Greetings CASBS friends! I don’t need to tell you it’s been a tumultuous year for the country and world, and so much remains uncertain for the year to come and beyond.
Here at the Center, we continue, as ever, to navigate the uncertainty and advance understandings through interrogation of some of the most vexing questions and problems of societal importance. One important aspect of that, of course, involves the stellar collection of scholars we host each year. Along these lines, I am delighted to report that the Center’s 71st fellowship year – featuring the class ushering the Center into its eighth decade – got off to a tremendous start in the fall. More than in previous years, we spent quality time engaging in a series of community building exercises – some mandatory and some optional – and many have remarked about how refreshing it is for academics to even pause and think about what it means to be part of a community. And that community is both intellectual and social. Fellows have self-organized reading and study groups around topics of mutual interest (as a sample, institutional persistence and change, migration, beliefs, feminist theory, health and healthcare, speculative fiction) but also have organized happy hours, dinner outings, hikes, and a group volunteer effort at the Ecumenical Hunger Program in East Palo Alto organized by fellow Jas Sullivan on Election Day. Another fellow, Stephanie Wang, is a connoisseur of film and is curating a weekly documentary screening drawn from the Criterion Collection. All told, one fellow told me that coming to CASBS feels like a giant embrace; another remarked that she feels like she can breathe again. I’m so gratified that the 2024-25 class heads into the winter break as a cohesive, mutually supportive and caring group.
The Center also navigates uncertainty and advances understanding through the thought leadership it has convened and produced in previous academic years. If you haven’t already, please have a look at the excellent 2024-25 CASBS Syllabus we released in October. Curated by CASBS communications director Mike Gaetani, it compiles some of our best programming from the past four or five years – in the form of podcast and webcast episodes, event and interview videos, and articles – across six curated, election- and post-election-relevant themes. It really underscores CASBS as a place that convenes some of the world’s best talent. We’d love it if you share it with those in your networks who are CASBS-curious and/or hungry for some sense-making expert insights.
We’ll reconvene on our beautiful hilltop in early 2025 refreshed and with a flurry of activity. Among other things, in January we and our partners at Sage will announce the next winner of the Sage-CASBS Award. In February, 2003-04 fellow Alison Gopnik, leader of our ongoing project on The Social Science of Caregiving (read our article on the project), along with CASBS faculty fellow Margaret Levi and CASBS program director Zack Ugolnik, curates the Winter 2025 issue of Dædalus. We’ll announce this, too, and hope you’ll consider sharing it with your networks.
And we’ll continue experimenting with some new projects and gatherings. The first of these is a new Transformation Science Initiative, led by me and current CASBS faculty fellows Jim Leape, Gabrielle Wong-Parodi, and Nicole Ardoin, all of whom are associated with the Stanford Doerr School for Sustainability (SDSS). With funding from SDSS and a partnership with Nature magazine, our group is working on what we hope will be a field-building piece on how various social science disciplines theorize and model change, with a focus on change designed to slow or halt climate change. We’ll host a workshop at the Center to bring together editors, funders, and academics (including interested current CASBS fellows) to give us feedback and generate new research ideas based on our review.
A second new initiative is an Advancing Health Online (AHO)-funded partnership with the Stanford Center for Digital Health. CASBS board of directors member Mubarik Imam (we’ll publish a Q&A with Mubarik in the winter or spring) is involved with AHO, which is how we heard about its call for proposals. We are working together on a white paper focused on evaluating investments in projects focused on generative AI for improving health behaviors. We hosted an initial convening in October 2024 at the Center and will continue our research for the white paper, which we will deliver to AHO in spring 2025.
A third connects CASBS with the new Futures Project on Education and Learning for Longer Lives, spearheaded by our partners at the Stanford Center for Longevity (SCL) – specifically, Laura Carstensen (2009-10 CASBS fellow) and Mitchell Stevens, both CASBS faculty fellows this year. The project is charged with developing a new framework for discussing how we can build new models of education, learning, and work to help navigate change and and enable continued prosperity and flourishing over our steadily lengthening lifespans. We held a kickoff two-day workshop at CASBS in October 2024; SCL followed-up with a terrific overview of the project that I encourage you to read.
The above efforts, broadly concerning health, education, climate change, and democracy, invoke some of the most critical issues and challenges of our time. Those of us on the CASBS hill now, and those among you who have spent time here in the past, know that it’s such a gift to be afforded the time, safety, and space to read and think and collaborate on such issues and challenges. Notwithstanding unknown potential new anxieties 2025 may bring, no doubt testing our collective resiliency and creativity, we in the CASBS community will return from winter break with a renewed sense of commitment to enhancing understanding through scholarship and insights that truly make a difference.
Sincerely,
Bonus video: Sarah recently spoke to Stanford alumni on "Embracing Failure"
