launched in the 2021-2022 academic year by co-directors Meagan Call-Cummings (CEHD), Amy Best (CHSS) and Khaseem Davis (Executive Director of the Early Identification Program). The PI for the ARIE grant is Meagan Call-Cummings. The Leadership Team for the Summer Institute is Meagan Call-Cummings, Amy Best, Khaseem Davis, Sharell Hassell-Goodman, Rob Graham with graduate student J. Orisha (Sociology).

People across classes enter a new social contract on the metro. It not only creates a new form of mobility through urban space and over time, but also across a large swathe of the working and middle class of the city.

Blake R. Silver, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, received $1,947 from the American College Personnel Association for the project: "Layered Transitions: First-Generation College Seniors from Immigrant Families." With the support of collaborators Tharuna Kalaivanan, Fanni Farago, and Kellie Wilkerson, Mason doctoral students studying sociology, this project will explore the experiences of students who are both children of immigrants and the first in their families to pursue a bachelor’s degree. In-depth interviews will be analyzed to understand the resources FGC students from immigrant families bring to the senior-year transition and how these resources shape strategies for navigating the transition.

As organizations rush to stake their claim in the internet’s new frontier, many questions remain about what the metaverse is and isn’t. George Mason University Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute of Immigration Research, Jim Witte, joins other thought leaders including Meta VP for the Americas, Nada Stirratt, to discuss the metaverse and its relevance for business and social science.

Dr. John Dale received an Invitational Fellowship for Research in Japan from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). He will be working with his colleague, Nobuhiro Aizawa at Kyushu University from early November 2021 through January 2022. The title of the research project is "Re-Working Japan’s Automated Warehouses: Cobotics, Social Autonomy, and Human Rights."

The Year of the Humanities and The Pittsburgh Consortium for Adoption Studies invited Dr. Seligmann to give a talk at the University of Pittsburgh.