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SOCIAL SCIENCES

Social sciences examine human behavior, social structures, and interactions in various settings. Fields such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, and economics study social relationships, cultural norms, and institutions. By using different research methods, social scientists seek to understand community dynamics, the effects of policies, and factors driving social change. This field is important for tackling current issues, guiding public discussions, and developing strategies for social progress and innovation.

Adult Online Hate, Harassment, and Abuse: A Rapid Evidence Assessment

By Julia Davidson, et al.

By Julia Davidson, et al.

The development of email and social media platforms has changed the way in which people interact with each other. The open sharing of personal data in public forums has resulted in online harassment in its many forms becoming increasingly problematic. The number of people having negative online experiences is increasing, with close to half of adult internet users reporting having seen hateful content online in the past year.

London: University of East London, 2019. 138p.

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Tackling Hate in the Homeland: US Radical Right Narratives and Counter-Narratives at a Time of Renewed Threat

By William Allchorn

Over the past few years, North America, particularly the US, has become a focal point for practitioners and researchers studying the radical right. Given the recent rise in white supremacist violence (see the green portion of Figure 1), policymakers are more aware of the urgency of the threat posed by radical right violent extremism, as reflected in a shift in priorities away from overwhelming focus upon religiously inspired extremism. For example, in September 2019, the US Department for Homeland Security (DHS) named white supremacist violent extremists as part of “an evolving domestic threat.” On 5 April 2020, the Russian Imperial Movement was listed as a ‘Specially Designated Global Terrorist’ group by the US State Department, the first time a white supremacist group was placed on this list. This shift in policy is compounded by the rise of transnational, digitally-anchored, radical right ‘accelerationist’ organisations founded and operating on behalf of an American constituency, such as Atomwaffen Division and the Base, with the leader of the latter apparently also based in Russia.

Abu Dhabi - United Arab Emirates:  Hedayah and Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, 2021. 66p.

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Hijacked by Hate: American Philanthropy and the Islamophobia Network

By The Council on American-Islamic Relations

Anti-Muslim bigotry is a common and widespread feature of our country’s mainstream cultural and political landscape. However, it is important to remember that Islamophobic attitudes and policies are propagated by special interest groups with deep sources of funding. This decentralized group of actors is known as the Islamophobia Network, a close-knit family of organizations and individuals that share an ideology of extreme anti-Muslim animus, and work with one another to negatively influence public opinion and government policy about Muslims and Islam.

To provide a better understanding of how the Islamophobia Network operates, CAIR’s Islamophobia report Hijacked by Hate maps the flow of funding from charitable organizations to anti-Muslim special interest groups, and their destructive impact on public life.

Hijacked by Hate finds that the Islamophobia Network has been drawing upon mainstream American philanthropic institutions for financial and political support for years. CAIR researchers have found 1,096 organizations responsible for funding 39 groups in the Islamophobia Network between 2014 and 2016. The report also reveals the total revenue capacity of the Islamophobia Network during this period to reach at least $1.5 billion. This money has been channeled into politics, media, law enforcement, educational institutions, lobbying groups, and a whole assortment of industries to advance anti-Muslim and anti-Islam animus in America.

Philadelphia: Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), 2019. 152p

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Hate Crime Victimization, 2005-2019

By Grace Kena and Alexandra Thompson

This report presents National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data on hate crime victimizations from 2005 to 2019. Hate crimes in the NCVS include violent and property crimes that the victim perceived to be motivated by bias against the victim's race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, disability, sexual orientation, or religion. It includes crimes reported and not reported to police. The report examines the number of hate crimes over time, characteristics of hate crimes, perceived bias motivations for these hate crimes, reporting to police and reasons hate crimes were not reported, and demographic characteristics of victims and offenders

Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2021. 24p.

