* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Register in advance for this webinar: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/8416226562432/WN_WLYcdRa6T5Cs1MMdmM0Mug

About the Event: Is there a place for illegal or nonconsensual evidence in security studies research, such as leaked classified documents? What is at stake, and who bears the responsibility, for determining source legitimacy? Although massive unauthorized disclosures by WikiLeaks and its kindred may excite qualitative scholars with policy revelations, and quantitative researchers with big-data suitability, they are fraught with methodological and ethical dilemmas that the discipline has yet to resolve. I argue that the hazards from this research—from national security harms, to eroding human-subjects protections, to scholarly complicity with rogue actors—generally outweigh the benefits, and that exceptions and justifications need to be articulated much more explicitly and forcefully than is customary in existing work. This paper demonstrates that the use of apparently leaked documents has proliferated over the past decade, and appeared in every leading journal, without being explicitly disclosed and defended in research design and citation practices. The paper critiques incomplete and inconsistent guidance from leading political science and international relations journals and associations; considers how other disciplines from journalism to statistics to paleontology address the origins of their sources; and elaborates a set of normative and evidentiary criteria for researchers and readers to assess documentary source legitimacy and utility. Fundamentally, it contends that the scholarly community (researchers, peer reviewers, editors, thesis advisors, professional associations, and institutions) needs to practice deeper reflection on sources’ provenance, greater humility about whether to access leaked materials and what inferences to draw from them, and more transparency in citation and research strategies.

View Written Draft Paper

About the Speaker: Christopher Darnton is a CISAC affiliate and an associate professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. He previously taught at Reed College and the Catholic University of America, and holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. He is the author of Rivalry and Alliance Politics in Cold War Latin America (Johns Hopkins, 2014) and of journal articles on US foreign policy, Latin American security, and qualitative research methods. His International Security article, “Archives and Inference: Documentary Evidence in Case Study Research and the Debate over U.S. Entry into World War II,” won the 2019 APSA International History and Politics Section Outstanding Article Award. He is writing a book on the history of US security cooperation in Latin America, based on declassified military documents.

The influx of marriage migrants and their children of mixed heritages has reconstructed the demographic landscape and national membership in East Asia. Through in-depth interviews with sixty adult children from cross-border marriages in Taiwan, Lan’s research explores their identity management at the intersection of geopolitical tensions and multicultural policies. Taiwan's evolving regime of “geopolitical multiculturalism” started to associate Southeast Asian immigrants with a reward for difference, while PRC immigrants are still considered a threat of similarity. Accordingly, Southeast Asian second-generation youths are increasingly encouraged to claim a bicultural identity, but the children of PRC Chinese immigrants continue to face geopolitical stigmas and conflicting identities. Three major strategies of second-generation identity work are identified: majority identity, biculturalism, and rescaling. Lan will also discuss policy implications for immigrant incorporation and multicultural future in the region. 

This event is part of APARC's Contemporary Asia Seminar Series.

Pei-Chia Lan is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at National Taiwan University and also a 2024-25 Stanford-Taiwan Social Science Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University. Her major publications include Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan (Duke 2006, won a Distinguished Book Award from the Sex and Gender Section of the American Sociological Association and ICAS Book Prize: Best Study in Social Science from the International Convention of Asian Scholars) and Raising Global Families: Parenting, Immigration, and Class in Taiwan and the US (Stanford 2018).

A growing literature finds high returns to firms connected to legislative office. Less attention has been paid to benefits from bureaucratic connections and to organizations beyond for-profit firms. Using new data recording the first post-bureaucracy position occupied by all former civil servants in Japan, Incerti reveals a bifurcated job market in which the highest-ranking civil servants from the most prestigious ministries retire into for-profit firms while others join non-profit and public organizations. Incerti will show that for-profit firms receive larger government loans and stock price boosts following bureaucratic hires, and that these effects are driven by hires from prestigious economic ministries. Incerti will also show that non-profits leverage their bureaucratic hires by receiving higher value contracts in periods when former officials are in director positions at the organization. While top civil servants are therefore of value to for-profit firms, others find post bureaucracy employment in non-profits supported by government funding.

This event is part of APARC's Contemporary Asia Seminar Series.

