* NOTE:  The venue has been changed to the Barnes/McDowell Rooms at the Fisher Conference Center in the Arrillaga Alumni Center.

Professor Marci Shore will be speaking on the topic of her recent book, The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Easten Europe.  The collapse of communism opened the archives, illuminating the tragedy of twentieth-century Eastern Europe: there were moments in which no decisions were innocent, in which all possible choices caused suffering.  The Taste of Ashes is an account of the darker side of the revolutions of 1989, when the ghost of communism--no longer Marx’s “specter to come"--became a haunting presence of the past.

Marci Shore is associate professor of history at Yale University.  She is the translator of Michał Głowiński's The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968.  Currently she is at work on a book project titled “Phenomenological Encounters: Scenes from Central Europe,” an examination of the history of phenomenology and existentialism in East-Central Europe.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, Taube Center for Jewish Studies and the Department of History.

About the Speakers: Abraham Sofaer was appointed the first George P. Shultz Distinguished Scholar and Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution in 1994. Sofaer's work focuses on the power over war within the US government and on issues related to international law, terrorism, diplomacy, and national security. His most recent books are The Best Defense?: Legitimacy and Preventive Force and Taking On Iran: Strength, Diplomacy and the Iranian Threat. From 1985 to 1990, he served as a legal adviser to the US Department of State. He received the Distinguished Service Award in 1989, the highest state department award given to a non–civil servant.

Allen Weiner is senior lecturer in law and co-director of the Stanford Program in International Law at Stanford Law School. He is also the co-director of the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation. For more than a decade, he practiced international law in the U.S. Department of State, serving as an attorney-adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser and as legal counselor at the U.S. Embassy in The Hague. Weiner is the author of "The Torture Memos and Accountability" in the American Society of International Law Insight and co-author of International Law. Other publications include "Law, Just War, and the International Fight Against Terrorism: Is It War?" in Intervention, Terrorism, and Torture: Contemporary Challenges to Just War Theory.

Abstract: 

CDDRL post-doctoral fellow Bilal Siddiqi will address the question of whether progressive, statutory legal reform can meaningfully affect the lives of the poor, using observational and experimental evidence from Liberia in a new study co-authored with Justin Sandefur at the Center for Global Development. The authors develop a simple model of forum choice and test it using new survey data on over 4,500 legal disputes taken to a range of customary and formal legal institutions in rural Liberia. Their results suggest that the poor would benefit most from access to low-cost, remedial justice that incorporates the progressive features of the formal law. They then present the results of a randomized controlled trial of a legal empowerment intervention in Liberia providing pro bono mediation and advocacy services, using community paralegals trained in the formal law. The authors find strong and robust impacts on justice outcomes, as well as significant downstream welfare benefits—including increases in household and child food security of 0.24 and 0.38 standard deviations, respectively. They interpret these results as preliminary evidence that there are large socioeconomic gains to be had from improving access to justice, not by bringing the rural poor into the formal domain of magistrates’ courts, government offices, and police stations, but by bringing the formal law into the organizational forms of the custom through third-party mediation and advocacy.

About the Speaker: 

Bilal Siddiqi is a postdoctoral scholar affiliated with the Empirical Studies of Conflict project (esoc.princeton.edu). His research focuses on micro-institutions, formal and informal legal systems, peace-building and state accountability in post-conflict settings. He is currently involved in several field experiments in Sierra Leone and Liberia, including a randomized controlled trial of two non-financial incentive mechanisms in Sierra Leone’s public health sector; experimental evaluations of community-based paralegal programs in Liberia and Sierra Leone; and a randomized controlled trial of a community reconciliation program in Sierra Leone. 

Bilal received his Ph.D. and M.Phil. in economics from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. Prior to Stanford, he was based at the Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES) at Stockholm as a Marie Curie / AMID Scholar; and has also spent time at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC, where he worked on aid effectiveness in global health. He holds a B.Sc. (Hons) from the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan.

Sonja Schmid is an assistant professor in the Department of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech. She received her PhD in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University in 2005. From 2005-2007 she was a fellow at CISAC and a lecturer in Stanford’s program in Science, Technology and Society. In 2007-08, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

Her research has focused on understanding complex decision-making processes at the interface between science, technology, and the state in the Cold War Soviet context, and she is currently working on a book about reactor design choices and the development of the civilian nuclear industry in the Soviet Union. The book is based on extensive archival research and narrative interviews with nuclear energy specialists in Russia. Her research interests also include technology transfer, risk communication, especially in the context of energy policy, and the popularization of science and technology.

