CARTSS-Center to Advance Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences

CARTSS supports social science research and teaching initiatives on the CU campus. This includes interdisciplinary projects involving faculty from different social sciences and other fields as well as discipline-based work. Seeking innovative ways to integrate faculty research with undergraduate and graduate teaching is a particular priority for CARTSS.

The events of the past few years make it increasingly clear that the benefits of socially-relevant social science research need to be better articulated and more widely shared. CARTSS provides an infrastructure for bringing together the talents and assets already available in social science departments across campus. CARTSS also encourages a larger public constituency—“the university without walls”— to contribute to and draw on the university’s expertise in addressing significant problems of the day.

All too often, the traditional organization of the social science disciplines isolates scholars within departments and limits their ability to address complex contemporary issues. CARTSS started up in 2001 as an initiative of the Provost and the College of Arts & Sciences: CARTSS acts as an incubator for interdisciplinary projects for research and teaching in the social sciences.

CARTSS offers a thin but resilient infrastructure for collaborative research: there are no permanent faculty appointments, modest staff support, and a flexible administrative structure of working committees. CARTSS is methodologically and theoretically inclusive, with participation defined by common research and teaching interests, not by administrative or disciplinary boundaries.

CARTSS also puts a priority on linking social science research with contemporary issues in order to develop knowledge that proves useful to citizens of Colorado, the United States, and the global community. It does so by mobilizing existing resources and talent and bringing in additional external resources. Those additional resources are reinvested in College, departmental, and faculty/student initiatives: while CARTSS is multi-disciplinary, it is designed to build on and contribute to departmental strengths by providing centralized support for departmentally-grounded efforts. With CARTSS, the CU campus gains a more coherent voice and institutional venue for the social science research and teaching already occurring on campus as well as additional opportunities for expanding those activities.