Virtual Events

[51] November 13, 2024 at 2:30 (Eastern)

Meeting to discuss the launch of the Johns Hopkins Center on Global Poverty

[50] November 8, 2024 at 3:00-4:00 (Eastern)

Virtual Coffee Hour with Michael O. Johnston, Assistant Professor, William Penn University

"It's a Block Party: the Use of Design and Narrative as a Way to Create Destination Neighborhoods"

In urban sociology, the city is conceptualized as a ‘superorganism’. Cities of all sizes rely on the multiple interworking parts that are necessary for them to operate seamlessly. The early city was limited to only a few plans and designs. There is an endless supply of plans and designs today. The focus of the research for this PSS Coffee Hour is about the use of design and narrative by new housing developments as a way to steer buyers into particular neighborhood. This study focuses on 11 housing developments that are in or near a small Midwest town. Bourdieu (2018) describes the risk associated with the social creation of physical space as not being who is let in but instead who is kept out. During the discussion, we will discuss the social problem of using narrative (storytelling) to shape physical spaces. We will also discuss practical solutions for making physical spaces more accessible.

[49] October 18-20, 2024 at Johns Hopkins University

10th Annual Sociology of Development Conference, "Solving Global Poverty," 

(The recordings of the plenary sessions are available at the following links.)

1. Oct. 18 11:15am, Opening plenary, "Is there a sociological approach to global poverty?"

2. Oct. 18 3:30pm, Keynote plenary. 

3. Oct. 19 9:30am, Regular session, "Reducing Inequalities through Grass-roots Activism."

4. Oct. 19 11:15am, Practitioners' Plenary Session, "How Development Practitioners Use Research." 

5. Oct. 19 3:15pm, Practitioners' Plenary Session, "Using Qualitative Methods to Increase the Utility of Research for Practitioners."

[48] October 4, 2024 at 3:00-4:00 (Eastern)

Virtual Coffee Hour with Jose Eos Trinidad, Assistant Professor, University of California Berkeley

"Creating A Civic Ecosystem in Education: A Developing Country Case"

The emergence of civic organizations has often been examined with the creation of individual organizations rather than the broader process of field formation. This study explores the intentional development of a civic ecosystem in a developing country, particularly focused on education. Using the case of an education nonprofit whose various alumni initiated more than twelve other nonprofits and social enterprises, the paper builds a theory for the dynamics of creating and sustaining a civic ecosystem. It includes processes for establishing legitimacy, creating professional structures, adapting organizational missions, and defining niches. To establish legitimacy, organizations justify their existence by highlighting their agility, stability, innovation, and focus on peripheral concerns not addressed by government bureaucracies. To create professional structures, the parent organization provides structures and opportunities to test new ventures. However, many organizations adapted missions and programs due to external constraints like government policies and funding instabilities. Finally, established organizations solidify their niches while emergent organizations carve out new niches to navigate potential crowding of the field.

[47] August 12, 2024 at 10:00 to 11:00am (Eastern) @ Palais des Congrès de Montréal, Floor: Level 5, 511A

Decision-Making, Social Networks, and Society Section's Invited Session at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association

"Coordination Problems, Unintended Consequences, and Solving Social Problems" (only available to meeting registrants)

This session includes papers and remarks that consider, present, or evaluate how the frameworks or methods traditionally employed in social network research, rational choice theory, and analytical sociology can be used to address and potentially resolve existing social problems. Many of the problems we face as a society, such as climate change, police reform, municipal corruption, educational reform, discrimination can be characterized as thorny problems that are difficult to address. This panel considers whether the frameworks of social coordination and unintended consequences – or others – can be mobilized to more effectively address these difficult issues.

• Session organizers: Emily Erikson

• Presider: Eric Martin Feltham

• Panelists: Mario Luis Small, Monica Prasad, Anthony Paik, Byungkyu Lee, Arnout van de Rijt

[46] August 10, 2024 at 6:00 to 9:00pm (Eastern)

Theory and Social Inquiry Launch Party

Rooftop Terrace, Intercontinental Hotel, 360 Rue Saint-Antoine O, Montréal

(Free drinks for graduate students!)

