Center Research
A Place for Different Disciplines to Connect
The last decade has seen a welcome growth of interdisciplinary centers intended to mobilize scholars around common areas of topical interest. The result of a double partnership, the PACS Center is administratively based at the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences and physically housed at the Haas Center for Public Service. The PACS Center goal is not to build a separate field of study, but to draw on current research by Stanford faculty, PhD students, and advanced undergraduates on civil society and the public sphere and to infuse these topics into the core disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, while building on expertise located in the professional schools.
A Platform for New Research
The PACS Center is pursuing a host of urgent issues with a combination of conceptual analysis and empirical research. Questions being addressed by the Center's community of faculty and PhD fellows include:
- The impact of new technologies on work and organizational culture;
- Philanthropy and educational entrepreneurship;
- The importance of NGOs in the delivery of water and sanitation service to the poor;
- The effects of political institutions on land rights, taxation, and public schooling;
- The interaction of environmental grantmaking and environmental social movement organizations; and
- Ways in which school teaching is shaped by organizational policy and social-cultural conditions of communities and schools.
Student Testimonial
PACS Undergraduate Lauren Finzer '09 speaks about the influential role PACS had on her Stanford academic career and how PACS is creating the next generation of philanthropic change agents.
PIPE Conference
PACS recently hosted a research conference to launch the project on Private Initiatives in Public Education (PIPE) that brought together leading scholars and practitioners who are working on projects related to emerging trends and cross-sector innovations in public education. Specifically, the conference explored the following themes:
1) The influence of philanthropic and private intermediary organizations in education;
2) Models of organizing diverse providers (charters and district schools) of public education;
3) Innovations in the development of human capital for education;
4) Entrepreneurship in the era of Obama.
The conference also set out to establish an agenda for future research in these areas.
