The Russell Sage Foundation is pleased to announce the appointment of Martha Minow to its board of trustees. Minow is the Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where she has taught since 1981, and a lecturer in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is co-editor of the RSF books Just Schools (2010), Engaging Cultural Differences (2004), and a contributor to Fathers Under Fire (2001).

After completing her undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan, Minow received a master’s degree in education from Harvard and a law degree from Yale. She clerked for Judge David Bazelon of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and then for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Minow is an expert in human rights and advocacy for members of racial and religious minorities and for women, children, and persons with disabilities. She served on the Independent International Commission on Kosovo and helped to launch Imagine Co-existence, a program of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, to promote peaceful development in post-conflict societies. Her five-year partnership with the federal Department of Education and the Center for Applied Special Technology worked to increase access to the curriculum for students with disabilities and resulted in both legislative initiatives and a voluntary national standard opening access to curricular materials for individuals with disabilities. She has also worked on the Divided Cities initiative which is building an alliance of global cities dealing with ethnic, religious, or political divisions.

Below is a first look at new and forthcoming books from the Foundation for Spring 2016. The list includes A Pound of Flesh, a new investigation of how monetary sanctions disproportionately punish the poor and perpetuate racial and economic inequality; Coming of Age in the Other America, a study of how neighborhoods and public policies affect the social mobility of low-income Baltimore youth; From High School to College, an analysis of how disparities across race, gender, and immigration status influence students’ paths to college completion; and Engines of Anxiety, an in-depth look at how law school rankings are reshaping legal education.

Three new issues of RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences will also be released this spring, and include “Higher Education Effectiveness,” which investigates the extent to which colleges and universities today are accessible, cost-effective, and able to prepare students for the labor market; “Inequality of Economic Opportunity”, which examines the barriers to social mobility that exist in the U.S.; and “Immigrants Inside Politics/Outside Culture,” which draws from a recent survey of the Latino population to analyze the political activity of both native-born and immigrant Latinos, including the undocumented.

To request a printed copy of our Spring 2016 catalog, please contact Bruce Thongsack at bruce@rsage.org, or view the complete list of RSF books on our publications page.

Update 2/17/16: Video of the event is available in full from CSPAN.

On Friday, February 12, Sara McLanahan (Princeton University), chair of the RSF board of trustees, and Andrew Cherlin (Johns Hopkins University), co-author of the RSF book The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood, will participate in a panel discussion hosted by the American Academy of Political and Social Science and the Annie E. Casey Foundation on the changing nature of American working class families.

The panel will explore how changes to family structures and marriage dynamics at a time of rising inequality and stunted social mobility have led to the decline of low-income children’s well-being. They will also evaluate the extent to which current policies have promoted healthy outcomes for children. Other panelists include Ron Haskins (Brookings Institution), Robert Putnam (Harvard University), and Michael Gerson (The Washington Post).

The event will take place at 10:30am EST on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. and is free and open to the public.

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.

With factors such as increased immigration and interracial unions propelling racial and ethnic diversity in the U.S., many have predicted that the nation will become “majority minority” in a few decades’ time. Yet, some researchers, such as former Visiting Scholar Richard Alba (CUNY Graduate Center), have argued that the U.S. is likely to remain majority-white as racial boundaries shift and more groups are incorporated into the mainstream. In other words, our idea of diversity today is contingent upon our society’s perception of who “counts” as white.

Perceptions of diversity also deeply inform how we view our environments at the individual level. Visiting Scholar Cara Wong (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is currently studying individuals’ ideas about the racial and ethnic diversity of their neighborhoods. Using a new map‐drawing measure of people’s “local communities” and multiple survey datasets, Wong and her colleagues are exploring how individuals’ perceptions of the racial makeup of their locales affect their intergroup attitudes.

In an interview with the Foundation, Wong explained how the social sciences have traditionally examined people’s neighborhoods, and discussed how further investigation of people’s perceptions of race and diversity can help provide new frameworks for more effective housing policies.

Q. Your current research examines the gap between people's "objective" neighborhood contexts and their perceptions of those contexts, focusing in particular on race and ethnicity. What kinds of problems do social scientists face when they attempt to analyze people's environments, and how does studying perceptions add a new dimension to research on racial inequality?

On Thursday, February 4, RSF president Sheldon Danziger, Visiting Scholar Ron Mincy (Columbia University), and RSF grantee Lawrence Mead (New York University) will join a number of other experts on a panel discussion hosted by the Ford Foundation and Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity. The panel will discuss findings from a report, “Opportunity, Responsibility, and Security,” which was released by the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute in December 2015.

The report outlines a comprehensive, non-partisan plan for addressing poverty and economic mobility and was authored by an interdisciplinary working group of researchers, including Danziger, Mincy, Mead, and a number of other RSF scholars and grantees. The report can be downloaded in full from both the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute.

The February 4 panel discussion will take place at the Ford Foundation from 9am-12pm EST and is free to the public. Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity will livestream the event from their site.