The former Senior Editors of Theory and Society cordially invite you to a Launch Party at ASA for our new journal, Theory and Social Inquiry.  For background on the new journal, please see here. 

[45] August 10, 2024 at 4:00 to 5:30pm (Eastern) @ Palais des Congrès de Montréal, Floor: Level 5, 511D

Theory Section's Session at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association

"Theory and The World’s Problems: Perspectives on Using Sociology to Create Change" (only available to meeting registrants)

From the beginning of our discipline, many sociologists, including Marx, Addams, and DuBois, have theorized the world in order to change it. New generations of sociologists are looking back to these examples and proposing new paths forward for bringing sociological theorizing to bear on the world’s problems. This panel will examine the theoretical foundations of these various approaches, as well the successes and failures of their efforts to address real problems such as urban development and climate change. What blind spots remain in our theorizing, and what critical problems have been undertheorized within our discipline? What is the role of theory at the intersection of sociology and social change, and how can engagement with the world's problems change theory?

• Session organizers: Margaret Frye and Monica Prasad

• Presider: Luna Vincent

• Presentations

  • From Urban Renewal to Repair: Examining Reparative Development in Black Los Angeles - Demetrius Miles Murphy

  • Functionalist Foundations for Problem-solving Sociologists - Andres Castro Araujo

  • Mobilizing Materialisms: New and Old Conception of the World and How to Change it - Jason Augustus Miller, Dawei Chen, and Mark Shakespear

  • Motivating Youth to Engage in Sustainable Behaviors and Consumption Patterns - Catherine M. High, and Li-Ling M Ahtime

  • The Teaching Assistant: Joining Wright’s Class Analysis to Real Utopias - Michael Burawoy, Justin Matthew Germain, and Natalie Pasquinelli

  • Women’s Suffrage in the Periphery: Women as Collective Theorizers of Global Historical Knowledge - Juno Topias Korhonen

[44] Friday, May 3, 2024 at 3:00–4:00 pm (Eastern) 

Virtual Coffee Hour with Neil Gong, Assistant Professor, University of California San Diego, and Alex Barnard, Assistant Professor, New York University 

"Fixing Public Psychiatric Care"

Since the mid 20th century closing of its state psychiatric hospitals, the US has seen successive crises of patient neglect, homelessness, and incarceration. Some suggest a simple need to fund the underdeveloped community-care system, whereas others blame patient civil liberties and issue a call to "bring back the asylum." At stake are theoretical questions about the nature of psychiatric power and the welfare state, on the one hand, and practical questions about care delivery, design, and procedure, on the other. In this discussion we will examine how practical problem solving efforts might inform theory, and vice versa. 

[43] Friday, April 12, 2024 at 3:00–4:00 pm (Eastern) 

Virtual Coffee Hour with Jasmine Sausedo, Michelle Naffziger-Hirsch, and Monica Prasad 

"Power and Attunement: Community Colleges and Socio-Economic Mobility"

Community colleges serve nearly one third of the country’s undergraduates, and can help to address the crisis of college affordability in America.  But entering a community college rather than a four-year institution significantly reduces the chances of attaining a bachelor’s degree.  Recent research has argued this is because four-year institutions are reluctant to allow community college students to transfer.  Why are they reluctant?  We answer this question based on 139 interviews with students and administrators, and through a reformulation of the theory of strategic action fields.  Although existing scholarship stresses that fields are sites of power and contestation, we argue that the most important aspect of social fields is that they are also the context in which social cooperation can occur.  In particular, we draw attention to the idea of social "attunement," a less developed part of field theory that, we show, explains universities' reluctance better than the alternative, and also shows how to overcome it.  Understanding field theory in this way leads to specific practical implications, and also gives us a specifically sociological approach to problems of socio-economic mobility.

