Event Details: The Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is proud to present:

“How Multiracial Identity Shapes Citizenship“, part of the 1891 Lectures in the Humanities. Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden Family Professor in Feminist and Gender Studies, Rachel Jean-Baptiste will be speaking on her book Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa, (Cambridge UP, 2023).

Please join us for what will be a lively and eventful talk at the Stanford Humanities Center on February 26th, 2024 at 4:30 PM PST at Levinthal Hall in the Stanford Humanities Center.

There will be a reception to follow! We encourage you to RSVP with this form for logistics and planning purposes by February 19th! RSVP’s are encouraged but not required!

This event is sponsored by The Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and is cosponsored by Stanford Humanities Center, Department of African & African American Studies, Center for African Studies, France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies and The Europe Center Freeman Spogli Institute Stanford Global Studies.

More about the author and book: 

Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa is a groundbreaking history of EurAfricans or métis, people of African and European parentage, and how their conceptions of racial identity shaped notions of citizenship and childhood in Africa and Europe. Despite increasingly hardened visions of racial difference in colonial governance in French Africa after World War I, interracial sexual relationships persisted – mainly between African women and European men – and resulted in the births of thousands of children in West and Equatorial Africa. Drawing on public and private archives, photos, and oral history research in Senegal, France, Gabon, Germany, and Congo Jean-Baptiste traces the little-explored history of francophone métis. Crucially, this history analyzes how multiracial people made claims to access French social and citizenship rights amidst the refusal by European fathers to recognize their children and in the context of changing racial thought and practice in varied African societies. In this innovative and transcontinental history of race-making, belonging, and family Jean-Baptiste reveals the complexities and interconnected nature of identity-making in Africa and Europe. 

Since the early 1990s democracies, including European Union member states, Japan, and the United States, have claimed to promote human rights in China. Yet under Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping's decade-long rule modest gains have been reversed, and state-driven abuses now range from pervasive high-tech surveillance to crimes against humanity. Not only has external engagement failed to deter this downward spiral, democracies appear ill-prepared to cope with the Xi regime's increasing threats to democratic processes, the freedom of expression, and the international institutions meant to protect these rights in their own countries. How and why have these democracies failed, and can how can they better insulate themselves from these threats?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Sophie Richardson is currently researching democracies’ support for human rights in China. From 2006-2023, she served as the China Director at Human Rights Watch, overseeing the organization’s research and advocacy on Chinese government human rights abuses inside and outside the country. She has worked closely with civil society groups, governments, and United Nations bodies, and published extensively on the topic. Dr. Richardson has testified to the Canadian Parliament, European Parliament, and the United States Senate and House of Representatives. She is the author of China, Cambodia, and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence (Columbia University Press, Dec. 2009), an in-depth examination of China's foreign policy since 1954's Geneva Conference, including rare interviews with Chinese policy makers. She speaks Mandarin and received her doctorate from the University of Virginia and her BA from Oberlin College.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Encina E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Do citizens' perceptions of parties' multidimensional issue positions shape partisanship? Dassonneville, Fournier and Somer-Topcu use survey data from 11 countries to study this question.

There is a growing consensus in the field of party politics that new political fault lines are emerging and scholars increasingly characterize party competition as multidimensional. However, the level and nature of change differ widely between countries, resulting in variation in the extent to which new ideological dimensions structure oppositions between parties, and important differences in the extent to which new fault lines cross-cut existing ideological oppositions. It has been argued that such differences are important, because the cross-cuttingness of parties’ positions on different ideological dimensions determines the clarity of parties’ brands and in this way shapes party attachments (Dassonneville, Fournier and Somer-Topcu 2022). 

Most of what we know about the connection between parties’ position, brand clarity and partisanship relies on expert- or manifesto-based estimates of the positions that parties take, forcing scholars to assume that voters are perfectly informed about parties’ positions on multiple dimensions and about the oppositions between parties. To address this limitation, we rely on an original data collection of surveys in 11 countries in which we asked respondents to position parties on six different issues, capturing economic, social, and cultural divisions. Our design allows connecting citizens’ perceptions of the space of party competition in their country to their views about the clarity of parties’ ideological brands and measures of partisanship. Using this novel dataset, we provide unique individual-level insights into the ways in which party positions and the restructuring of party competition shape party attachments.

Ruth Dassonneville is an Associate Professor in the political science department at the Université de Montréal, where she holds the Canada Research Chair in Electoral Democracy.

Her research interests include electoral behaviour, dealignment, economic voting, compulsory voting, and women and politics. Her work on these topics has been published in, amongst others, the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, the European Journal of Political Research and the Journal of Politics. In 2023, she published Voters Under Pressure with Oxford University Press.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by February 29, 2024.

Do citizens' perceptions of parties' multidimensional issue positions shape partisanship? Dassonneville, Fournier and Somer-Topcu use survey data from 11 countries to study this question.

Since the early 2000s, Poland has experienced a remarkable Jewish turn, largely driven by non-Jewish Poles with a passionate new interest in all things Jewish. Klezmer music, Jewish-style restaurants, kosher vodka, and festivals of Jewish culture have become popular, while new museums, memorials, Jewish studies programs, and Holocaust research centers reflect soul-searching about Polish-Jewish relations before, during, and after the Holocaust. Poland's Jewish community is also undergoing a significant revival. Geneviève Zubrzycki examines these processes and asks what it means to try to bring Jewish culture back to life in a country where 3 million Jews were murdered and where only 10,000 now live. 

