Cornell Center for Social Sciences names spring grantees

New grants from the Cornell Center for Social Sciences (CCSS) will fund research ranging from exploring why people spread polarizing content online to assessing health care access in rural New York.

CCSS recently awarded 19 grants across 15 departments and seven colleges. These awards include funding for a conference, a superdepartment grant supporting collaboration in psychology, and 17 grants that will jump-start research across campus.

CCSS funds two rounds of grants each year for eligible Cornell faculty. The center is particularly interested in supporting junior faculty, seeding large projects and supporting interdisciplinary projects via these grants. To learn more about grant eligibility and past projects, or to affiliate with the CCSS, please visit its website.

Grants to College of Arts & Sciences' faculty include:

Adaptation, Social Coordination & Pragmatic Inference

Helena Aparicio, assistant professor, linguistics (A&S)

Linguistic interactions display spontaneous self-organizing behavior, pragmatic inference being the epitome of such coordinative behavior. However not much is known about cognitive mechanisms supporting coordination. The current project argues that adaptation is one of the mechanisms deployed by listeners to resolve pragmatic coordination problems.

Against Humanity: Race, Empire, and the Liberal International Order

Oumar Ba, assistant professor, government (A&S)

This project reconstructs the emergence of the current global justice regime and argues that the Liberal International Order is built upon the denial of humanity through a layered racial hierarchy of humanness. Using archival research, it focuses on the drafting and adoption of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights amidst the French campaign of “pacification” in Madagascar; the UN Trusteeship Council as a site of legislation and contestation of nuclear imperialism in the Pacific; and the prosecution of the crimes against peace at the Tokyo Tribunal.

Transforming Asia with Food: Women and Everyday Life (April 2024 Conference)

Chiara Formichi, associate professor, Asian studies (A&S)
Suyoung Son, associate professor, Asian studies (A&S)

This conference explores how women effected change across Asia engaging in everyday practices of food production, handling, preparation and consumption; participants will bring to light how such “domestic” practices had significant impact on “public spaces,” and created spaces for women’s autonomy and agency.

How do Parents See the World? Using Virtual Reality to Assess Perception of infants’ Environments (Super-department grant)

Michael Goldstein, professor, psychology (A&S)
Adam Anderson, professor, psychology (CHE)
Emma Murrugarra, Ph.D. student, psychology

How does becoming a parent change how we see the world? Here we propose a novel virtual reality paradigm investigating what shapes parents’ perception of the environment around their infants. We will explore cognitive mechanisms that facilitate parental decision-making surrounding infant wellbeing.

Relational and Well-being Outcomes of (Non) Reciprocity in Attachment Networks

Cindy Hazan, professor, psychology (CHE)
Vivian Zayas, professor, psychology (A&S)
Randy Lee, Ph.D. student, psychology
Wicia Fang, Ph.D. student, psychology

How do people fulfill their attachment needs across people in their networks, and how do people also meet the needs of others in their network? Proposed studies test novel hypotheses on how reciprocated ties confer unique benefits for individuals (security), dyads (satisfaction), and networks (status).

Intergroup Loss Aversion

Amy Krosch, assistant professor, psychology (A&S)

This research uses an economic model of choice behavior and psychophysiological measures of arousal to examine sensitivity to losses for racial ingroup vs. outgroup members, with a discussion of implications for racial disparities at the interpersonal and national level.

Semantic Mapping of Indigeneity Through Computational Modeling of Nineteenth-Century French-Language

Imane Terhmina, assistant professor, Romance studies (A&S)
Laurent Dubreuil, professor, comparative literature, Romance studies  (A&S)

We intend to build a digital corpus of French-language documents related to indigeneity in the 19th century, and use both computational methods (NLP/CL) and interpretive tools to understand the ideological biases associated with textual representations of “indigeneity”, from its colonial genesis to its post-colonial recuperation.

On Our Own: Deinstitutionalization and the Politics of Care

Stephen Vider, assistant professor, history (A&S)

On Our Own traces the impact of deinstitutionalization—the release of people with mental illnesses and disabilities from state-run institutions—to reveal how efforts to repair state systems of mental healthcare were reshaped by the convergence of patient activism and privatization after World War II.

Amanda King is CCSS program coordinator.

Read the story in the Cornell Chronicle.