[42] Friday, March 29, 2024 at 3:00–4:30 pm (Eastern) 

The Second Annual Solving Climate Change Panel with Jason Beckfield, Ankit Bhardwaj, Taylor Braswell, Benjamin Bradlow, and Raka Sen

Panel organizer and presider: Joshua Basseches

JASON BECKFIELD at Harvard will discuss how sociological ideas and tools can reveal and support the social mechanisms of energy transition, drawing on his study of the US Gulf Coast.

ANKIT BHARDWAJ at New York University will argue that emphasizing near-term emissions reduction, rather than long-term plans, better addresses climate justice.

TAYLOR HARRIS BRASWELL at the University of California, Santa Cruz will argue that democratizing the electric grid involves understanding how urban growth politics shape conflict between electric utilities in U.S. states.

BENJAMIN BRADLOW at Princeton University will be arguing that post-World War II experiences of developmental “catch-up” make it possible to theorize and make policy for how we get from one energy basis of economic life to another — that is, the sociological problem of climate change.

RAKA SEN at the University of Pennsylvania will argue that emphasizing the everyday labor of adapting to climate change unearths new mechanisms of social change that are emerging in response to the climate crisis. 

[41] Friday, March 15, 2024 at 3:00–4:00 pm (Eastern) 

Virtual Coffee Hour with Xuemei Cao, Assistant Professor, Bentley University 

"Assigning (un)Deservingness: How Do Aging Services Shape Older Immigrants’ Access to Formal Support"

Older immigrants make up an increasingly larger share of the overall aging population in the United States. By 2050, about one in five US older adults is estimated to be foreign-born, and many will face barriers in navigating the highly complex US healthcare and eldercare systems. Drawing on in-depth interviews with aging service workers and older Chinese immigrant elders in the New England region and some ethnographic observations at aging service organizations and community spaces, I will show that aging service organizations and professional caregivers can improve immigrant elders’ quality of life by initiating assessments and services under state mandates, market competitions, and professional norms. However, aging professionals also exercise discretion based on the tacit judgment of each elder’s deservingness. Those who are medically ill, who are compliant and passive care recipients, and who are perceived as assimilated are constructed as more deserving and thus have better access to formal services. In this talk, I will also reveal how a biomedical framing of aging and an assimilationist framing of immigration constrain immigrant elders’ access to non-medical support that they truly need to age with dignity, belonging, and joy. Government regulations and professional training should tackle the unspoken expectations of immigrant deservingness to better care for the rising older immigrant population.

[40] Friday, March 1, 2024 at 3:00–4:00 pm (Eastern) 

Virtual Coffee Hour with Jensen Sass and John Braithwaite, RegNet, Australian National University 

"Leveraged Decommodification: Tempering Domination in Academic Publishing" 

The central idea we explore began as a blog comment written during the recent controversy surrounding The Journal of Political Philosophy, a journal founded and edited for thirty odd years by our colleague and friend Bob Goodin. The Problem-Solving Sociology Coffee Hour seemed the perfect venue to share our blue sky thinking on this topic. We briefly describe some problems confronting academic publishing and efforts to challenge its commercial domination. We then set out a strategy that aims to decommodify academic publishing and expand the global knowledge commons.

[39] Friday, January 26, 2024 at 3:00–4:00 pm (Eastern) 

Virtual Coffee Hour with Catherine van de Ruit, Associate Professor of Sociology, Ursinus College 

"Public-private partnerships and health disparity in South African HIV/AIDS care: A call to action"

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are now ubiquitous in global health governance, and yet their performance in containing the  global COVID-19 pandemic points to widespread deficiencies in this governing model. This paper is part of a larger book project Outsourcing Obligation: the Organization of South African AIDS care. The book considers how governance by partnership to eliminate HIV/AIDS shifts health service delivery from the sole responsibility of the public sector to a mix of public and private agencies. South Africa is a compelling case to examine PPPs as it runs the worlds largest national HIV/AIDS antiretroviral therapy program managed by a combination of public and private agencies. However, in keeping with other countries in both the Global North and South this program has seen mixed outcomes. Patient HIV testing rates are commendable, but drug adherence and rates of viral suppression are low. Outsourcing obligation, drawing on archival and ethnographic evidence, critically examines the structural factors that contribute to unsatisfactory patient outcomes. This paper and penultimate book chapter steps away from South Africa to contrast to countries that have accomplished impressive patient adherence to antiretroviral therapy and concomitant HIV viral suppression. Modifications made to the outsourcing model will be reviewed and their applicability to the South Africa context analyzed.