Drawing on a decade of participant-observation in Jewish and Jewish-related organizations in Poland, a Birthright trip to Israel with young Jewish Poles, and more than a hundred interviews with Jewish and non-Jewish Poles engaged in the Jewish turn, Zubrzycki's book Resurrecting the Jew presents an in-depth look at Jewish life in Poland today. She shows how the revival has been spurred by progressive Poles who want to break the association between Polishness and Catholicism and promote the idea of a multicultural Poland, exploring the limits of performative solidarity and empathetic forms of cultural appropriation.

Geneviève Zubrzycki is the William H. Sewell Jr. Collegiate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, where she directs the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia, and the Copernicus Center for Polish Studies. A historical and cultural sociologist, she has published widely on nationalism and religion; collective memory, national mythology and the politics of commemoration; and visual culture and materiality. 

Geneviève is the author of the award-winning monographs The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland (Chicago 2006), Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion and Secularism in Quebec (Chicago 2016), and Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism and Poland’s Jewish Revival (Princeton 2022), and the editor of National Matters: Materiality, Culture and Nationalism (Stanford 2017). In 2021 Zubrzycki was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and was awarded the Bronisław Malinowski Prize in the Social Sciences from the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by February 8, 2024.

What explains education-based political divides? Jonne Kamphorst discusses how decreased interactions between higher and lower-educated citizens has widened the political divide between them

Across advanced democracies, education levels are predictive of immigration attitudes and voting for new left or far right parties. What explains education-based political divides? Existing scholarship holds that education causes progressive attitudes, or proposes that being higher educated and holding progressive attitudes can both be explained by socialization during someone’s childhood. This article puts forward an additional explanation. 

We argue that decreased interactions and relationship formation between higher and lower-educated citizens has widened the political divide between them. Using panel and survey data of strong ties, we demonstrate that higher (lower) educated ties make individuals more progressive (conservative). Education divides citizens by providing a distinct worldview for the higher-educated, which is reinforced in increasingly homogeneous education-based networks. Our findings suggest the further crystallization of a cleavage based on education, and highlight the importance of studying networks to understand political behavior.

Jonne Kamphorst is a Postdoctoral Scholar in Political Science at the European University Institute in Florence and a Senior Research Fellow at the Polarization and Social Change Lab at Stanford University. He completed his Ph.D. in Political Science at the EUI in 2023. Before starting his Doctoral Degree, Jonne was a Master’s student in Politics and Sociology at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics and obtained his Bachelor’s in Political Science from the University of Amsterdam. 

His research, positioned at the intersection between comparative politics and political behavior, explores the roots of political divides in advanced democracies and proposes strategies to bridge them. Two questions define his research agenda: 1) What are the origins of political divisions? And 2) how can democracy be strengthened by re-engaging citizens and building new coalitions of voters that bridge political divides? Jonne answers these questions leveraging quantitative scientific methods. His methodological expertise is in the design, conduct, and analysis of randomized field and survey experiments which he often employs in collaboration with political candidates and parties. He also uses quasi-experimental methods for causal inference. Jonne’s research has been accepted at or been revised and resubmitted to the Journal of Politics, American Political Science Review, and Comparative Political Studies, among other outlets.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by January 25, 2024.

Bartels dismantles the pervasive myth of a "populist wave" in contemporary European public opinion. He shows that attitudes regarding immigration, European integration, trust in politicians, and satisfaction with democracy have remained largely unchanged over the past two decades. Electoral gains by right-wing populist parties have mostly reflected idiosyncratic failures of mainstream parties; both their magnitude and their implications have been exaggerated by the press. Europe's most sobering examples of democratic backsliding--in Hungary and Poland--occurred not because voters wanted authoritarianism but because conventional conservative parties, once elected, seized opportunities to entrench themselves in power.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Larry Bartels's research and teaching focus on public opinion, electoral politics, public policy, and democracy. His books include Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (2nd edition) and (with Christopher Achen) Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. He has also published dozens of scholarly articles and brief pieces in the New York Times, Washington Post, Salon, and other popular media outlets. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the American Philosophical Society.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Philippines Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.

How do nations grapple with a history of past atrocities? Does recognition of historical crimes in public discourse lead citizens to embrace a past that may devalue their national identity, or does it foster backlash and illiberal nationalism? Perhaps no better example of a paradigm of confronting the past exists than the case of post-war Germany, a country marked by the legacy of the Nazi atrocities in World War II.

More than half a century later, we ask how public recognition of collective culpability in public discourse, education, and culture, has affected German national identity and attitudes towards the country's history. We conducted a nationwide representative survey of German-born adults and relied on an experimental treatment to distinguish between private preferences and their public expression. Our findings suggest that the low levels of national pride and muted emotional connection to German history that are expressed by the German public have been internalized and are not the result of social desirability concerns. Yet a stigma surrounds the public expression of a desire to move on from the historical narrative that emphasizes Germany's role as a perpetrator of atrocities. Our study highlights both the potential for success and the costs of public recognition of a nation's historical sins.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Vasiliki Fouka is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, a Faculty Research Fellow at NBER, and a Research Affiliate at CEPR. Her research interests include historical political economy, political behavior, and cultural economics, with a main focus on immigrant assimilation, the determinants of prejudice against ethnic and racial minorities, and the long-run effects of history for inter-group relations.  

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Encina E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.