Two-day symposium to look closely at sex discrimination

Michael Sosin, the Emily Klein Gidwitz Professor in the School of Social Service Administration, has been named editor of The Social Service Review.

“The Social Service Review is one of the great assets of the school and the field of social work,” said Eddie Lawlor, Dean of the School of Social Service Administration, who appointed Sosin to the post. “We have had outstanding editors who ensure that the field has a true scholarly foundation. With recent editor John Schuerman and now Michael Sosin, we are fortunate to have the best of our faculty leading the Review.”

Sosin said he hopes to continue the Review’s strong emphasis on research while incorporating some new additions. “The Social Service Review has always been empirically oriented, emphasizing history, theory and events–that’s not going to change,” Sosin said. “However, I would like to bring back some features like brief reports on social service trends and increased book reviews. I’d also like to emphasize young scholars more.”

Since its inception in 1927, the quarterly Review has been interdisciplinary and devoted to examining policies and practices of the social services–a focus that is not so unusual now, but which would have been path-breaking at the time the publication debuted.

Sosin is the ninth editor of the Review, succeeding Schuerman who served for 12 years as editor. Sosin’s research focuses on homelessness, managed care and the interaction between individuals and social institutions. He is the author of Private Benefits: Material Assistance in the Private Sector and Last Resorts: Emergency Assistance and Special Needs Programs in Public Welfare as well as many articles on homelessness.

Evelyn Brodkin, Associate Professor in the School of Social Service Administration and Lecturer in the Law School, and Arjun Appadurai, the Samuel N. Harper Professor in Anthropology, are recipients of two individual fellowships from the Open Society Institute.

Brodkin, who received her fellowship this past summer, is writing a book that undertakes a reconsideration of work, its meaning and its reality for poor women subject to the requirements of welfare reform. She is analyzing how a new “public economy of work” is emerging from structural changes in the economy, politics, society and welfare law.

Appadurai received his fellowship in July 1997 toward work on a monograph that will help explain the recent ethnic conflict in Bombay, India. He seeks to demonstrate how large-scale forces can violently transform local structures, how stable identities can become volatile and neighbors can turn into killers. Appadurai presented some general results from his research at a luncheon discussion sponsored by the Open Society Institute at their New York office on Nov. 20.

The Open Society Institute is a private, grant-making foundation established by philanthropist George Soros.

The Individual Project Fellowship Program supports researchers in the United States and abroad whose work furthers the development of an open society, defined by Soros as one that relies on the rule of law, has a democratically elected government and a diverse and civil society, and respects minorities and minority opinions.