SPEAKER BIO
Andy Carvin was National Public Radio's senior product manager for online communities. He accepted a position at First Look Media in February, 2014. Carvin was the founding editor and former coordinator of the Digital Divide Network, an online community of more than 10,000 Internet activists in over 140 countries working to bridge the digital divide . He is also an active blogger as well as a field correspondent to the vlog Rocketboom.

Abstract:

Development organizations need tools capable of providing reliable and timely feedback on the efficacy of humanitarian interventions. Traditional surveys and surveying methodology lack interactivity as participants only provide data and may never see the survey results. In her talk, Brandie will describe an interactive assessment platform called CAFE, the Collaborative Assessment and Feedback Engine. CAFÉ was utilized to assess the performance of three Nutrition Education Centers in Uganda. The platform collected the opinions of 137 women who visited these centers for family planning training. We applied principal component analysis on the quantitative assessment questions. We learned that the top two factors that differentiated participants’ assessment of the effectiveness of the family planning trainings were: degree of female’s autonomy at home and degree of fear about contraception techniques. We applied a significance testing methodology to these factors and discovered the promising result that attending family planning trainings was correlated to reduced fears. 

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Brandie Nonnecke

Abstract: Advances in biotechnology offer huge potential benefits to humankind, but at the same time present serious challenges to security. Professor Stearns will discuss his work as a member of JASON, an advising body that carries out studies for the US government on a wide range of topics.  Much of that work has been directed at assessing how the dissemination of sophisticated, yet inexpensive, biotechnology equipment and methods has changed how we have to think  about some of the key issues in biosecurity. 

About the Speaker: Tim Stearns is the Frank Lee and Carol Hall Professor of Biology at Stanford University and Professor of Genetics at Stanford Medical School.  He is the chair of the Department of Biology.  Dr. Stearns’ lab studies the structure and function of the centrosome and cilium in animal cells and the relationship of defects in these important signaling centers to human disease.  He has been recognized for his teaching of undergraduates and graduate students at Stanford, and internationally in Chile, Ghana, South Africa and Tanzania.  Dr. Stearns is a member of JASON, an independent group of scientists which advises the United States government on matters of science and technology.  

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Is it good governance that leads to growth or vice versa? Applying a "complexity" framework to China’s great economic and bureaucratic transformation, Professor Ang argues that governance and growth necessarily interact and coevolve. So-called good governance is not a universal set of institutions—its particular forms vary dramatically at early and late stages of development. Moreover, the adaptive processes of coevolution do not universally happen or work. Understanding how reformers tackled problems of adaptation illuminates the sources of China’s extraordinary dynamism and the new challenges in the 21^st century. 

Yuen Yuen Ang is Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of Michigan. Ang studies development and governance in developing countries, especially China, focusing on the coevolution of state and economy, bureaucracy, and corruption. Her research has appeared in The Journal of Politics, Comparative Politics, The China Quarterly, and other journals. Ang’s book project was supported by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS)/Andrew Mellon Foundation, Chiang Ching Kuo Foundation, Overseas Young Chinese Foundation/1990 Institute, APSA Paul Volcker Junior Scholar Grant, and grants from Stanford, Columbia, and Michigan. A summary essay of Ang's forthcoming book is available at this link. She was awarded the Eldersveld Prize for outstanding research by the UM Political Science Department in 2014. Before joining Michigan, she was an Assistant Professor at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). She obtained her PhD from Stanford University.

This event is part of the New Approaches to China series.

About the topic: This talk explores two primary questions: (1) the origins of the modern US national security state, and what might be called a constellation of democratic exceptions, during the late 1930s and 1940s; and (2) the patterning of congressional delegation, and the particular role played by southern Democrats in producing that period’s constellation of institutions and policies.  More speculatively, it considers subsequent patterns of continuity and discontinuity in instruments, norms, political coalitions, and the balance of congressional and presidential capacity. 

About the Speaker: Ira Katznelson has been Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia University since 1994, and, since 2012, President of the Social Science Research Council. He served as President of the American Political Science Association in 2005-06, as Chair of the Russell Sage Foundation Board of Trustees from 1999-2002, and as President of the Social Science History Association in 1997-98. His most recent book, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (Liveright, 2013) has been awarded the Bancroft, Woodrow Wilson, Sidney Hillman, and J.David Greenstone Prizes. Other recent books include Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns (Cambridge University Press, 2008; written with Andreas Kalyvas); When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (W.W. Norton, 2006), and Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust (Columbia University Press, 2003). He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Join Global Development and Poverty Initiative (GDP) for a stimulating discussion on the opportunities, obstacles, and unforeseen events encountered while conducting field research in the developing world.

The panelists will share stories of challenges and successes from their own experiences and will offer insights on conducting effective research in the field.

Abstract:

“Best practices” prescriptions for democratic reform confuse the end point with the journey of getting from here to there, so  are not  useful in responding to the governance ambiguities of the early 21st century. In this seminar, Brian Levy will introduce an alternative approach laid out in his new book, Working with the Grain: Integrating Governance and Growth in Development Strategies (New York: OUP, 2014).

In many nascent democracies, power is fragmented,  the rule of law and  public bureaucracies are weak; political stability is sustained through personalized deals. The way forward in such settings is to set aside ‘best practices’, and engage with things as they actually are seeking out ‘with the grain’ opportunities for initiating a virtuous spiral of forward economic momentum and incremental, cumulative improvements in institutions. As the seminar will explore, the implications for action of this altered perspective are profound --  on  the economic front, on the institutional front and  vis-à-vis how commitment to a democratic approach to development can be sustained over the long-haul.

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*** PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS WEEK'S THURSDAY CDDRL SEMINAR IS HELD ON WEDNESDAY***

Abstract:

We assess the degree of persistence in armed conflict in particular places over the last two centuries.  At the regional level, we find some evidence of anti-persistence, consistent with Tilly's arguments about war and state-building: Eastern and Western Europe had large amounts of conflict from 1815-1945 and almost none after, whereas Africa, Asia, and the Middle East had moderate amounts before and large amounts after.  Within regions, by contrast, we find that places that experienced colonial and imperial wars before 1945 (or before 1914) were more likely to have civil wars after independence.  The degree of persistence is not much affected by controls for durable features that may affect conflict levels in both periods (such as initial population, land area, ethnic diversity, terrain roughness, income, and colonial power), suggesting that at least some of the effect is due to conflict in one period causing conflict later.  We can rule out persistence being due to long-lasting ethnic feuds, and find little evidence that places with more developed pre-colonial states were consistently more likely to have fought with colonizers and then with other groups after independence.  There is some evidence that colonizers fought where there happened to be groups with greater martial cultures or traditions, and that these may have persisted to some degree post-independence.

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