Spalding University School of Social Work seeks a diverse applicant pool for a Tenure Track Faculty position.

This is a 9-month faculty position (compensation prorated over 12 months) with responsibility for teaching in our MSW and BSSW programs. Teaching areas include multicultural practice, social justice, diversity and other content based on experience and expertise.

Faculty members teach 24 credit hours per academic year. Most courses are hybrid in format, and include face to face, and online learning. Other faculty responsibilities include student advising, culminating project consultation, School and University committee assignments, professional scholarship activities, and community service.

The Research Coordinator at Johns Hopkins University will oversee the implementation of three grants including support of the MESH Program. One key indicator obtained from surveillance should be the size of the population that can be used for estimating coverage. Often surveillance implements several different methods for estimating population size. Interpretation of these estimates is problematic for programs. Programs need a denominator for coverage estimates that is useful and linked to their programs. They will assess the usefulness of size estimates obtained from surveillance for use as denominators for programs and assess a way forward. They will compare size estimates obtained from program data and from various size estimation methods. In undertaking the comparisons, they will broaden the work to not only being about static size estimates – an estimate about size at one point in time – to explore measures of the dynamics of key population group membership including the demography of membership – age-specific flows into and out of these groups– which would provide size estimates as well as additional information about turnover in the groups.

The School of World Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University invites applications for a tenure eligible position in International Studies at the rank of Assistant Professor. The School of World Studies is a dynamic multidisciplinary nexus, combining programs in Anthropology, Foreign Languages, International Studies and Religious Studies. We seek a candidate with an interest in and demonstrable potential to teach courses in Theories of International Social Justice, Theories of Globalization, and Cultural Studies; a clear research agenda; and an ability to incorporate critical theoretical approaches in scholarship and teaching. More information is available below.

The Department of Social, Cultural, and Justice Studies at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Sociology/Criminal Justice, which will begin on August 1, 2017.

Qualifications:

Successful candidates will possess the following requirements:

• D. in Sociology or a Ph.D. in Criminal Justice with an M.S. in Sociology (ABDs will be considered, but must have completed doctorate before start date); JD degree alone is not acceptable.
• Ability to teach at both the undergraduate and graduate (masters) levels. Candidates must  exhibit teaching and research expertise and willingness to teach in areas of sociology and criminal justice with particular emphasis in the areas of gangs, hate crimes, deviance, and/or urban sociology.
• Demonstrated ability to teach and conduct research in an interdisciplinary, merged department is preferred.
• Candidates should also be willing to engage in a variety of instructional modalities, including online instruction.
• Willingness to engage in assisting UTC campus in its ability to reach additional goals as specified by UTC’s Strategic Plan.

Young participants are an integral part of the European Forum Alpbach. Each year, the Forum welcomes more than 700 students and graduates whose attendance is enabled by our extensive scholarship programme. Aside from their critical spirit and contributions to discussions, they also organize an entertaining and challenging social programme and are involved in the bodies and advisory boards of the Forum via the Forum Alpbach Network.

Two different routes can take you to an Alpbach scholarship:

You can apply directly via the European Forum Alpbach Foundation or via the Forum Alpbach Network.

• The European Forum Alpbach awards scholarships via its eponymous Foundation and partner organisations. The Foundation’s scholarship programme is aimed at international applicants and will start on February 20 with an online tool (all Austrian applicants please refer to the members of the Forum Alpbach Network).
• The Clubs and Initiative Groups of the Forum Alpbach Network award scholarships to applicants from Austria and all countries in which they are active. Most Clubs already opened their call for applications.

There are also a small number of scholarships available for the Professional Programme on European Health Care. Please note: If you apply for the Professional Programme, you can’t apply simultaneously for any other scholarship.

Returners/Former Scholarship holders are also invited to participate at the Forum. You can apply as Seminar Assistant, as an Alpbach Buddy or register for the “Coming Home Days.”

Applications for scholarships from the European Forum Alpbach Foundation will be accepted from February 20 to March 31, 2017.

Proposals for the Royalty Research Fund must be submitted to the Dean’s Office by Thursday, March 2, before 5:00 PM PT. Submission to the system itself is due on Monday, March 6, before 5:00 PM PT.

The purpose of the Royalty Research Fund (RRF) is to advance new directions in research, particularly:

1. in disciplines for which external funding opportunities are minimal, and/or
2. for faculty who are junior in rank, and/or
3. in cases where funding may provide unique opportunities to increase applicants’ competitiveness for subsequent funding.

Proposals must demonstrate a high probability of generating important new creative activities or scholarly understandings, new scholarly materials or resources, significant data or information, or essential instrumentation resources that are likely to significantly advance the reputation of the university, lead to external funding, or lead to developing a new technology. (Note: RRF proposals must support faculty development; this fund is not intended to support independent research projects undertaken by graduate students and/or post-doctorates.)

