Dictionaries currently define “sex” as a biological category–connected to “reproductive organs and structures”–and “gender” as the “behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one […]

Background

Race is a social construct. The racial categories that are widely used today have histories; they were not recognized before the late Middle Ages. They are closely connected to the history of […]

Tufts’ Equity in America website allows you to choose demographic characteristics and social outcomes and see how they relate. By comparing such results, you can detect differences among groups and ask whether […]

Welcome to this week’s roundup of exciting opportunities!
Northeast

PHP Software Engineer, Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston, MA)
Assistant Director of Gallery Teaching and Collections Training, Museum of […]

Jürgen Habermas (1929-) is a German philosopher and sociologist, often seen as the leader of the intellectual movement called the “Frankfurt School” in its second generation, when he helped to shift it away from […]

A deliberative democracy is a system in which people discuss before they make decisions. In order for the system to be democratic, people must have reasonably equal power over decisions, which usually means that […]

Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012) was a political scientist at Indiana University and a leader of the intellectual movement informally known as the Bloomington School. She won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 and was […]

Lesson plans can be found all over the Internet for games that model the “Tragedy of the Commons” using goldfish crackers. This is a version used in the Introduction to Civic Studies course at Tufts. […]

To model a human interaction as a game means understanding it as a set of discrete choices made by independent parties that yield results for all (cf. Johnson 2020).

A game model does not presume that the […]

Elinor Ostrom and colleagues have found that communities are more likely to succeed at producing and protecting common pool resources if they employ the principles listed below (as phrased in Levine 2022, drawing […]

Concept

As stated on the Ostrom Workshop website:

The Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework was designed by Ostrom and her colleagues from the Ostrom Workshop in 2005 to facilitate analysis […]

The commons (sometimes more precisely known as “a common pool resource”) is a good or set of goods that is owned by a community, from a small group to the entire species. These goods can be highly tangible […]

The ISAIAH Trash Referendum by Peter Levine and Liz McKenna is a case study “about an organization in Minnesota called ISAIAH, a faith-based organization that works to expand the power and influence of people w […]

The Montgomery Bus Boycott by Peter Levine is a case study about “a classic example of a social movement episode that accomplished its immediate goals despite severe obstacles. It catapulted the 26-year-old Rev. […]

Building a Party with Activists: The Case of the Uruguayan FA by Verónica Pérez Bentancur, Fernando Rosenblatt and Rafael Piñeiro Rodriguez is a “case study is about the Frente Amplio (Broad Front, FA) in Uru […]

“The
Center for Popular Democracy’s Education Justice Campaign” is a case study
by Dmitri Holtzman, Ben Kirshner, and Tafadzwa Tivaringe. It “explores dilemmas
that arise for a network aiming to build a multige […]