In this talk, Professor Han will examine the implications for the Zainichi (people of Korean ethnicity who have lived in Japan since the colonial period) of choosing between identifying themselves as either Chōsen or Kankoku for Japan's alien registration purposes. Chōsen is a historic name for Korea now also used by North Korea in its official name, while Kankoku, which also means Korea, refers to the Republic of Korea (South Korea). 

Young-Hae Han is a visiting professor at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) for the 2012–13 academic year. She is also a professor at the Graduate School of International Studies at Seoul National University (SNU). Her research and education focuses on contemporary Japanese society. She has conducted field research on Japanese grassroots social movements in cities such as Kawasaki, Kunidachi, Kobe, Yamagata, Kanazawa, and Oita. After the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, she organized a team and conducted research in the damaged area. Han is also involved in researching another topic that is of great interest to her: ethnic minorities in contemporary Japan. For this topic, her research has been focused on the identity issues of Zainichi Koreans, particularly on the changing relationship of the Zainichi with their "homeland" in the post-cold war period.

Han served as the director of the Institute for Japanese Studies at SNU from 2006 to 2012 before she joined Shorenstein APARC. She also served as the chair of the Exchange Committee of KSA-AJS at the Korean Sociological Association from 2008 to 2011.

Han is the author of numerous publications, such as the books: Understanding Contemporary Japanese Society (in Korean); Japanese Community and Grassroots Social Movements (in Korean); Multi-Cultural Japan and Identity Politics (co-author, in Korean). Her recent publications include Institutionalization of East Asian Studies and New Dilemmas: With a Focus on Japanese Studies (in English); New Relationship between Zainichi Koreans and the Homeland: Through the Journeys of the Former 'Chosen Nationals' Living in Korea (in Japanese); The Meaning of 'Seikatsu' (Life) in the Citizens' Movement in Contemporary Japan (in Korean); and The Inheritance of the Korean Dance and Identity in the Ethnic Korean Community (in Korean).  

This lecture is part of the "Iberian Studies Program Lecture Series"

Antoni Bassas (Barcelona, Catalonia, 1961) is a journalist, and graduated with his degree in journalism from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Since June 2009, Bassas has been the chief correspondent of TV3, Television of Catalonia in the United States, based in Washington DC. This has allowed him to travel and cover major news in the US, from the Obama White House to the Oscars, from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to Superstorm Sandy in New York, from Immigration Law in Arizona to the last take off of the space shuttle in Florida.  He has reported on political primaries, conventions and the presidential campaign, and interviews with people like Yo-Yo Ma, James Taylor, Amy Goodman, Madeleine Albright and Zbigniew Brzezinsky.

Between 1995 and 2008, Bassas was the anchor for the morning news on the Catalan public radio, achieving both outstanding levels of audience and influence in the public life of his country, and receiving  some of the most distinguished radio and TV awards.

Co-sponsored by the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and the Stanford Humanities Center

Abstract: 
While the debate rages on regarding the role of social media technologies within the Egyptian revolution of 2011, and more generally the larger wave of ‘Arab Spring’ protests, the more relevant question of today is whether the 18 days of revolt may have done more for social media than vice versa. In different manners, social media technologies appear to be central to this discussion. From the Muslim Brotherhood’s use of technology to engage global publics, to activist uses of social media to build grassroots networks which bypass the barriers of infrastructure and access, or blogger uses of social media to impact older top-down media, social media technologies represent critical sites for analysis and critique. Building on two years of ethnographies and interviews, this paper identifies three key themes by which social media technologies shape political power: 1. Moving Past Bubbles, 2. Linking Older and Newer Media, and 3. Digital Subversion.

Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan, Assistant Professor at UCLA in Design and Media/Information Studies, studies and participates in projects focused on how new media technologies impact political revolutions, economic development and poverty reduction, and the future of cultural heritage. He recently wrote a front page article on Internet Freedom for the Huffington Post, an Op/Ed in the Washington Post on Social Media and the London Riots, an upcoming piece in the Washington Post on Myths of Social Media, and was recently on NPR discussing his fieldwork in Egypt on networks, actors, and technologies in the political sphere. He was also recently in the New Yorker based on his response (from his blog: http://rameshsrinivasan.org) to Malcolm Gladwell’s writings critiquing the power of social media in impacting revolutionary movements. He has worked with bloggers who were involved in overthrowing the recent authoritarian Kyrgyz regime, non-literate tribal populations in India to study how literacy emerges through uses of technology, and traditional Native American communities to study how non-Western understandings of the world can introduce new ways of looking at the future of the internet. He holds an engineering degree from Stanford, a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab, and a Doctorate from Harvard University. His full academic CV can be found at http://rameshsrinivasan.org/cv