Announcing the 2025-26 Faculty Research Fellows

The Center for International Social Science Research is pleased to welcome the newest members of its scholarly community.

Since 2017, CISSR's Faculty Fellows Program has supported international, transnational, and global research projects that are empirical in nature. The program is designed to support social scientists from any discipline, working in any geographic region, regardless of methodological approach. The center provides up to $25,000 for faculty research projects at any stage of development. 

Susan Stokes - Studying Mechanisms of Direct Democracy in Colombia and the United States

This project will use CISSR funding to conduct survey experiments in Colombia and the United States. The goal is to shed light on the potential of mechanisms of direct democracy (referendums and citizens' initiatives) to enhance the legitimacy of democratic decision-making. The study will explore whether policies that result from direct-democracy votes are viewed as more legitimate than the same policy decisions when taken by legislatures or executives; whether policies that result from citizens' initiatives are viewed as more legitimate than those taken by referendums; and whether the public view certain topics as more appropriate for MDDs. The results of this research will form the basis of scholarly articles, a book about direct democracy in representative systems, and public information about how mechanisms of direct democracy can be used to improve the functioning and legitimacy of democracy. 

Anne Karing - Understanding the Relationship between Formal and Informal Markets for Medicine: Evidence from Citizen Behavior in Sierra Leone

Informal medicine markets are widespread across many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), yet there is limited quantitative evidence on their effects on consumer behavior and societal welfare. This study examines the informal market for medicines in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where unlicensed vendors, known as marketers, sell medicines on public transportation. We conducted a listing of 141 marketers, collecting survey and observational data to uncover key insights. On the supply side, marketers primarily source medicines from wholesale pharmacies and sell them at prices comparable to retail pharmacies. On the demand side, citizens disproportionately rely on marketers for medicines with positive externalities (e.g., deworming pills) and for stigmatized conditions (e.g., STIs). Building on these findings, we propose two studies. First, leveraging quasi-random variation in citizens’ exposure to marketers, we examine whether this exposure influences their engagement with formal healthcare providers. Second, we experimentally vary marketers’ sales pitches to test how behavioral mechanisms, such as persuasive communication, shape demand for essential medicines. Finally, we will assess the quality of medicines sold in informal versus formal sectors through a blind comparison. These findings will inform policies on informal markets in Sierra Leone and provide insights applicable to other LMICs. 

Benjamin Lessing - Evaluating Focused Deterrence from the Inside Out

In Latin America, mano dura crackdowns typically backfire spectacularly, driving consolidation, expansion, and violent reactions by drug cartels, prison gangs, and other criminal networks. Yet without other options, desperate leaders voice dangerous infatuation with Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele’s authoritarian crackdown suspending civil rights and incarcerating 1.7% of the population. Even if this achieves short-term security at the expense of democratic rule of law, it is likely unworkable in other contexts. The need for alternative approaches could not be more acute. As such, the unprecedented expansion of a Focused Deterrence policing initiative in Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul (RS), after initially successful piloting, could be a watershed moment for Latin America. By deploying coercive force strategically, to punish gang leaders for violence occurring in the areas they control, the project promises to reorient gangs’ tactics and even preferences and culture toward less destructive behavior. Together with my Brazilian collaborators, and building on contacts with the governor and Security Secretary, I propose to study and evaluate this exciting initiative from two angles, that of the state agencies working together to strategically coordinate their actions, and that of the criminal groups whose incentives the state is trying to shape. Drawing on local researchers and officials with direct access to both the corridors of power and the state’s prison system---where most of its gang leaders reside---this project will produce a body of in-depth qualitative interviews with both state and criminal actors, providing a unique assessment of this important public policy innovation. 

Susan Gal and Lenore Grenoble - Linguistic Futures: Centering Language Shift and Revitalization in Sociolinguistic Theory

Recent decades of political activism aiming to revitalize endangered languages have created linguistic change, and a new linguistic future. The loss of languages used to be expected, even welcomed in the name of modernity or a myopic definition of “progress.” It is now clear that, far from assuring better communication, the diminishing number of languages is a result and sign of neglect, devaluation and discrimination against their speakers who are often coerced into shifting. Half of the roughly 6500 languages spoken today are "endangered." Colonization, migration, war and other changes in power relations lead to language shift, as do the centralization projects of states.  The last half century has seen vibrant, organized efforts by speakers and their allies to reverse language shifts. These developments challenge mainstream (socio)linguistic theory, which has long sidelined shifting languages as mere “deficit,” decay, and irregularity. Our goal is to mobilize this new evidence, paired with new methods, to put shifting languages at the center of (socio)linguistic theory and thereby rethink core theoretical questions, specifically: the nature of language community and its (non)boundedness; grammatical complexity in language change; regularity in social meaning; the category of “native speaker.” We aim to develop these issues in a collaborative project of twenty scholars who study shifting languages and their contexts. They and their field-sites are chosen from around the world for contrast and comparison. In two workshops over two years, with papers submitted in advance and revised in between, we aim for a volume of linked, theoretically integrative essays.

Yueran Zhang - Workers of the Socialist World: The Transnational Remaking of Chinese Workers' Class Consciousness, circa 1980 

This project provides a transnational account of the crystallization of socialist workers’ class consciousness at a pivotal historical moment. Specifically, drawing upon a wide range of historical source materials, it documents how, in China’s early post-Mao era, Chinese workers’ understandings of who they were and what they were to demand were significantly shaped by the inspiration they drew from the Yugoslavian model of heterodox socialism as well as the Polish Solidarity movement. Not only did urban Chinese workers deploy these inspirations to frame their grievances and discontents in a new language, but their (not necessarily factually accurate) understanding of what happened in Yugoslavia and Poland emboldened them to rethink what their positions in society should be and what they are capable of demanding. In doing so, this project demonstrates how the making of class consciousness under actually existing socialism has an important transnational dimension that conventional, internalist approaches alone cannot capture.