Welcome to the March 2011 issue of the Social Sciences
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World-renowned philosopher Brian Skyrms earns UCI Alumni Association's highest award

Skyrms and 18 others will be honored at 41st Lauds & Laurels ceremony May 12

The UCI Alumni Association has announced UC Irvine Distinguished Professor Brian Skyrms, logic & philosophy of science and economics, will receive the 2011 Extraordinarius award during the 41st annual Lauds & Laurels ceremony May 12 at the Hyatt Regency Irvine. Eighteen additional distinguished individuals - including four from social sciences - will be feted for their commitment to UC Irvine. Recipients include a Pulitzer Prize winner, UCI's first woman drafted into professional soccer, physicians, scientists, educators and humanitarians from every walk of life. Awardees were selected by a committee of alumni, faculty, students and volunteers.

A complete list follows, and keep an eye out for feature spotlights on the social sciences standouts!

Public Impact Fellowship winner follows his heart

Andrew Chang left promising engineering career to pursue doctorate in economics

Before coming to UC Irvine, Andrew Chang, economics, had had scant experience with California beyond the turnstiles at Disneyland. Years after vacationing with his parents at the Magic Kingdom, he thought of the entire state as "the happiest place on Earth." "When making my decision about a grad school, I talked to three or four students at each [candidate] university," Chang recalls. "All the UCI students sounded really happy. That clinched it for me. I thought, 'You know what? I'm going to the happy place!'" Now he has even more reason to feel happy. A third-year economics graduate student, Chang recently was awarded a $10,000 Public Impact Fellowship. The prize, created by graduate division dean Frances Leslie, supports UCI grad students whose work has the potential to significantly benefit society.

Dancing away their differences

Visits engender friendship between UCI students and their Ghanaian counterparts

Gabrielle Castro believes art can be a unifying force. She experienced this in a memorable way during a trip to Ghana last summer with a UC Irvine contingent of dancers and scholars. A senior studying dance, English and linguistics, Castro embarked on the journey to explore the role dance has played in forming Ghana's cultural identity. "The Ghana Dance Ensemble was started in 1962 - just five years after Ghana's independence from Great Britain - partly to build a more unified country," she says. "I'm interested in peacemaking opportunities through dance and art, and Ghana is a fascinating place to learn how art can bring people together." For three weeks, 16 undergraduate and graduate students and faculty in dance, history, political science, international studies and anthropology conducted research and performed with the Ghana Dance Ensemble - a collaboration of the Ghanaian government and the University of Ghana's Institute of African Studies.

Weighing in

Neumark testifies before State Senate on merits of hiring and earned income credits, pitfalls of Enterprise Zone Program

In its review of proposed legislation by Governor Brown that would repeal California's Enterprise Zone program, the State Senate called on the expertise of UCI economics professor David Neumark. A research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research and Bren fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), Neumark is an expert on minimum wage and labor policy and will be a member of the five-person speaker panel. His research on the state's Enterprise Zone (EZ) Program, created in 1984 with the goal of "stimulating business investment in depressed areas of the State and creating job opportunities," has found the program to be largely ineffective with no measurable effect on new job creation for businesses located within zone boundaries.

Household chores or 'women's work'?

UCI sociologist and CDASA director Judith Treas explains in new book how society, culture and public policy impact who does chores in homes around the globe

Determining who cooks and who cleans in a household may feel like a personal decision arrived at by individual couples, but UCI sociologist Judith Treas says culture and societal characteristics have a major influence on how domestic duties get divvied up in homes around the globe. In Dividing the Domestic: Men, Women, and Household Work in Cross-National Perspective, Treas, coeditor Sonja Drobnic, and international collaborators combine survey data with sociological analysis to explain why the lion's share of domestic responsibilities still rests with women, even as more are working outside the home. The coeditors find that while certain countries, such as Sweden, are closing this gender chore gap, other countries may be reinforcing traditional roles through policies that allow women time off for housekeeping and caring for children. Here, Treas discusses some of their key findings.

SPOTLIGHT EVENT: Mapping and Tracking Global Cultural Change

Friday, March 11, 2011 @ 9:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m.
Social & Behavioral Sciences Gateway, Room 1511

The World Values Surveys represent an incomparable data source to map global cultural differences and trace cultural change around the world. Their development overlaps with a period of tremendous cultural change in many regions of the world including a decline of deference to authority; an increasing emphasis on freedom of expression and equality of opportunities; growing social and political tolerance; growing emancipative orientations towards the role of women; a diffusion of protest politics; rising happiness; and increasing emphasis on democratic principles combined with greater dissatisfaction with the democratic process and institutions in practice. For the first time, various prominent scholars who have collaborated on the World Values Surveys on different aspects of these changes will be brought together to take stock of the key insights and unresolved puzzles. The conference is sponsored by the UCI Center for the Study of Democracy, the Center for the Study of Democracy at Leuphana University, Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, and the Institute for European Studies at UC Berkeley.