Social Science

The Social Life of the Sediment Balance: A Social and Geomorphic Approach to the Transformation of River Systems and Deltas*

G. Mathias Kondolf
Giacomo Parrinello
2018

Interdisciplinary scholarship on river systems and society is usually concerned with water flows, but rarely with sediment balance. Sediments, however, are essential component of river systems and their deltas, providing sediment needed to sustain river channels to balance delta subsidence and coastal erosion. Hydroelectric dams, canals, sand and gravel mining, and other human uses alter sediment fluxes, resulting in sediment starvation that causes undermining of bridges and other infrastructure, coastal erosion and retreat of many the world’s river deltas, and loss of ecological values....

Political Representation in India: The Berkeley-Sciences Po Indian Legislators Project

Jennifer Bussel
Christophe Jaffrelot
2018

This project will develop a novel research agenda focused on political representation in India, building upon and integrating previous major data collection efforts by the Principal Investigators. In particular, we will examine the sociological backgrounds and responsiveness to constituents of national, state, and sub-state-level elected officials in India.

Jennifer Bussel

UC PI:
Jennifer Bussel...

New Directions in Himalayan Studies

Alexander Von Rospatt
Stéphane Gros
2018

This project aims to help develop Himalayan Studies at UC Berkeley in partnership with the Centre d'Etudes Himalayennes (CEH) of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France, which is providing matching funds. For this we are hosting a workshop at Berkeley that will bring together experts from both institutions, including graduate students, working on the Himalayan region in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The broadly configured workshop (which will include Environmental Studies, and cover "Tibet and its Margins,"and "Newar Society, Religion and Art") will allow us to...

An Interview with Claire Zalc and Robert Braun (FBF 2022)

July 26, 2023
By: Evan Bretéché

Intergroup Solidarity and Social Integration: Micro-level evidence from the Holocaust in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Poland

Can you both introduce yourselves and talk about your academic journeys that lead you to this project?

Claire is a Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Research Director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Director of the Institute of Modern and Contemporary History at the École Normale Supérieure. A prizewinning author, she has written on topics as varied...

Congratulations to the 2023 FBF Grantees!

July 12, 2023
FBF is absoltuely delighted to sponsor 21 outstanding projects for 2023-24! Congratulations to the grantees!

FBF

Project span Applied Science, Engineering, Exact Science, Humanities and Social Science and many of the projects take an interdiscipinary approach. For a full overview of this year's funded projects, click here.

The FBF would like to...

From epic wildfires to epic flash-floods: Rethinking flood risk management in an era of extremes

Anna Serra-Llobet
Johnny Douvinet
2019

Linking social and applied sciences, this project includes interdisciplinary research on flood risk management, with a focus on California and southern France, regions affected by flash floods. We propose to develop new approaches to assess and manage flash floods after wildfires through improved understanding of the physical and social factors that affect the occurrence of these events.

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Evolutions of personal networks across time: A comparison between France and the USA

Claude Fischer
Guillaume Favre
2019

This project aims to compare and understand the evolution of sociability and personal networks in France and the United States of America. It aims to share data collected in both countries and to articulate two scales: a macro-sociological analysis of the evolution of personal networks and sociability over the past 30 years in both countries and a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the evolution of personal networks along life courses based on very detailed data on a small sample. By multiplying international comparisons and scales of analysis, we seek to understand how...

The impact of the pregnancy exposome on birth outcomes

Brenda Eskenazi
Rémy Slama
2019

Studying the impact of the entirety of environmental exposures (the “exposome”) on health is a real challenge. This collaboration will gather the exposome experts from multiple research fields. Based on this expertise, simulations and both US and European mother-child cohorts, we aim to investigate, using new methodologies, the effects of the environmental exposures occurring during the prenatal period, a key time for health and the development of child and adult diseases.

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Geographic variations in the length of life: Comparing France and the United States

Magali Barbieri
Hippolyte D'Albis
2019

In the current context of increasing disparities in mortality within the most developed countries and given the growing divergence in trends at the national level between the United States and other high-income countries, the purpose of the proposed project is dual. First, we will build two databases of historical mortality indicators at the regional level in France (for the départements) and in the United states (for the counties) using the same set of methods. Then, we will use the resulting data series to compare the levels and trends in geographic inequalities in the length of...

The effect of culture on individual perceptual mechanisms

David Whitney
Mark Wexler
2020

The goal of our project is to examine how culture, as represented by language, can affect low-level perceptual function--in our case hearing. Although studies of low-level perception have assumed that it is largely universal, there have been reports that lower-level perceptual function varies between cultures. Here we put forward and test the hypothesis that the effect of language milieu on perception is via a process called ensemble perception.

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