[38] Friday, November 3, 2023 at 3:00–4:00 pm (Eastern)

Virtual Coffee Hour with Adam D. Reich, Associate Professor of Sociology, Columbia University

"Can social science help rebuild the labor movement?" 

Scholars concerned about the future of the labor movement often wonder how our research might benefit the workers and organizations on behalf of which we advocate. Strong labor organizations are necessary for the passage of labor-friendly policies in the political realm and necessary to channeling any moments of worker militancy into durable political power for workers. Yet, our social science scholarship typically takes one of two forms: research aimed at policymakers in support of policies that might strengthen the hand of labor, but which are unlikely to get passed in the current political environment; or broader paeans about the importance of labor unions and labor militancy, reaching those already mostly likely to agree. Here, I discuss the work of Columbia's Labor Lab, in which we are oriented towards a different way for our scholarship to be of use: using modern quantitative social science to strengthen existing labor organizations.  

[37] Friday, October 6, 2023 at 3:00–4:00 pm (Eastern)

Virtual Book Forum with Neil Gross, Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology, Colby College

Book: Walk the Walk: How Three Police Chiefs Defied the Odds and Changed Cop Culture

Discussant: Laura Doering (University of Toronto)

[36] August 18, 2023 at 8:00-9:30 am (Eastern)

Thematic Session at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association 

"Solving Problems That Have Never Been Solved" (access through the ASA Virtual Annual Meeting Portal; only available to meeting registrants)

Sociologists often compare successful cases to unsuccessful cases to identify solutions to problems. But what happens when there are no successful cases? How can we think rigorously about theory, methods, and evidence in this situation? Papers consider how activists in the past imagined solutions to problems that had never been solved; how scholars gather and evaluate evidence for things that do not exist; how we can break problems down into parts or analogize them to other problems; and how new technologies could be deployed to solve previously unsolvable problems. Papers also give ideas for solving currently unsolved problems, including racism and climate change.

• Session organizer: Monica Prasad

• Presider: Michelle Jackson

• Panelists: 

  • The problem of climate change and the analogy of development - Benjamin Bradlow 

  • Reducing Inequality in America - Thomas A. DiPrete, Brittany Nicole Fox-Williams 

  • Solving problems that have never been solved by working together in new ways - Matthew J. Salganik

  • Moving Past the Digital Smokescreen: How to Harness Big Data to Solve Social Welfare Problems - Erik Schneiderhan, Martin Lukk

  • How to Solve "The Race Problem": Lessons on Organizing on the Colorline from Black Americans at the Turn of the 20th Century - Luna Vincent 

[35] May 26, 2023 at 2:00-3:00 pm (Central) 

Virtual Coffee Hour with Gabriel Suchodolski, Ph.D. student the University of California, Los Angeles

"How Can We Save the Amazon (and the World)? The Politics and Policy for and Against Deforestation"

