This feature is part of an ongoing RSF blog series, Work in Progress, which highlights some of the research of our current class of Visiting Scholars.

During his time in residence at RSF, Visiting Scholar Philip J. Cook (Duke University) is completing a series of articles based on research in four cities (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Boston) that examines the sources of guns to gang members. He argues that a better understanding of the social networks and other underground sources of guns will inform strategic interventions to disrupt supply and reduce gun violence.

In a new interview with the Foundation, Cook discussed the social costs of gun violence, and offered strategies for law enforcement to disrupt the tightly knit networks that supply guns to gangs.

Q. What are the social costs of gun violence and how are they unequally distributed across the population?

The Russell Sage Foundation has recently approved the following Presidential Authority awards in several programs, including Future of Work, Social Inequality, Cultural Contact, and Immigration programs.

Awards approved in the Future of Work program:

Living at the Minimum: Low-Wage Workers with Children During Seattle's Minimum Wage Increase
Heather D. Hill and Jennifer Romich (University of Washington)
Jointly funded with the MacArthur Foundation

Human development and social policy experts Heather Hill and Jennifer Romich will carry out an in-depth, qualitative study of Seattle workers with children before and after the implementation of the city’s minimum wage increase to $15 per hour starting in April 2015.

This feature is part of an ongoing RSF blog series, Work in Progress, which highlights some of the ongoing research of our current class of Visiting Scholars.

We tend to think of race as a part of one’s identity that stays fixed throughout their lifetime—unlike socioeconomic status, which has the potential to change. But new research by current Visiting Scholar Aliya Saperstein (Stanford) offers a provocative new perspective on the mutability of race today.

During her time in residence at the Russell Sage Foundation, Saperstein is completing a book that examines the ways in which an individual’s racial status can shift based on changes to their social status. Her research focuses on the fluidity of racial perceptions, including how people self-identify racially, how they are classified by others, and how conceptions of race change both within and across generations.

In a new interview, Saperstein discussed how using a “racial mobility perspective” can help social scientists conceptualize the complex interactions between race and socioeconomic status today.

Q. What is a racial mobility perspective? How does it build upon what social scientists already understand about status attainment and socioeconomic mobility to highlight important features of racial inequality in the US?