Programs

CASBS is an accelerator of ideas. It facilitates multi-year, interdisciplinary, intersectoral, and collaborative efforts to develop new solutions to major societal challenges.

Our programs and projects focus on the following challenges:

Building equitable societies
How to craft institutions, organizations, and networks to enhance societal and individual flourishing.

Enacting ethical technologies
How to create, regulate, and use technology in service of our highest values and understand the capacity of technology to amplify and alleviate societal problems.

Ensuring sustainable livelihoods
How to respond to climate change and maximize the long-term well-being of all species and their environments.

To properly address these challenges, in all our work we strive toward:

Rethinking the social sciences
How to develop better practices and tools for social science research to meet the needs of modern society.

We accomplish this through our programs, projects, and training institutes.

Programs:

Programs stimulate new thinking and research. Spanning 3-5 years and wide in scope, programs articulate questions, generate specific projects, and co-ordinate collaboration among those projects.

Creating a New Moral Political Economy
Humans, Nature, and Machines

Projects:

Projects apply the best new thinking and methods of the social sciences to answer particular questions and/or achieve explicit objectives. Projects can be launched independently or as part of programs.

Independent Projects:

Causal Inference for Social Impact Lab
Ethics & Society Review
Understanding the iGeneration 

Projects affiliated with the Humans, Nature, and Machines program:

Imagining Adaptive Societies
Toward a Theory of AI Practice
The Social Science of Caregiving

Projects affiliated with the Creating a New Moral Political Economy program: 

The Social Science of Caregiving

See the program page for more information about its projects, working groups, and resources.

Training Institutes:

Training institutes convene teams of researchers to build new fields and model ways of collaborating for an extended period of time, often two weeks.

Organizations and their Effectiveness
Diversity Institute: Why and How Difference Makes a Difference

All programs, projects, and institutes require the approval of the Academic Advisory Board.

For more information, please contact CASBS program directors Betsy Rajala (betsy.rajala@stanford.edu) and Zachary Ugolnik (zugolnik@stanford.edu).

Ethics, Society, and Technology Hub

CASBS co-leads the Ethics, Society, and Technology Hub, a presidential initiative at Stanford University. Go to the EST Hub web site for more on the Hub's purpose as well as its past and current activities. Read about the EST Hub's beginnings in this Stanford Report article.

For more information, please contact EST Hub program manager Ashlyn Jaeger (ajaeger@stanford.edu).