Fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study

Each year, approximately 20 scholars are selected as Members in the School of Social Science. A completed doctorate or equivalent is required by the application deadline. Memberships are awarded at both the junior and senior levels and for the full academic year only. Members are expected only to pursue their own research and participate in the weekly seminar. The School is not wedded to any particular intellectual or disciplinary approach. While there is an organizing theme each year, each class of accepted fellows includes some who represent that thematic focus and others who do not. Applications are strongly encouraged from scholars across the social sciences, whether or not their research corresponds to the theme. Funding for Member stipends is individually negotiated, taking into account the applicant’s base salary and the level of sabbatical and other grant support that he or she can secure. In setting compensation, the School attempts to provide half of the current academic base salary for all Members, up to a maximum stipend of $65,000.

 

 

Theme for 2015–16

 

The external limits of territories (borders) and the internal delimitations within societies (boundaries) have long been thought of in different terms: immigration, nationality and citizenship in the first case; racial, ethnic, religious, caste and class differentiation in the second. If globalization has hardened rather than abolished borders it has also produced new realities and anxieties concerning social boundaries. The immigrants of yesterday have often become the minorities of today. Whether one considers the parallel rise of xenophobia and Islamophobia in an increasingly integrated Europe, the links between undocumented immigrants and Latino politics in North America, the conflicts between neighboring countries involving oppressed minorities in Asia, the repression of ethnic or religious groups in Africa, or the transnational circulation of terrorist networks, the reconfiguration of borders and boundaries in both war and peace raises anew classical problems of state formation, nation-building and social contract. This is not to say that these phenomena are unprecedented: on the contrary, their genealogies and histories, colonial pasts and imperial legacies need to be explored.

 

How to analyze the continuities and discontinuities in the making of borders and boundaries? How to interpret contemporary insecurities concerning immigration and identities in relation with economic and cultural tensions? How to envisage the consolidation of racial, ethnic, religious differences in a context of transnational circulation of goods and people? How are the psychological dynamics of in-group and cross-group interaction interacting with shifting legal and political realities? How are class and gender inequalities recomposed in the changing patterns of the nation-state? How do public policies, political parties, social movements and non-governmental organizations address these issues? Around such questions, we hope to bring together scholars working in various countries, using empirical and comparative method as well as theoretical and normative approach, and from all disciplines, including history, sociology, anthropology, geography, psychology, economics, law, philosophy and political science. The Borders and Boundaries theme year will be led by Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School.