2026 Publications | Center for Innovation in Social Science

Learn about the latest books, journal articles, and reports of BU social scientists here.

The Center’s mission is to promote the work of Boston University’s social science faculty and our affiliates. If you have or know of someone who has a new publication, please email us at ciss@bu.edu.

David Carballo (CAS/Anthropology, Archaeology, & Latin American Studies & CISS Affiliate) The Distribution of Power and Inclusiveness Across Deep Time (Science Advances, Mar 2026) Carballo and his associates present a global, deep-time comparative analysis of governance, questioning entrenched viewpoints about the origins and evolution of democratic institutions.

Leyla Jafarova

(GRS/Anthropology) Death as the Gateway to “Humanity”: The Humanitarian Paradox of Humanity After Life (Polar, Mar 2026) Jafarova examines how humanitarian management of the dead in the Nagorno–Karabakh conflict constructs deceased soldiers as objects of care, incorporating them into “humanity after life”—a postmortem register of humanitarian concern.

Andrew Stokes (SPH, Global Health & CISS Affiliate) Applying machine learning to identify unrecognized COVID-19 deaths recorded as other causes of death in the United States (Science Advances, Mar 2026) Stokes and his coauthors use machine learning trained on US death certificates from March 2020 to December 2021 to predict unrecognized COVID-19 deaths finding that 19% more COVID-19 deaths occurred in the US than officially reported.

Christopher Robertson

(LAW/Health Law, Policy & Management & CISS Affiliate) Political Theater and the Great Healthcare Plan (JAMA Network, Mar 2026) Robertson & his colleague examine various aspects of the Great Healthcare Plan related to drug pricing, including over-the-counter expansion; subsidies, rebates, and cost sharing; and price transparency.

Samuel Bazzi (CAS/Economics), Jeremy Menchik

(Pardee/International Relations and Political Science, director CURA: The Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs), Pujan Paudel (ECE), Gianluca Stringhini (ENG), & Clara Martiny (Pardee ’23) Protests and Radicalization in the Digital Age: The Reopen Movement (Cambridge University Press, Apr 2026) Bazzi, Menchick and their co-authors provide the first large-scale inquiry into the ‘Reopen’ protest movement against COVID-19 public health shutdowns and synthesize digital ethnography inside the movement with text analyses of an original data set spanning more than 1.8 million Facebook comments and posts from over 224,000 online activists.

Deborah Carr (CAS/Sociology & CISS Director) Midlife in the United States (MIDUS Refresher 2), 2022-2024 (National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging, Mar 2026) Carr and her co-investigators on the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) are pleased to announce the release of the 2022-24 wave of follow-up data from the Refresher Sample. These data are now publicly available at ICPSR at University of Michigan. MIDUS data allow explorations of how working conditions, relationships, health, finances, and more affect health and well-being over the life course.

Amanda Tarullo

(CAS/Psychological & Brain Sciences & CISS Affiliate) ‘It all depends on your faith’: Spiritual illnesses and traditional healing in rural Limpopo Province, South Africa (Journal of Biosocial Science, Mar 2026) Tarullo and her colleagues sought to understand local explanatory models for illness and patient experiences with different traditional health practitioners (THPs) among a population of rural women in Limpopo, South Africa.

Erik Peinert (CAS/Political Science) Strong Intellectual Property and Weak Antitrust: How the End of Vertical Restraints Fissured the US Political Economy (Socio-Economic Review, Mar 2026) Peinert and his co-author show how public and private actors strove to change the interlocked legal regime governing domestic and global intellectual property (IP) rights and antitrust policy to prioritize the value of intangible assets like IP, shifting the distribution of profits among firms and contributing to the ‘fissuring’ of industrial organization.

Pending