As the Faculty of Social Sciences launches the School of Integrated Social Sciences (SISS) on 1st July, Acting Director Clifton van der Linden is thinking about both the opportunities ahead and the foundations that make them possible.
Bringing together Globalization, Public Policy and Social Psychology under one umbrella, the school aims to strengthen existing programs while creating new opportunities for collaboration, innovation and interdisciplinary engagement. We spoke with van der Linden about his background, his vision for SISS and what success might look like in the years ahead.
Tell us about your professional and academic background.
I received my doctorate in political science from the University of Toronto before joining the Faculty of Social Sciences at McMaster. I am broadly interested in the relationships between digital transformation and democratic participation. My research tends to centre around public opinion, psephology, and digital technologies. I am a computational social scientist by training and most of my work involves statistics, survey methods, and design science.
I am also a social entrepreneur, having founded and led multiple technology companies over the past 25 years ranging from nonprofit organizations to Silicon Valley-incubated, venture-backed start-ups. I currently serve as CEO of Vox Pop Labs, a social enterprise I founded in 2010. Vox Pop Labs operates a suite of civic engagement applications, including Vote Compass, which has been used by tens of millions of people in more than 100 elections and referenda worldwide, and also conducts public opinion research for governments, academics, and industry.
What excites you most about SISS?
What excites me most is that SISS is not simply bringing several programs under one administrative roof. It is an opportunity to build a new intellectual community within the faculty and the university more broadly.
My hope is that SISS will create new possibilities for collaboration across fields, methods, and forms of professional and public engagement. I am especially excited about the potential for shared courses, research initiatives, public programming, and experiential opportunities that might be difficult to develop within the boundaries of a single discipline. The School can be both a supportive home for its existing programs and a platform from which faculty, staff, and students can develop ideas that we have not yet imagined.
What role does this new school play in the Faculty of Social Sciences?
I see SISS as both a home and a catalyst.
First, it provides a stable administrative and intellectual home for successful interdisciplinary programs that previously operated independently. Bringing them together creates greater critical mass, visibility, and capacity for collaboration and growth.
At the same time, the School should serve the broader Faculty by acting as connective tissue across departments and programs. Interdisciplinarity should not be confined to SISS; the School should help enable it throughout the Faculty. That means partnering with existing academic units, supporting collaborative research and teaching, helping to incubate new programs and credentials, and creating additional points of connection with the rest of the University and with external communities.
How does the new school benefit the Faculty and our students?
For the Faculty, SISS creates a centre of gravity for interdisciplinary education and research. It allows us to share expertise and infrastructure, recruit scholars whose work crosses conventional boundaries, develop new academic offerings, and present a more open and accessible face to partners elsewhere in the University and beyond it.
For students, the most important benefit is a broader and more connected academic community. Students will continue to identify strongly with their individual programs, but they will also have opportunities to encounter different questions, methods, faculty members, and professional pathways. An undergraduate student in Social Psychology might discover an interest in globalization or public policy; a graduate student might find new methodological expertise, research collaborators, or opportunities for public and community engagement elsewhere in the School.
The objective is not to make the programs less distinctive. It is to preserve what makes each one exceptional while giving students access to opportunities that no stand-alone program could provide on its own.
How do you think about interdisciplinarity in the context of this School?
Interdisciplinarity is sometimes understood as simply placing several disciplines alongside one another. I think it requires something more deliberate.
It begins with respect for disciplinary knowledge. Disciplines give us theories, methods, standards of evidence, and accumulated bodies of expertise. Interdisciplinary work becomes valuable when a question or problem exceeds the explanatory reach of any one of those traditions and requires us to integrate different perspectives in a meaningful way.
For SISS, that means being problem-led, collaborative, and methodologically plural. It means creating spaces in which researchers and students can develop a common language without erasing their intellectual differences. It also means remaining porous: although the School is located in Social Sciences, many of the challenges we study will require partnerships with colleagues in Humanities, Science, Engineering, Business, Health Sciences, and other parts of the University.
Ultimately, interdisciplinarity is about bringing people and perspectives together in a way that produces insights, educational experiences, and public contributions that would not otherwise have been possible.
When you look ahead a few years, what would success for the School look like to you?
The first measure of success will be that the School’s founding programs are better off than they were as standalone programs. I expect that they will continue to offer excellent student experiences, maintain clear and distinctive identities, attract outstanding students and faculty, and have the support they need to grow and innovate.
Beyond that, I would like faculty, staff, and students to feel that they belong to a genuine intellectual community—not simply to programs that happen to share an administrative structure. We should see active research seminars and public events, collaborative projects, shared learning opportunities, and meaningful interaction among undergraduate and graduate students.
I would also hope to see carefully chosen new programs, certificates, minors, or other credentials emerging in response to important societal questions and student needs. New faculty recruitment could help build connections across the School’s areas of strength, while partnerships with governments, communities, non-profit organizations, and industry could extend the reach and relevance of our work.
Ultimately, success is a School that is more connected, inventive, and consequential—one known for preparing students to move confidently between theory, evidence, and practice, and for bringing diverse forms of expertise to bear on some of the most difficult challenges facing society.
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