The CONSIRT Program has its roots in the series of seminars and meetings organized at the beginning of the 1990s by Professors J. Craig Jenkins, Edward Crenshaw, and Kazimierz M. Slomczynski under the Across Nation Project. The main purpose of this program was to guide graduate students in their research involving cross-national data. As a result of the seminars and meetings, graduate students prepared a set of articles that were included in three special issues of the International Journal of Sociology, IJS. Ten issues of IJS, including those that were prepared in collaboration between Polish and American colleagues were published in recent years.
In the early 1990s Goldie Shabad and Kazimierz M. Slomczynski began collaboration with colleagues from the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland on the project devoted to the politics of inequality. In 1992 Polish colleagues, Krystyna Janicka, Bogdan W. Mach i Wojciech Zaborowski, together with Melvin Kohn from the Johns Hopkins University, conducted a survey on psychological aspects of inequality in Poland, later extended to Ukraine. The OSU faculty members and graduate students participated in these studies, using the data for their independent research, dissertations, and MA thesis.
Since the early 1990s, over twenty graduate students from the Departments of Sociology and Political Science at The Ohio State University have visited the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, taking part in collaborative cross-national research. As a result of their participation, almost all these students have published journal articles and/or chapters in edited volumes, both prior to and after their entering the academic job market.
Some of the earliest participants have continued their study of Europe, the post communist transformation in particular. More recently, ten former or current OSU PhD graduates from Sociology and Political Science have contributed to the volume Continuity and Change in Social Life: Structural and Psychological Adjustment in Poland (2007, Warsaw: IFiS Publishers, an outlet of the Polish Academy of Sciences). The experiences of these students in visiting IFiS PAN go far beyond the technical aspects of research production: all obtained firsthand knowledge about people and culture at a level not possible if they would have not gone beyond the borders of an American university setting.
At times the collaboration between the DS OSU and IFiS PAN was extended to other institutions, the John Hopkins University, and University of Warsaw, in particular. Joint research efforts resulted in obtaining grants from the (US) National Science Foundation, the (US) National Council for Soviet and Eastern European Research, the American Council of Learned Societies, IREX, the Research Council of Norway, the (Polish) Committee for Scientific Research, and the (Polish) Ministry of Science and Higher Education. Some projects were also supported by the OSU Mershon Center for International Security Studies, the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the OSU College of Social and Behavioral Studies.
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