By Christy DeSmith, Harvard Gazette, November 1, 2024
With another presidential election at America’s doorstep, Lawrence D. Bobo, the dean of Social Science, last week gathered four of his division’s faculty members — Mina Cikara, Jill Lepore, Eric Nelson, and Theda Skocpol — to discuss the state of the U.S. political system.
“We don’t have enough occasions in the social sciences to share ideas across our disciplines, across our methods, and across our different perspectives to understand key issues,” offered Bobo, who is also the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences, at the top of the conversation. He hoped that the interdisciplinary panel’s expertise — in history, sociology, government, political theory, and psychology — would yield “a sense of illumination, if not calm, about the fate of American democracy.”
Drawing on field research with American voters and the history of U.S. political thought, the symposium quickly surfaced disagreement over the source of recent dysfunction….
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