The Center for Social Science Scholarship (CS3) is proud to share that Dr. Eric Stokan, Director of CS3 and Associate Professor of Political Science, has been awarded the prestigious Elkins Professorship.

This honor recognizes Dr. Stokan’s innovative work at the intersection of public administration, computational methods, and applied social science. Support from the Elkins Professorship will advance the development of an open-source forthcoming book that aims to bridge cutting-edge computational tools with core questions in public management, public policy, and local governance.

Furthermore, the award will enable the creation of new training modules in computational social science and Large Language Models (LLMs), to be offered through CS3 to the UMBC community and beyond. These modules will expand opportunities for faculty, students, and community partners to gain hands-on experience with methods that are rapidly transforming research, teaching, and practice in the social sciences. Look for forthcoming details about these sessions at socialscience.umbc.edu.

We look forward to supporting this important work and to sharing these resources with the broader UMBC community and beyond. Congratulations to Dr. Stokan on this achievement!

September 3 | 12-1pm | University Center, 310

Dr. Jennifer Mata-McMahon, Professor, UMBC Dept. of Education

All members of the department, partners/collaborators, and students/faculty from other departments and institutions are invited to attend.  Lunch will be provided by the department.  Register here.  

See the attached flyer for a list of future sessions this semester.

The Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) graduate program; Language, Literacy, and Culture (LLC) doctoral program; and the Center for Social Science Scholarship (CS3) present a Research Methodology Talk

Q Methodology: Mapping Shared Viewpoints

Adrian Lundberg 

Malmö University, Sweden

September 9, 2025 | 3:00-4:00pm | Public Policy Building 451 | UMBC Main Campus

Campus Map

 In this talk, I introduce Q methodology as a flexible approach for studying people’s viewpoints. Q combines a structured data-collection technique (Q sorting), by-person factor analysis, and a conceptual framework to enable a systematic study of subjectivity. It fits complex and contested questions across disciplines and supports theory building, stakeholder mapping, and policy or design decisions. For doctoral projects, Q bridges qualitative and quantitative traditions, producing defensible, interpretable typologies of shared views with consensus and distinguishing statements. It works well alongside interviews for depth and follow-up surveys for prevalence, yielding actionable narratives grounded in participants’ own reasoning.

 Please RSVP by completing this form by 8 September:

María Célleri, Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies, will serve as our Acting Associate Director for the Fall 2025 semester.

“I’m delighted to join the Dresher Center as Interim Associate Director this semester. In a moment when the value of the humanities is being questioned in many spaces, I’m proud to support the Center’s work championing humanistic inquiry, creativity, and critical thinking. I'm most excited to continue the important work Earl Brooks has begun with Humanities Retrievers, assisting in planning scholarly and professional development programs for our humanities undergrads! Fall 2025, here we go.”