Amazonian deforestation is a central question for global climate security and international development. Human-led deforestation could produce climate catastrophe—a biome switch from tropical forest to savannah, widespread extinctions, massive hydrological changes, droughts in the Southern Cone, impact on global atmospheric dynamics, and colossal CO2 emissions. Since the 1970s, massive deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon has been caused by two main factors: (i) regional and rural development policies and (ii) an open frontier economy. Command and control policies reduced deforestation by 80% between 2004 and 2012, starting under the first Lula government (2003-2010). Nonetheless, deforestation regrew since 2013, exploded under Jair Bolsonaro’s government (2019-2022), and remained high in 2023 under Lula’s newly sworn-in and pro-environment government. How can we eliminate large-scale Amazonian deforestation? This paper compares three periods of deforestation rates—high, declining, and rising—to analyze factors. Policy shocks cannot fully explain the outcome. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Amazonia between 2012 and 2022, this paper shows the social and political micro-foundations and mechanisms that promoted deforestation over time. I show that Amazonian rural communities living in precarious economic and institutional conditions experienced environmental policies as punitive and resorted to clientelism. Predatory elites mobilize people into pro-deforestation structures—directly through capital and labor and indirectly through clientelism and coercion. These findings suggest anti-deforestation policies should seriously engage questions of income, inequality, public service provision, and civil society organization—i.e., a Green New Deal for Amazonia.

[34] May 5, 2023 at 2:00-3:00 pm (Central) 

Virtual Coffee Hour with Aliza Luft, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles

"The Moral Career of the Genocide Perpetrator: Dehumanization as Consequence, Not Cause, of Violence"

This talk is about dehumanization and how people shift their judgments of violent actions from morally bad to morally neutral by shifting their judgments of victims. Crucially, however, and through qualitative analysis of interviews with Hutu who participated in the Rwandan genocide, I find that dehumanization did not cause Hutu to harm Tutsi but rather emerged because of ongoing participation in violence. This finding challenges existing research and common assumptions that dehumanization is necessary for people to kill. Rather, it suggests that people can act in ways that counter their moral values, including actions that are violent, but through ongoing participation in such actions, their values can change. Moreover, one mechanism that facilitates such change is a change in judgments of victims. Judgments of actions and judgments of people go hand-in-hand.

[33] April 21, 2023 at 2:00-3:00 pm (Central) 

Virtual Coffee Hour with Myungji Yang, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa

"Angry Young Korean Men? Anti-Feminist Politics in an Age of Polarization"

Existing scholarship on anti-gender and anti-feminist politics is predominantly Western-centric, with analyses often limited to European and US cases. While feminist scholars have studied misogyny and anti-feminism in extremist online spaces in the South Korean context, few studies have focused on how anti-feminist attitudes have been normalized among ordinary young men. Why do young Korean men in their twenties believe so strongly that they are the victims of gender inequality and feminism is a female supremacy movement? I argue that young men’s frustration, anger, and anxiety about competitive and limited opportunity structures and what they believe to be a corrupt and unfair “establishment” have been translated into anti-feminist opinions. My analysis will deepen understanding of the roots of anti-feminist attitudes among young men and the processes by which anti-feminism is mobilized and propagated in South Korean society. 

[32] March 17, 2023 at 2:00-3:00 pm (Central) 

Virtual Coffee Hour with David Joseph-Goteiner, Doctoral Student at the University of California, Berkeley.

"Are Digital Labor Platforms Creating Dependent Workers through Their Payment Systems?" 

Some scholars suggest that those who are most dependent on platforms are structurally those who are most reliant on the platform to meet basic needs. Others suggest dependence is driven by psychological dynamics of the game that is being played, notably through algorithmic control and piece rate pay. Both explanations assume that the qualities of the payment system matter, but the idea that platform pay might differ in its meaning from salaried pay hasn't been explored fully. What are the qualities that make platform pay distinctive, and attractive, to workers? My paper hypothesizes that platform money is more easily earmarked in its structure of delivery, but also in its reception, and therefore can become more meaningful than the more mainstream payment systems. 

