Podcasts
Jennifer Lee on Asian Americans
July 01, 2021
The twin prods of a U.S. president trying to rebrand the coronavirus as the ‘China virus’ and a bloody attack in Atlanta that left six Asian women dead have brought to the fore a spate of questions about Asian Americans in the United States. Sociologist Jennifer Lee is answering those questions
Whose Work Most Influenced You? Part 4: A Social Science Bites Retrospective
May 10, 2021
In this montage drawn from the last two years of Social Science Bites podcasts, interviewer David Edmonds poses the same question to 25 notable social scientists: Whose work most influenced your own?
Diego Gambetta on Signaling Theory
February 01, 2021
In this Social Science Bites podcast, Diego Gambetta, a professor of social theory at the European University Institute in Florence, discussing his research around signaling theory and the applications of his work, whether addressing courtship, organized crime of hailing a cab.
Alondra Nelson on Genetic Testing
October 01, 2020
In this Social Science Bites podcast Alondra Nelson, sociologist and Deputy Director for Science and Society for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, describes her particular interest in those root seekers whose antecedents were “stolen from African” in the slave trade who make up so much of the African diaspora.
Hetan Shah On Social Science And The Pandemic
April 27, 2020
Hetan Shah details how science, and social science in particular, has come to be deployed, how it’s been a force for good throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and how it can help policymakers understand and shape a better tomorrow.
Gina Neff on Smart Devices
March 1, 2019
In this Social Science Bites podcast, Gina Neff tells interview David Edmonds that such information—your information collected on tracking application—is widely available to the device or software maker. Now combine that with social network data—and many apps essentially require you connect those dots—and what results is an unintentionally rich portrait of the user.
James Robinson on Why Nations Fail
December 3, 2018
In this Social Science Bites podcast, interviewer David Edmonds posits — and Robinson rebuts — several traditional explanations for the inequality of nations.
Nick Adams on Textual Analysis
November 1, 2018
Fake news, whether truly phony or merely unpalatable, has become an inescapable trope for modern media consumers. Sociologist Nick Adams, in this Social Science Bites podcast, offers hope that a tool he’s developed can improve the media literacy of the populace.
David Spiegelhalter on Communicating Statistics
April 2, 2018
David Spiegelhalter, professor of the public understanding of risk in the Statistical Laboratory in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge and current president of the Royal Statistical Society on communicating statistics.
Melinda Mills on Sociogenomics
February 1, 2018
Combining sociology and genetics, Melinda Mills and her collaborators abandon the nature v. nurture controversy for empirical research on family formation, inequality, child-rearing, etc., leading them into ‘sociogenomics.’
Bev Skeggs on Social Media Siloing
December 1, 2017
In this Social Science Bites podcast Bev Skeggs explains to interviewer David Edmonds of the accidental lesson she learned during research on how social networks were structuring, or restructuring, friendships
Tom Chatfield on Critical Thinking and Bias
October 2, 2017
Podcast with author Tom Chatfield highlights his new book and the way critical thinking is lacking in today's generation, which author Tom Chatfield believes is the number one skill that everyone needs to have in order to compete in today's society.
Al Roth on Matching Markets
August 1, 2017
In this Social Science Bites podcast, Roth explains to interviewer David Edmonds some of the ins and outs of market matching, starting with a quick and surprisingly simple definition.
Gary King on Big Data Analysis
March 1, 2017
It’s not the ‘big’ or the ‘data’ that really turns the screw; it’s the analysis. In this Social Science Bite, Professor Gary King, uses text analysis as an example of this big data analysis.
Sandy Pentland on Social Physics
January 3, 2017
In this Social Science Bites podcast, Pentland tells interviewer Dave Edmonds about the origins of social physics in the barren days before the advent of widespread good data and solid statistical methods and how it blossomed as both a field and for his own research.