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Islamophobia in Australia -- III: 2018-2019

By Derya Iner  

The third Islamophobia in Australia report has been sourced from Australia-based Islamophobic incidents reported to the Islamophobia Register Australia (IRA) by victims, proxies and witnesses during 2018 and 2019. The IRA is the first of its kind in Australia to provide a unique platform for Islamophobic incidents to be reported, recorded and analysed to produce research reports in collaboration with Charles Sturt University’s Centre for Islamic Studies and Civilisation (CISAC). Report Objectives The overarching aims of the Islamophobia research reports are to raise public awareness about the increasing and normalising of Islamophobia in the Australian context and inspire academics, policymakers and the public to take action in their respective roles and areas to counter Islamophobia for a better, socially inclusive Australia. Like all forms of hate, Islamophobia contributes to entrenching a hate culture in society, which upsets liberal democracies, civic rights and the Australian way of life that is symbolised with mateship and “fair go” understanding. Populist far-right groups also use Islamophobia as permitted hate (Poynting and Perry 2006) and a legitimised gateway to sow divisive ideologies, eventually affecting other minority groups and the spirit of democratic and equitable involvement for all.   

Bathurst Australia: Charles Sturt University, 2022. 160p.

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Profiting from Hate: Extremist Merchandise on Redbubble, Etsy, Teespring, Teerepublic and Zazzle

By Tim Squirrell and Clara Martiny

E-commerce sites have attracted controversy in isolated incidents for over a decade, being forced to delist merchandise highlighted by media for being egregiously insensitive or hateful. As a result, these merchandise platforms have for the most part developed relatively rigorous guidelines for what items can be sold on them.

ISD investigated five such platforms to determine to what extent these guidelines are being enforced, and whether merchandise platforms are facilitating the sale of, and profiting from, products that promote hate, extremism and harmful misinformation.

Etsy, Redbubble, Zazzle, Teespring and Teepublic each have revenues in the millions of dollars per year, providing infrastructure for independent creators and artists to sell their outputs. Etsy sells primarily handmade and vintage products, while the other four platforms are predominantly t-shirt stores, or ‘print-on-demand’, allowing buyers to choose materials (such as t-shirts, mugs, stickers, and posters) on which to print their chosen art.

In analyzing products sold across these platforms, ISD found a wide range of items promoting everything from harmful misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic, to antisemitism and anti-LGBTQ+ hate, to neo-Nazi narratives and symbols. While there is evidence that these platforms are in many cases removing the most egregious and obvious forms of bigotry, it is still extremely simple to find and purchase hateful products across the full range of these platforms.

Policy recommendations for e-commerce platforms are provided, including expanding keyword lists to include coded language and references, three-strike rules for vendors of borderline items, and restricting adverts and sponsorship on controversial search terms.

Amman: Berlin: London: Paris: Washington DC ; institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2022. 40p.

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Framework for Federal Scientific Integrity Policy and Practice

United States. White House Office

From the Executive Summary: "The 2021 Presidential Memorandum on Restoring Trust in Government Through Scientific Integrity and Evidence-Based Policymaking charges OSTP to (1) review agency scientific integrity policy effectiveness and (2) to develop a framework for regular assessment and iterative improvement of agency scientific integrity policies and practices (Framework). This document builds on the review published in January 2022 by the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) entitled 'Protecting the Integrity of Government Science', which identified good agency practices on scientific integrity and areas in need of consistency across agencies. This Framework includes key resources for agencies as they work to develop and improve scientific integrity policies, practices, and culture. The Framework reflects input from the interagency Scientific Integrity Task Force and other key Federal officials, and includes considerations from public input. [...] The goal of this Framework is to assist agencies across the Federal Government as they take next steps together to strengthen, implement, and institutionalize scientific integrity policy, practice, and culture. Figure 1 illustrates the process by which agencies can take to use the components of this Framework with the goal of making iterative improvements over time."

White House: www.whitehouse.gov/. 2023. 68p.