[31] March 3, 2023 at 2:00-3:00 pm (Central) 

Virtual Coffee Hour with Steven Schmidt, National Science Foundation SBE Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Southern California

"The Persistence of Inadequate Rental Housing Conditions"

In the United States, landlords are legally responsible for most apartment maintenance and repair. However, millions of tenants continue to live in inadequate homes that threaten their health and safety. How do landlords make decisions around building maintenance, and why do inadequate housing conditions persist, despite robust enforcement mechanisms? During this virtual coffee hour, I will present a drafted research proposal for a qualitative project that investigates how landlords make maintenance decisions in Los Angeles, California and how landlords respond to building code enforcement. Los Angeles—a city with relatively strong tenant protections, substantial code enforcement mechanisms, and persistent rental housing quality problems—offers a strategic site to explore these questions. This data collection effort will complement another portion of my postdoc project, which examines how LA tenants become “stuck in place” in inadequate living conditions. Prior to our meeting, I will circulate a research proposal draft and sample interview questions. I welcome the group’s feedback to improve the research design and to orient the project towards a problem-solving framework. 

[30] February 3, 2023 at 2:00-3:00 pm (Central) 

Virtual Coffee Hour with Juho Korhonen, Professor of Sociology at the Boğaziçi University

"Democratic Breakthrough in the Periphery: Non-Sovereign Democratization in the Grand Duchy of Finland of the Russian Empire, 1899 – 1919" 

This interdisciplinary project (history and sociology) addresses a missing transnational dimension in sociological literature on modern democracy’s origins and enriches those theories to include overlooked cases of peripheral democratization and the importance of women’s suffrage. 

How did Finnish actors in 1905-06 imagine and implement the first case of democracy in its modern sense (e.q. Eley 2002, Sulkunen 2019, Korhonen 2019), including the right for women to stand for election, as a non-sovereign state of the Russian Empire? 

A key problem Finnish actors tackled was to separate democratization in the periphery from the authoritarian politics of the metropole. What can we learn from these actors and their political imagination in terms of understanding democratization as separate from sovereign power politics and its associated patriarchal hierarchies and why did that lead to a more encompassing democratic politics in the periphery?

[29] January 27, 2023 at 2:00-3:30 pm (Central) 

Virtual Book Forum on Problem-Solving Sociology: A Guide for Students (Oxford University Press, 2022) 

Panelists: 

Neil Gross (Colby College)

Victoria Reyes (University of California, Riverside)

Adaner Usmani (Harvard)

[28] January 6, 2023 at 2:00-3:00 pm (Central) 

Virtual Coffee Hour with Analidis Ochoa, Doctoral Student at the University of Michigan 

"Social Insurance programs as place-conscious policies to reduce interregional geographic inequality"

Interregional geographic inequality in the United States has grown substantially over the past 40 years, and is an increasingly urgent topic for scholarship and policy. In this paper we consider the role that national social insurance programs, such as Social Security and the EITC, play in reducing geographic inequality. Although these programs do not have an explicit goal of reducing geographic inequality, they nonetheless have that effect, because they are disproportionately used by residents of low-income regions. We show that transfers from social insurance programs had the effect of reducing interregional inequality in 2019 by 12%, equivalent to reversing 28.6% of the growth in pre-transfer inequality since the 1970s. We also use simulations to evaluate the geographic consequences of proposed expansions to the US welfare state such as the expanded Child Tax Credit enacted in 2021 or a Universal Basic Income, showing that these programs could achieve further reductions in interregional inequality. 

* Co-working with Robert Manduca and Catalina Anampa Castro 

[27] December 2, 2022 at 2:00-3:00 pm (Central) 

Virtual Coffee Hour with Paul Lichterman, Professor of Sociology and Religion at the University of Southern California 

"The Timing of Seemingly Intractable Problems: Unaffordable Housing in Los Angeles"

Part of constructing a social problem is projecting a timeline for its solution. For at least a quarter century, advocates have considered housing affordability a dire problem in Los Angeles. Advocates time the course of their solutions differently, though. During ethnographic research, I found two timelines, each of which limited advocates’ and constituents’ practical grasp of collective problem solving. One constructed unaffordable housing as a relatively sudden “crisis”— pegged to the cycles of election campaigns, short-term coalition-building and media attention. The other constructed unaffordable housing as a hazard suffered recurrently by an essentialized, subordinated “community,” often understood in very local if hazy terms. In different ways, both of these imagined timelines cultivate a limited understanding of political realities that transpire on vastly different timelines. For that reason, I propose these timelines contribute to perpetuating unaffordable housing, homelessness—and ultimately, a larger public pessimism among Angelenos regarding efforts to address them.  

