The Academy fulfills its charter in a variety of ways:

Annual Symposium. Each year the Fellows convene for a symposium on a topic of current debate. The Symposium is coupled with ASSA's prestigious Annual Cunningham Lecture. The Annual Symposium and the Cunningham Lecture are open to the public. From time to time the Academy sponsors additional symposia conceived by Fellows on particular issues.

Research Projects. The Academy initiates research projects involving social science scholars who collaborate on important topics through a competitive grant program.

Workshops. The Academy supports a number of workshops each year that provide opportunities for multidisciplinary scholarly approaches to issues pertinent to the social sciences.

Joint Academy Activities. Together with the other three learned Academies, ASSA forms the National Academies Forum (NAF) which promotes academic research and collaboration through research projects and matters of interest to scholars in all fields.

Academy Award for Scholarship. Each year an early career scholar, deemed to have made an outstanding contribution in one of the social sciences and who is not a Fellow of the Academy, is awarded a Certificate for Scholarship.

Relations with Government

The Academy of the Social Sciences engages with government and policy makers through its Policy and Advocacy Program's Roundtables and Occasional Paper series. ASSA provides assistance to Government through submissions to major reviews, and advises on matters of concern to the social sciences. Reports of activities and other publications are provided to Government bodies where appropriate, and Academy Fellows serve on numerous advisory committees on policy and research in the social sciences. The provision of social science based knowledge to assist policy formulation is an important objective of the Academy.

International Links

The Academy has a number of exchange agreements with similar institutions in other countries including France, India, the Netherlands, the People's Republic of China, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam. Two of these schemes (the UK and the Netherlands) function in association with the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

The Academy is the Australian member of the Association of Asian Social Science Research Councils (AASSREC), and is currently the Secretariat of that Association. The Academy has facilitated contact between the National Library and the Asia-Pacific Information Network in the Social Sciences, under the auspices of AASSREC. Links at both a formal and informal level are fostered and maintained with a variety of international bodies such as UNESCO and the Pacific Science Association.

Publications

The Academy has a long and active publishing record, including publications from research projects, the proceedings of Symposia and Workshops. The annual Cunningham Lecture is published each year, and the Academy also supports its Occasional Paper publications.

The Annual Report outlines the year's activities and provides information about Fellows. The Academy newsletter, Dialogue, appears three times a year, and provides a forum for the examination of aspects of social science scholarship and their applications in modern society. Each issue contains comment from the Academy's Executive, news of honours and appointments and progress reports on workshops, research projects, policy roundtables, international relations and other contemporary issues involving the social sciences. Both the Annual Report and the newsletters are widely distributed, and are available on request to any member of the public.