A History Of Sociological Analysis

Edited by Tom Bottomore & Robert Nisbet

From the cover: This landmark contribution to the history of social thought, edited by two of the world’s leading sociologists, contains spe­cially commissioned contributions by seventeen internationally renowned scholars. These authoritative essays provide the most comprehensive account of the development of sociological anal­ysis available. “It will undoubtedly become the standard reference on the sub­ject.” “Generally excellent... a valuable contribution [which] can be read with profit both by diverse specialists and by students with little familiarity with the history of social thought."

NY. Basic Books. 1978. 715p. THIS BOOK CONTAINS MARK-UP

Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of Myth

By Norman O. Brown

From the Preface: This study of the Greek god Hermes explores the hy­pothesis that the interrelation of Greek mythology and Greek history is much closer than has generally been recognized. Such a hypothesis seems almost inescap­able in the face of the radical transformation that the attributes and personality of Hermes underwent during the archaic period of Greek history. What I have sought to do here is to correlate these changes with the revo­lution in economic techniques, social organization, and modes of thought that took place in Athens between the Homeric age and the fifth century b.c. Such a cor­relation, I submit, casts new light on the mythology of Hermes, and especially on the Homeric Hymn to Hermes.

NY. Vintage. 1947. 1969. 183p.

Greek Mythology

By Sonia Soul. Art by Michael Lacinere. Translation by Philip Kamp.

From the introduction: “.Intellect is the gift of the human race, the greatest and most enduring of all. This is the means by which it perceives, exists, creates and evolves, No matter haw extensive knowledge is, it has its limits. Intellect thirsts for fulfillment, to ceaselessly push these limits outward. Thus, people in that far-off period wanted to learn for they felt powerless and vulnerable in a world without bounds. They were deeply concerned with the beginning and the end and all the supernatural forces that could not be mastered. Through intellect, humanity came to fashion its view of the world. Utilizing the raw information from its immediate surroundings, it cultivated knowledge and experience, while imagination filled in the rest. Mankind had need of "Myth" because that was his own personal truth. His path in this increased his certitude about the world he had created around himelf. This is how we have come to accept the myth. In its conventional sense, that is, a narration that informs us about an older order of the world and explains it. The content of Greek mythology is not a simple matter. There is a practically endless series of accounts from various periods, and derivations on which  an  enormous classificatory endeavor has been expended and that is only the beginning. ...”

Athens. Techni. 1998. 118p.

The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism

By F. A. Hayek.

Edited by W. W. Bartley Iii.. From the foreword: The reader who is struck by the pace and freshness of the argument of this new book, its vigorous application to specific cases, and its occasionally polemical thrust will want to know something of its background. In 1978, at the age of nearly eighty, and after a lifetime of doing battle with socialism in its many manifestations, Hayek wanted to have a showdown. He conceived of a grand formal debate, probably to be held in Paris, in which the leading theorists of socialism would face the leading intellectual advocates of the market order. They would address the question: ‘Was Socialism a Mistake?'. The advocates of the market order would argue that socialism was - and always had been - thoroughly mistaken on scientific and factual, even logical grounds, and that its repeated failures, in the many different practical applications of socialist ideas that this century has witnessed, were, on the whole, the direct outcome of these scientific errors.

London. Routledge. 1998. 186p.

The Evolution of Culture in Animals

By John Tyler Bonner. Original drawings by Margaret La Farge.

From the cover: “On the one hand, there is culture and on the other, biology; moreover, We (the people) have the former, and They (the animals) have the latter. Or so it is often said. Recently, however, the distinction has been blurred, as sociobi­ologists have become strikingly successful in interpreting complex animal social behavior in evolutionary (hence, biological) terms. Spurred by this success, several people have begun taking a new and controversial look at human culture, presupposing that it may also be strongly biological in some sense. In this simply written, brief yet elegant book, biologist Bonner looks in the other direction: he argues that many nonhuman animals experience culture, in one form or another.” —David P. Barash, The American Scientist

Princeton. Princeton University Press. 1990. 203p.