Trevor Incerti is an Assistant Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam and Visiting Assistant Professor in Modern and Contemporary Japanese Politics at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service Asian Studies Program. Incerti’s main area of research is in comparative political economy, with a focus on the role of money in politics and business influence in politics. Additionally, his research explores how economic stimuli shape political behavior and preferences. Much of his work focuses on East Asia, particularly Japan. He also conducts research in quantitative methods, where he is particularly interested in the reliability and validity of measurement strategies. Incerti’s research is published in the American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and Political Analysis, among other outlets. Incerti received his Ph.D. from Yale University and B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. He is also an Expert at the Leiden Asia Centre and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. Prior to academia, he worked in data science and economic consulting.

Taiwan is host to a panoply of popular spiritual-religious practices that reach back to the 17th century. Since 1987, these folk institutions have proliferated, blurring among other things the boundary between secularism and religiosity. They permeate different facets of contemporary Taiwanese society, from politics to technology, grassroot movements to elections. Regardless of faction, political and social groups negotiate and exert new configurations of social power in this spiritual space, which is also used transnationally. This talk focuses on the most influential among them and discusses how one may approach such a study in new and interdisciplinary ways.

This event is part of APARC's Contemporary Asia Seminar Series.

Jing Tsu is Jonathan D. Spence Chair Professor of Comparative Literature & East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale. She holds an affiliation with the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs and has also taught in the Grand Strategy program. Her research spans cultural and social history, nationalism, diaspora, and history of science and technology. Her most recent book, Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern (Penguin Random House, 2022), examines how the Chinese written script negotiated its way into the technological age of global communications dominated by the western alphabet. The book was named a 2023 Pulitzer Finalist. Her current research focuses on the social and political life of spirituality and technology in Taiwan.

Skyline Scholars Seminar Series

Tuesday, February 4, 2025 | 1:00 pm -2:30 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

The Anatomy of Chinese Innovation: Insights on Patent Quality and Ownership

In this study we look at the evolution of patenting in China from 1985-2019. We develop a new method to measure the importance of an individual patent for innovation based on the use of a Large Language Model to process patent text data and a new theory of the innovation process. We also classify patent ownership using a comprehensive business registry. We highlight three insights. First, patents that are important for innovation have become less important on average. Second, knowledge within China has become more important than knowledge outside of China for directing innovation in China. Finally, knowledge produced by Chinese entities within China has become more important than knowledge produced by foreign entities.

Please register for the event to receive email updates and add it to your calendar.

About the Speaker 
 

Loren Brandt is the Noranda Chair Professor of Economics at the University of Toronto specializing in the Chinese economy. He is also a research fellow at the IZA (The Institute for the Study of Labor) in Bonn, Germany. He has published widely on the Chinese economy in leading economic journals and been involved in extensive household and enterprise survey work in both China and Vietnam. With Thomas Rawski, he completed Policy, Regulation, and Innovation in China’s Electricity and Telecom Industries (Cambridge University Press, 2019), an interdisciplinary effort analyzing the effect of government policy on the power and telecom sectors in China. He was also co-editor and major contributor to China’s Great Economic Transformation (Cambridge University Press, 2008), which provides an integrated analysis of China’s unexpected economic boom of the past three decades. Brandt was also one of the area editors for Oxford University Press’ five-volume Encyclopedia of Economic History (2003). His current research focuses on issues of entrepreneurship and firm dynamics, industrial policy and innovation and  economic growth and structural change.

Interested in meeting with Professor Brandt one-on-one? 
Sign up to speak with him during his office hours: 
Wednesday, 1/29 or 2/12 | 2:00-5:00 PM 

Please schedule a meeting in advance and use your Stanford email to log in. 

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

Talk Title: TBD

Glied’s principal areas of research are in health policy reform and mental health care policy. She has written or co-edited books on health care reform, mental health policy, and health economics. She has served as the Dean of NYU's Graduate School of Public Service, a professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia, a member of the U.S. Senate, a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, and a member of the Clinton Health Care Task Force.

Talk Title: TBD

Eric's research examines questions of health economics and health policy, with a focus on economics and policy in the perioperative setting. Current research topics include the economics of treatments for chronic pain, as well as how physician practice organization affects outcomes and costs.
 

Talk Title: TBD

Chris Bennett is a clinically active emergency physician and faculty scientist in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Stanford University, and also a faculty affiliate with the Stanford Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Imaging (AIMI) and the Stanford Center for Digital Health (CDH). As an NIH-funded principal investigator, his research group focuses on understanding and improving the quality of care Americans receive in our nation’s emergency departments, as well as identifying who is providing that care. His interests include how policy can inform precision medicine and in developing innovations to optimize healthcare delivery.