The Graduate School is  pleased to announce the annual competition for the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fellowship.   Mrs. Liebmann set up a trust fund to provide funding for graduate students of “outstanding character and ability who hold promise for achievement and distinction in their chosen fields of study.”   The Graduate School will be able to send only three nominees to the national competition and is conducting an internal selection competition.

AWARD:  The fellowship provides an $18,000 stipend plus tuition and may be renewed for a total of three years of funding.

FIELDS:  Social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and professional (such as law, medicine, engineering, architecture).   The selection committee has a strong preference for supporting scholarly endeavors (not practice degrees).

ELIGIBILITY:

• Must be in an doctoral or professional degree program at the UW
• Must be U.S. citizen
• Must have outstanding undergraduate record
• Must show financial need
• Must have received baccalaureate degree
• Must conduct studies and research in the United States

Please note that financial need requirement will be determined based on the FAFSA, which must be on file with the UW.  They will only consider students showing in the UW Financial Aid system with need (any level).  If you have not filed a FAFSA, please do so immediately if you wish to apply for this fellowship.  Information is here: http://www.washington.edu/students/osfa/.  If the UW determines you don’t have need based on an initial review of the FAFSA, you can either 1) determine whether you can refigure your need requirement, which is definitely possibly through the Office of Student Financial Aid’s process, or 2) decide not to apply for the Liebmann fellowship.

The American Association of Geographers’ Annual Meeting in Boston, MA, is a conference for geographers, GIS specialists, environmental scientists, and other leaders and focuses on the latest in research and applications in geography, sustainability, and GIScience. The meeting will be held from April 5-9, 2017, and will feature over 6,600 presentations, posters, workshops, and field trips by leading scholars, experts, and researchers. Visit the link below for 2017’s featured themes and instructions on how you can submit your paper for consideration.

The Department of Sociology seeks to fill a vacancy at the rank of Assistant or Associate Professor. This is a tenure track position set to start in Fall 2017. Performs teaching, research and guidance duties in area(s) of expertise. Shares responsibility for committee and department assignments including administrative, supervisory, and other functions.

We are seeking candidates with research experience in the area now often called “Big Data,” “Data Analytics,” or “Data Science.” The preferred candidate is someone who has applied quantitative and statistical techniques, using large datasets, to important sociological issues. Familiarity with emerging techniques and methods from computer science that enable these sorts of analyses is most desirable. These areas of research are still being defined, and we are looking for a candidate who can, in addition to producing cutting edge research, help us to move our curriculum forward at both the MA and BA level to incorporate an emphasis on big data analytics.

The successful candidate is expected to establish a vigorous, externally funded research program that expands the scope of our departmental capability while complementing and integrating with our existing strengths. S/he will advise students at undergraduate, MS, and PhD levels. Teaching expectations include an average of three classes per academic year, including an undergraduate class in human-environment interactions as well as other introductory and upper-division courses. Service to the department, university, and community is also expected.

Minimum Qualifications
• PhD in Geography or related field at time of appointment
• Research specialization in human-environment interactions
• Ability to teach courses in human-environment interactions
• Demonstrated ability to publish original research in peer-reviewed journals
• Demonstrated ability or potential to establish an independent, externally funded research program
• Demonstrated ability or potential for high-quality teaching and mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students

 

Climate change has many overtly environmental expressions: it has contributed to aberrant temperatures, extreme weather, rising sea levels, and ever-increasing levels of drought. But climate change is not a purely environmental issue; it also has profound impact socially, economically, and geo-politically. And upon closer examination, it becomes clear that environmental changes do not affect human populations uniformly. In fact, the United Nations, the National Institutes of Health, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and countless other organizations recognize that climate change disproportionately impacts women, minorities, impoverished peoples, indigenous populations, people in developing nations, and other marginalized groups. Moreover, research shows that carbon taxes (often included in proposals to mitigate the greenhouse effect) have the heaviest burden on the poor. Thus, to fully address and solve the multilateral matter of climate change, we need to take into consideration the stances and experiences of marginalized peoples and developing nations.

Join the World Affairs Council and Western Washington University on November 3rd for an educator’s workshop all about climate change and its relationship to issues of social justice and human rights around the world. Teachers will explore climate change from both an environmental and a societal perspective, and will learn tools for engaging students around the issues.

Teachers will receive standards-aligned curricular resources and full original lesson plans to help bring the complex topic of climate change to the classroom. This is an interdisciplinary workshop, and would be appropriate for teachers in the Sciences, Arts, and Humanities.

Workshop includes 3 clock hours (with STEM components), classroom resources, and a light dinner.

In order to understand public reactions toward social problems and, in order to do something about these conditions causing so much human misery, we need to know much more about the work of social problem narratives.  In a world of countless competing stories, we need to know how some—and only some —stories achieve widespread cognitive and emotional appeal and go on to influence public opinion and social policy; how different stories appeal to people in different social positions.  We need to know how stories promoting particular images of social problems reflect and challenge and/or perpetuate existing inequalities and structures of power, and how stories encourage or discourage social change.  We need to more fully understand how story contents and meanings change as they circulate through particular societies and throughout the globe.

Each participant is permitted to submit one sole-authored paper and one critical dialogue paper, but additional co-authored papers may be submitted. Critical Dialogue sessions include short (5 minute) presentations by up to 8 authors followed by facilitated dialogue that critically explores connections among the papers. The audience will have an opportunity to participate in the dialogue as well. Emphasis is placed on exploring interesting connections between papers with a broadly similar theme. The hope is that both presenters and the audience will have an opportunity to make new and deeper connections from their unique insights and presented ideas. Critical Dialogue sessions will not have audio-visual equipment.

Join Callie Burt, CSDE Affiliate and UW Assistant Professor of Sociology, for a seminar with the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences.

Recent studies suggest that interpersonal racial discrimination increases the risk of crime among African Americans and familial racial socialization practices provide resilience to discrimination’s criminogenic effects. Yet, studies have focused on the short-term effects of racial discrimination largely among adolescents. The present study seeks to advance knowledge by exploring whether and how racial discrimination’s criminogenic effects and racial socialization’s resilience effects endure. Elaborating Simons and Burt’s (2011) social schematic theory of crime, Dr. Burt traces the effects of childhood discrimination and familial racial socialization on the structuring of the life course in ways that influence the likelihood of adult offending, highlighting cognitive and social pathways and their interplay via interactional and cumulative continuity. This life-course SST model is tested using data from the Family and Community Heath (FACHS), a panel study of African American youth followed from ages 10 to 25. Consistent with the model, analyses reveal that the criminogenic cognitive consequences of racial discrimination are mediated by the nature of social relationships and ties. Specifically, by increasing criminogenic social schemas, interpersonal racial discrimination decreases embeddedness in supportive romantic, educational, and employment relations. Findings suggest that not only do the criminogenic effects of racial discrimination endure to increase the likelihood of adult offending, but familial racial socialization has lasting protective effects.