Eros And Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud

By Herbert Marcuse

Philosophical critiques of psychoanalysis have been rare. Almost all of those that have appeared hitherto have been either undisguised attacks or, equally evidently, defenses. This one takes psychoanalysis seriously but not as unchallengeable dogma. Eros and Civilization is a stirring book and a cheering (though in no sense naive) book. Except for Ernest Jones’ two notable books on Freud and his life, this strikes the reviewer as the most significant general treatment of psychoanalytic theory since Freud himself ceased publication.”—Clyde Kluckhohn in The New York Times

London. Beacon Press. 1966. 293p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

The Division of Labor In Society

By Emile Durkheim

Translated by George Simpson. From the Preface: The need for an English translation of Emile Durkheim’s De la division du travail social has long been felt. The first great work of a man who controlled French social thought for almost a quarter of a century and whose influence is now waxing rather than waning, it remains today, both from an historical and contextual standpoint, a book that must be read by all who profess some knowledge of social thought and some interest in social problems. First published in 1893 with the subtitle, Etude sur VOrganisation des Societes Superieures, and a dedica­tion “A Mon Cher Maitre, M. Emile Boutroux, Hommage respectueux et reconnaissatit,” it has gone through five editions, the last having been brought out in 1926, nine years after Durkheim’s death. The second edition appeared in 1902 with the now classic preface, Quelques Remarques sur les Groupements professionnels.The third edition appeared in 1907, the fourth in 1911.

In the second and subsequent editions Durkheim omitted many pages from the long introduction which he wrote for the first. I feel, however, that this introduction is fundamental to an understanding of Durkheim’s position and valuable in itself, besides being indispensable to an appreciation of a study which Durkheim had again turned to in his last years and which he considered his crowning work, the science of ethics. Conse­quently, I have appended it at the end of this volume. Nowhere else, except in the first French edition (now out of print), can this, Durkheim’s early development of the idea of a science of ethics, be found. Hence I consider it a great boon to sociological scholarship that I was enabled to have this first edition at my disposal, and present it to an English- speaking audience.

NY. The Free Press. 1964. 451p. THIS BOOK CONTAINS MARK-UP

A Dictionary Of Symbols

Byj. E. Cirlot

Translated from the Spanish by Jack Sage. Foreword by Herbert Read. Symbolism was an essential part of the ancient art of the Orient and of the medieval tradition in the West. It has been lately revived in the study of the unconscious, both directly in the field of dreams, visions and psycho-analysis, and indirectly in art and poetry. At the same time, the Gestalt theory of Kohler and Koffka, in pointing out the autonomy of ‘facts and expression’ and the parallel between the physical and the spiritual, has given renewed significance to the ancient principle of the Tabula smaragdina,‘What is above is what is below’. The basic aim of this work is to create a ‘cen­tre’ of general reference for sym- bological studies by clarifying the un­varying essential meaning of every symbol. The author uses the com­parative method, specifying the precise sources of information taken from a great number of widely vary­ing fields. This new edition of J.E. Cirlot’s book incorporates extensive revisions from the first edition of 1962.

NY. Philosophical Library, Inc. 1962. 497p.

Dictionary of Biology

Editorial director. Michael Upshall

From amino acids to zygotes, this book will give you a quick and easy reference to all life-science terms. Written for the general reader, this dictionary contains the essential facts about life-sciences, alphabetically arranged to put the facts at your fingertips.

Oxford. Helicon Publishing. Brockhampton Press. 1997. 228p.

Descent Of Man And Selection In Relation To Sex

By Charles Darwin

From the Introduction: “The nature of the following work will be best understood by a brief account of how it came to be written. During many years I collected notes on the origin or descent of man, without any intention of publishing on the subject, but rather with the determination not to publish, as I thought that I should thus only add to the prejudices against my views. It seemed to me sufficient to indicate, in the first edition of my 'Origin of Species that by this work light would be thrown on the origin of man and his history and this implies that man must be included with other organic beings in any general conclusion respecting his manner of appearanco on this earth. Now the case wears a wholly different aspect. When a naturalist like Carl Vogt ventures to say in his address as President of the National Institution of Geneva (1869),… it is manifest that at least a large number of naturalists must admit that species are the modified descendants of other species; and this especially holds good with the younger and rising naturalists. The greater number accept the agency of natural selection; though some urge, whether with justice the future must decide, that I have greatly overrated its importance. Of the older and honoured chiefs in natural science, many unfortunately are still opposed to evolution in overy form.:.”

