A Spark of Creativity in the Social Sciences
Three years in, the Center for Innovation in Social Science is already building a legacy of interdisciplinary research
When Deborah Carr and Ian Sue Wing published a study about the intersection of global climate change and population aging trends in May 2024, much of Asia was suffering through an oppressive heat wave. By 2050, they estimated, an additional 250 million people aged 69 and older—the population most at risk for heat-related deaths—could be exposed to dangerous temperatures. The media took notice. The Arts & Sciences colleagues did interviews with NPR and Bloomberg and wrote op-eds for the Los Angeles Times and CNN.
The fruitful collaboration between the two researchers began after Carr, a professor of sociology, was named founding director of the Center for Innovation in Social Science (CISS) in 2021. Her mission was to spark creative, interdisciplinary research in the social sciences and find ways to support students and faculty engaged in that work. She established a faculty steering committee to bring together colleagues from across the college, and Sue Wing, a professor of Earth and environment, joined. They knew little about each other’s work.
Sue Wing told Carr how he models weather and studies climate change impacts and noted that the places warming the most also have aging populations. He wondered if that data was significant. “I said, ‘Absolutely. This is hugely important,’” says Carr, who studies aging. Their interaction was exactly the type of matchmaking she had hoped the center would foster.
Three years later, Carr and Shannon Landis, the center’s administrator, are constantly experimenting with new programs and partnerships, seeing what works and retooling what doesn’t. They host professional development workshops, like panel discussions about book and journal publishing. A gift to the College of Arts & Sciences provides pilot grants for social scientists to partner with computer and data science students at BU Spark!, a learning lab in the BU Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences. And, with the hiring of Christopher Chiofolo as grants and finance administrator in 2022, CISS has taken on grant applications and management responsibilities formerly shouldered by individual departments, increasing the funding that BU’s social sciences attract. “We’re putting together people who need to meet each other in a way that will lead to more creative work,” says Carr.
Through salaries or access to pilot grants and other services and support provided by the center, CISS is helping a growing number of scholars—more than 200 in 2023–24 alone—including undergraduate research and writing interns, graduate affiliates, postdoctoral fellows, visiting scholars, and faculty affiliates from across BU. Three of those scholars shared their experiences with A×S.
Kaitlin Howlett (CAS’25), Historian and Undergraduate Research Intern
“My professor and advisor, Paula Austin [an associate professor of history and African American and Black diaspora studies], invited me to be her intern. It had always been a goal of mine to do research as an undergraduate.
Dr. Austin’s book, Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life, counters the myth that “The Great Migration” created a culture of delinquent urban youth, when formerly enslaved people moved to cities like DC for work. This narrative is not true or just and has fortified a racial hierarchy in which Black youth are seen as requiring white cultural influence to lead meaningful lives. We’re working on a digital humanities project, which will display, chronologically and spatially, how youth relocate through opportunities that they create, increase their wealth, and transform their fates from those predetermined for them.
My role has been to rake through online repositories such as ancestral, census, and Social Security data to follow the subjects from her book into their adult lives. At points, it has been challenging because we are studying people whose histories have been historically suppressed.
This internship has been transformative for me, working within the historical discipline but weaving in sociological methods. CISS is not just about the research output. It’s about the student experience and our growth trajectory. I wanted to be a social studies educator, but now I’m interested in public policy and historical curriculum and looking at what history is taught and how.”
Meghann Lucy (GRS’24), Sociologist and Graduate Affiliate
“One thing that’s really cool is that CISS makes funding available to graduate students that’s typically only available for professors. I applied for a grant, which I used to travel to a conference to present research. I also got funding for an undergraduate research assistant, and I was able to get a CISS-Spark! grant that connected me with computer science students.
I’m interested in consumption and mental illness—specifically, hoarding disorder. There is very little research in sociology that’s been done on hoarding and on what happens in the community when we run into these cases. There’s value in understanding the ways that our biases and social norms shape reality for folks experiencing mental illness and experiencing very precarious housing
situations.
I had data about all the violations reported to Boston’s Inspectional Services Department between 2010 and January 2023, which included more than 580,000 citations. I also had more than 600,000 reports from the city’s 311 hotline. A team of computer science students from Spark! cleaned up the data and wrote algorithms that identified probable hoarding cases in the community. Things that I couldn’t even dream of doing myself, I was able to do through CISS.”
Tatiana Padilla, Sociologist and Postdoctoral Associate
“It’s incredible to think of the ways that we limit ourselves as researchers, the limits of our methods. Being in a space where there are no limits allows you to really run free with ideas.
One of my colleagues, who works on homelessness, saw an ad for a grant and asked, ‘Want to put something together?’ I consider myself a policy analyst who studies the inequalities that arise from decisions related to immigration, but I never would have thought of how homelessness is impacted by immigration. Another of my projects is about how immigration enforcement impacts the psychological development of children. One of my undergrad research assistants is a psych major. She’s interested in how children process trauma.
I’m also trying to create a database of where and when immigration raids occur. There are records of ICE [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] arrests, and the students at BU Spark! can sift through all of the sources that are online—Twitter, Facebook, news articles, church bulletins—to validate quantitative data with qualitative data. It took me more than a year to do 10 percent of that; they’re able to crank it out in two months. CISS attracts people who care about work that informs things beyond academic walls. What we’re doing has the capacity to impact so many lives.”