[26] November 11, 2022 at 2:00-3:00 pm (Central) 

Virtual Coffee Hour with Hyunsik Chun, Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Iowa

"Removing the Heavy Burden of Corruption: Media, Movements, and Politics in the Grand Corruption Reform in South Korea, 2016-2017"

A growing consensus among researchers is that most attempts to combat corruption have ended in miserable failure. This case study of the 2016 presidential scandal in South Korea offers a new perspective that presents corruption as a complex secret problem. Building upon the sociological literature on organized secrecy and deception, we shift attention from what reduces corrupt behavior to when corruption is kept hidden or leads to political and legal consequences. Past research and policy goals often aimed to create top-down approaches that create a one-size-fits-all solution to combat corruption. However, we propose to pay attention to the complex interactions between different actors to understand the development of anti-corruption campaigns: media outlets, legal associations and organizations, social movement organizations, political parties, and corporations. First, we examine how the corrupt relationship between President Park and the Choi family effectively stayed hidden until a 2016 media investigation. We pay attention to what mechanisms contribute to social ignorance of the corrupt relationship even though the relationship itself was repeatedly revealed over a long period of time (1979, 1987-1990, 2007, and 2014). After that, we trace three media outlets that shed new light on the relationship in 2016. We explore how the combination of whistleblowing and material evidence attracted a wider audience while the counterstrategies posed by the presidential office and the conservative leading party became invalidated. Lastly, we delve into the role of social movements in anti-corruption campaigns. The 2016-2017 Candlelight mobilized an unprecedentedly large volume of protesters every week. We examine how these protests affected the media and political discourses on how to address the grand corruption. The 2016 presidential scandal and the subsequent presidential impeachment give important lessons about how to generate a successful anti-corruption campaign in a democracy.  

* Co-working with Ion Bogdan Vasi (University of Iowa), Chanhum Yoon (Opensurvey)

[25] October 21, 2022 at 2-3:30 pm (Central) 

Panel Discussion on "Solving Climate Change" with Joshua Basseches, Daniel Driscoll, David Pellow, Raka Sen, and Gabriel Suchodolski

JOSHUA BASSECHES at Tulane University will discuss how a policy approach toward equitable climate change mitigation will require grappling explicitly with the question of who pays when designing policy.

DANIEL DRISCOLL at Brown University will discuss how the limited time to solve climate change forces choices with critical political economy trade-offs that require strategic action.

DAVID PELLOW at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will discuss how local leaders in California's Central Coast are developing a grassroots, community-drive policy framework to deliver climate and environmental justice for the area.

RAKA SEN at the University of Pennsylvania will utilize her work in the Sundarbans to discuss how large-scale climate change adaptation needs to better align itself with everyday adaptation strategies of local people.

GABRIEL SUCHODOLSKI at the University of California, Los Angeles, will discuss how rural elites promote Amazonian deforestation, and how redistributive policies can curb deforestation.

[24] September 30, 2022 at 2:00-3:00 pm (Central) 

Virtual Coffee Hour with Jose Eos Trinidad, Ph.D. Candidate at University of Chicago

"Private Interests in Public Education: Why, How, and What Now?" 

In recent years, many "outside" school improvement organizations are providing support and assistance to typical schools and educational bureaucracies. These include for-profit, nonprofit, research, and philanthropic organizations that have tried to solve problems in education in both developed and developing countries. While they can initiate and catalyze important positive changes, their support may also lead to undesirable consequences, unaccountable policies, and unaddressed social needs. Thus, I investigate how we can theorize the "right" or "optimal" form of private intervention necessary in public education. I am currently studying the case of the ecology of school improvement organizations that have helped with the spread of dropout prediction and prevention systems--and how solutions can be created through new webs of connections among various stakeholders.