London. John Murray 1901. 1062p.

Demonstration Democracy

By Amitai Etzioni

From the Preface: “Most Americans tend to view their society as well advanced, politically stable and not very violent, although sophisticated observers point out to Americans that violence is frequently present in this country. Presidential assassinations, lynchings, abuses of police powers, threats and violence against negroes and blacks, and the violence and shootings in the newly settled western territories in the 19th century and early 20th century all indicate that violence was and still is common in the United States. We will probably never be able to answer the question whether the United States is a violent country; such a simple, naive question is obviously unanswerable. It seems safe to say that different nations are characterized by more and less violence; there are some nations that exhibit more incidence of violence and others have less; placing the United States in its proper place along this continuum would be a costly and difficult piece of social research. Whatever is the answer to this question, it is clear that many Americans, both politicians and ordinary citizens, were deeply disturbed by the demonstrations and violence of the mid-to-late 1960’s. For many reasons Lyndon Johnson appointed the President’s National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence; the task of the Commis­sion was clear, to help us gain an understanding and to help us prevent the commission of violent acts.”

NY. Gordon and Breach, Science Publishers. 1970. 115p.

Culture And Anarchy

By Matthew Arnold. Edited by J. Dover Wilson

From the cover: Manifesting the special intelligence of a literary critic of original gifts, Culture and Anarchy is still a living classic. It is addressed to the flexible and the disinterested, to those who are not committed to the findings of their particular discipline, and it assumes in its reader a critical intelligence that will begin its work with the reader himself. Arnold employs a delicate and stringent irony in an examination of the society of his time: a rapidly expanding industrial society, just beginning to accustom itself to the changes in its institutions that the pace of its own development called for. Coming virtually at the end of the decade (1868) and immediately prior to W. E. Forster’s Education Act, Culture and Anarchy phrases with a particular cogency the problems that find their centre in the questions: what kind of life do we think individuals in mass societies should be assisted to lead? How may we best ensure that the quality of their living is not impoverished? Arnold applies himself to the detail of his time: to the case of Mr Smith ‘who feared he would come to poverty and be eternally lost’, to the Reform agitation, to the commercial values that working people were encouraged to respect, and to the limitations of even the best Rationalist intelligence. The degree of local reference is therefore high, but Professor Dover Wilson’s introduction and notes to this edition supply valuable assistance to a reader fresh to the period. And they are informed by the respect and perceptive affection that Professor Dover Wilson brings to the work of Matthew Arnold as a whole.

London. Cambridge University Press. 1963. 270p.

Consciousness and Society: The reorientation of European social thought 1890-1930.

By H. Stuart Hughes

From the Introduction: The present study is an essay in intellectual history.. But to declare that one is writing intellectual his­tory is really to say nothing until one has defined the term. History of this sort obviously deals with the thoughts and emotions of men—with reasoned argu­ment and with passionate outburst alike. The whole range of human expression—as revealed in writing, speech, practice, and tradition—falls within its orbit. Indeed every declaration of mankind more explicit than a bestial cry may in some sense be considered the sub­ject matter of intellectual history.

It might well be argued that this subject matter is not the deepest stuff of history. Below it (to use the work­able but deceptively concrete metaphor of the “high” and “low” when dealing with the human psyche) lies the realm of unorganized sentiments and routine eco­nomic processes. Marx called this realm the “sub­stratum.” For Marx the important thing to know about it was the character of the regime of production that inexorably conditioned human life: for the great social

NY. Vintage Books. Random House. 1958. 448p. THIS BOOK CONTAINS MARK-UP