SHASS News

Living Climate Futures Symposium brings together humanities, sciences, and institutions to strengthen both social justice movements and research.

When MIT mechanical engineering Professor Kripa Varanasi landed in New Delhi in the middle of the night in June 2024 to attend a conference, he found himself in 104-degree Fahrenheit heat.  “This was June, and it was crazy. It was so hot for the whole meeting that I never left the hotel,” with daytime temperatures […]

In “The Acquisition of Relativization,” MIT linguist Suzanne Flynn and other researchers investigate how children from different cultures develop language skills.

On April 30, the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing’s Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) initiative hosted a full-day research symposium examining how artificial intelligence is shaping the world and its implications for society.  The symposium included research talks by SERC’s latest seed grant recipients on topics such as air pollution forecasting and responsible computer vision deployment, panels on AI […]

When Sonya Atalay conducted her doctoral research, she studied pottery in Çatalhöyük, a remarkable ancient site in Turkey. It’s one of the world’s earliest known urban settlements, flourishing by at least 7000 B.C.E. Yet even as Atalay was conducting field research and writing her doctoral thesis, she was scrutinizing standard archaeological practices, believing the discipline to […]