More information is available below.

The Università Commerciale “Luigi Bocconi” of Milan is launching a competition based on qualifications and tests for the conferral, by means of an appropriate contract, of 4 researchers with the following characteristics:

• Duration: 36  months
• Research Centre: DONDENA
• Financed by: European Commission – H2020-ERC Scientific
• Coordinator:  Francesco Billari
• Research Project: DisCont -“Discontinuities in Household and Family Formation” – a project that studies the impact of macro-level discontinuities such as the Great Recession and the Digital Revolution on household and family formation (including fertility) in post-industrial societies.

Admission requirements:

In order to participate in the competition, the candidates must have the following requirements:

• Qualification: PhD or, alternatively, similar experience in demography, economics, sociology or statistics/data science.
• Solid quantitative skills and familiarity with statistical packages such as R and/or Stata.

Relatives (up to the forth degree of kinship) of professors in the University Council, the University Rector, or the Director General may not apply.

The processes of development generate a broad range of disparities across populations, cities, economies and geographies at the global, regional and local levels. A central theme of this conference will be to identify and explore these disparities, with an emphasis on labor, health, race, gender, urban life, and the economy. Explorations of other areas of disparity along with other topics in the sociology of development are welcome.

Disparities take on many forms, from environmental degradation to the increasingly precarious nature of work, from growing hunger in both more advanced and developing regions to a growing crisis of an adequate supply of fresh water. The consequences of uneven development are manifest in the dislocation of people seeking a better life by moving from countryside to cities, from the poor countries of the Global South to wealthier countries of the Global North. Migration puts pressure on limited resources while neoliberal policies shred the social safety net. Diseases once on the verge of eradication are beginning to return, increasing numbers of children live in poverty, and nationalism and xenophobia create barriers to migrants in search of a better life.

This is the first annual Sociology of Development Conference to be held in the Midwest. The City of Detroit and surrounding communities are microcosms of many development issues traditionally explored within the Global North-Global South framework. Flint has become emblematic of what happens when extracting revenues dominates local political actions resulting in lead poisoning of a vulnerable population. Dearborn contains a large Muslim community and still draws immigrants looking to flee the ravages of war and poverty. Detroit represents both the potential of a strong industrial economy and the consequences of capital flight. This conference seeks to provide scholars with a venue to exchange ideas and to explore the nature of these disparities from a wide range of perspectives, disciplines, and geographies. Practitioners outside the Academy are encouraged to participate.

The conference will include keynote plenary talks or panels on the following disparities:

• Health
• Economic
• Gender and Race
• Environmental
• Urban
• Labor

In addition to these conference themes, we look forward to exploring a wide range of development-related topics, whether considered at the global, regional, or local levels, including (but not limited to):

• Religion
• Migration
• Social Movements
• Agriculture
• Poverty
• War and Conflict
• Developmental Idealism
• Education
• Public policy
• Trade and Investment
• Law

The deadline for submissions is February 28, 2017. Notifications will be sent out mid-March 2017.

Individuals should submit the title of their talk and an abstract (one page maximum), and include their affiliation and email address. Session organizers should submit proposals (three page maximum) with the session title, a summary of its scope, a list of participants with their affiliations and email addresses, and titles of the papers with brief abstracts. For more information, and to submit your paper or session proposals, contact Prof. Jeffrey Kentor, socdev2017@wayne.edu.

Detailed information about the program, including the venue, accommodations, and registration information, is available below. There is no fee for registration. Travel/hospitality grants will be provided to some participants, but they are limited. Please specify whether you would like to be considered for partial funding. Some meals will be provided for participants during the conference.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Rina Agarwala, Arthur Alderson, Thomas Dietz, Saskia Sassen, Moshe Semyonov, and Howard Waitzkin

Abstract: Since most social science research relies upon multiple data sources, merging data sets is an essential part of workflow for many researchers. In many situations, however, a unique identifier that unambiguously links data sets is unavailable and data sets may contain missing and inaccurate information. As a result, researchers can no longer combine data sets “by hand” without sacrificing the quality of the resulting merged data set. This problem is especially severe when merging large-scale administrative records such as voter files. The existing algorithms to automate the merging process do not scale, result in many fewer matches, and require arbitrary decisions by researchers. To overcome this challenge, we develop a fast algorithm to implement the canonical probabilistic model of record linkage for merging large data sets. Researchers can combine this model with a small amount of human coding to produce a high-quality merged data set. The proposed methodology can handle millions of observations and account for missing data and auxiliary information. We conduct simulation studies to show that our algorithm performs well in a variety of practically relevant settings. Finally, we use our methodology to merge the campaign contribution data (5 million records), the Cooperative Congressional Election Study data (50 thousand records), and the nationwide voter file (160 million records).