Stanford University Press Blog

Myth-Busting the Achievement Gap

A sociologist dispels misconceptions about race and educational disparities.

CC-BY-2.0 via Wikipedia.

A number of assumptions swirl around the educational achievement gap between minority and non-minority students, assumptions that have ossified into what counts as conventional wisdom on the topic. When L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy began researching these educational disparities and the attendant social issues, he was interested in dispelling two persistent myths: first, that the achievement gap is a predominantly urban phenomenon; and second, that class, rather than race, is the decisive factor that holds particular groups of students back.

That Lewis-McCoy elected to locate his research in a suburban context will surprise those well-versed in achievement gap research, much of which is oriented toward urban spaces like Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles. Much less understood is how these disparities affect suburban schools, despite the increasing diversity of suburban neighborhoods. “It’s almost like there is a neat and discrete disconnect from the idea of people of color and suburban spaces,” says Lewis-McCoy.

The Mother of Invention

Do the pecuniary gains of intellectual property motivate innovation?

 

Incentivizing the “progress of science and the useful arts” has been the goal of intellectual property law since our constitutional beginnings, but artists, scientists, businesses, and the lawyers who serve them continue to debate the merits of IP law and to what extent it stimulates or stymies innovation and creativity. In her new book, Jessica Silbey, Professor of Law at Suffolk University, combs through hundreds of hours worth of interviews with creators, employers, and IP lawyers, to examine whether the statutes are serving their intended purpose. 

The following is an adapted excerpt from Jessica Silbey’s new book, The Eureka Myth: Creators, Innovators, and Everyday Intellectual Property.

Our Spring Catalog (As Told By A Matrix)

A quick visual guide to help you navigate our Spring 2015 offerings.

Spring 2015 is here, bringing with it dozens of new releases on wide-ranging topics, in myriad forms—including a novel that's launching a brand new imprint, a genre-bending book on Walter Benjamin, and a memoir of Armenian genocide. Seasoned web surfers can peruse all of our 2015 titles (including new paperbacks) online, but for a cliff notes version of the catalog, check out the Spring 2015 Matrix:

 

See all Spring 2015 titles »

New Year, New Website

Welcome to the new digs.

SUP's new website offers easy mobile browsing, among other new features.

Streamlined for browsing, optimized for mobile, and featuring a sleek new look, it is with unbridled excitement that we unveil our new website (take a look »). Over a year in the making, this redesign marks the first major overhaul of sup.org in ten years. Our site—which first debuted during the Mosaic era of the Internet—received its first proper redesign in 2005, and has throughout its decade-long tenure, remained more or less the spitting image of its 2005-self.

Needless to say, the past ten years have brought with them a legion of dramatic changes to the online ecosystem, not to mention evolutions in web style and graphic design. So, in 2013 we began reimagining our website. At the nuts and bolts level, we wanted a more robust site with new features that better served our users; aesthetically, we wanted to give the site a modern gloss and make navigation more intuitive and enjoyable.

Why Dr. King Opposed the Atomic Bomb

On the intersections of civil rights, anticolonialism, and nuclear disarmament.

by VINCENT J. INTONDI

Dr. King with President Lyndon Johnson in 1966. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

On February 6, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stepped up to the pulpit to warn against the use of nuclear weapons. Addressing the second mobilization of the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, King urged an end to the war, and warned that if the United States used nuclear weapons in Vietnam the earth would be transformed into an inferno that “even the mind of Dante could not envision.” Then, as he had done so many times before, King made clear the connection between the black freedom struggle in America and the need for nuclear disarmament:

These two issues are tied together in many, many ways. It is a wonderful thing to work to integrate lunch counters, public accommodations, and schools. But it would be rather absurd to work to get schools and lunch counters integrated and not be concerned with the survival of a world in which to integrate.

The Digital Pilot

The author of our first DH publication speaks to the merits of born-digital scholarship.

by NICHOLAS BAUCH

Nicholas Bauch's born-digital monograph, Enchanting the Desert, combines written research, photography, and spatial mapping to explore the Grand Canyon, and will be SUP's first digital humanities publication. 

Stanford University Press’s digital publishing initiative will revolutionize how humanities scholars work in web-based media. I make this bold and hopeful statement as the pilot author in the initiative, and therefore from the perspective of a practicing digital humanist. The term digital publishing conjures a variety of possibilities, the most familiar being blogs, electronic books, wikis, or online newspapers and journals. For the past two decades libraries and presses all over—including SUP—have undergone massive restructuring to accommodate these new media. When I reference SUP’s digital publishing initiative as revolutionary, therefore, I am not talking about any of these familiar formats. Scholars engaged in what has become known as the Digital Humanities (DH)—encompassing disciplines as wide-ranging as Literature, History, Cultural Studies, and Geography—have developed a track record of serious engagement with digital media to both formulate new disciplinary questions and to express new theses in compelling ways.

Taking Digital Scholarship to the Presses

Director Alan Harvey speaks to the Press’s new digital publishing initiative.

by ALAN HARVEY

"The Future of Books." Image by Kyle Bean. CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 via kylebean.co.uk.

About a year ago I, along with Editor-in-Chief, Kate Wahl, and Stanford University Librarian, Mike Keller, began a series of round-table meetings with key Stanford faculty to discuss their impressions of scholarly publishing and to field recommendations for the Press’s future development. The theme of born-digital research quickly surged to the center of these discussions, and it soon became clear that some scholars were heading in directions that were beyond the scope of traditional academic publishing models.

What became evident from our conversations was that an entirely new digital publishing product was needed.

What became evident from our conversations was that an entirely new digital publishing product was needed; one that elevated digital-born projects to the same level of academic credibility as the traditional monograph. In this void, both publishers and academics were missing out on crucial opportunities for collaboration.

These conversations spun into a year-long dialog with faculty, authors and advisors—a dialog that has culminated in a new mandate for us at SUP: to create a system for the formal publication of peer-reviewed digital humanities and social science projects. This brave, new digital initiative, generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Scholarly Communications Program, will work in cooperation with Stanford Libraries, and Ed Ayers, president of the University of Richmond, whose Digital Scholarship Lab will be a vital collaborator.

Thinking Along Digital Lines

Announcing a new publishing program for the digital humanities and social sciences.

The digital humanities uses new digital tools to explore age-old humanist questions.

The nascent fields of digital humanities and computational social sciences have ballooned in recent years. Emergent technologies (and scholars’ increasing fluency with these technologies) are providing academics with new ways to visualize, analyze, and package data. The Mellon Foundation—an active champion of these budding approaches—has seeded programs and initiatives at a number of universities with grants geared toward exploring new platforms, and encouraging specialists to think along digital lines while researching, writing, and conceptualizing how best to present their arguments and findings.

Through this endeavor, SUP hopes to facilitate the work of digital humanists and computational social scientists.

Owing in no small part to the Mellon’s support, the digital humanities and computational social sciences are a growth industry in academia, yet for many academics the prospect of pursuing digital projects may present a significant opportunity cost. Whereas journal and monograph publishing both have established ecosystems of peer review and accreditation—making them key benchmarks in the careers of scholars—there are no formal channels for “publication” or consistent “peer review” standards analogous to article and monograph publishing for digital projects.

At SUP, we want to change that.