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- Date:
- 2019-10-17
- Summary:
- Dr. Vera Kuklina, Research Professor, Department of Geography, George Washington University While the impact of large infrastructural projects on Siberia’s people and environment has increasingly been gaining attention, important issues related to local infrastructures are less known. Taking the Evenki village Vershina Khandy as an example, Vera Kuklina’s research explores the relationship between different scales of local indigenous communities, extractive industries, and the state. With the introduction of infrastructural development and new transportation technologies, some traditional routes are being used as a base for public road construction, while others are being replaced by new elements: geological clear-cuts, forestry roads, and service roads, and as such, are informally used by motorized vehicles. These informal roads continue to serve as mediators between the village and large-scale infrastructural projects (e.g., the Baikal-Amur Mainline during the Soviet period, and more recently the Power of Siberia gas pipeline construction). The analysis and observations in this talk are based on materials gathered during summer 2019 field work, which included interviews with local leaders, hunters, and fishermen; travelling by different transportation modes; and participation in local subsistence activities. Besides her post at GWU, Vera Kuklina is also Senior Research Associate at the V.B. Sochava Institute of Geography of the Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include urbanization of indigenous people, traditional land use, socio-ecological systems, cultural geographies of infrastructure and remoteness.
- Date:
- 2019-02-15
- Summary:
- Visiting environmental journalist Angelina Davydova speaks about environmental problems and challenges in Russia, the policies to tackle them, and the civil society initiatives and movements that have grown to face them. Davydova is currently based at UC Davis as a Humphrey Fellow. She was a past Reuters Foundation fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford University (2006) and head of the German-Russian Office of Environmental Information (www.rnei.de). Since 2008 Davydova has been an observer of the UN Climate negotiation process (UNFCCC) and regularly publishes her work in Russian and international media (including the Thomson Reuters Foundation, The Conversation, Open Democracy, and Science Magazine). Davydova is also the curator of a two-year media training program, “Water Stories,” which features stories dedicated to water issues in Central Asia.
- Date:
- 2019-09-25
- Summary:
- Stephen F. Cohen and Alexander Rabinowitch Reflect on Six (plus!) Decades of Scholarly and Personal Engagement with Russia Open Panel Discussion. Stephen Cohen and Alexander Rabinowitch interviewed by their wives: Katrina vanden Heuvel and Janet Rabinowitch.
- Date:
- 2019-09-25
- Summary:
- Stephen F. Cohen and Alexander Rabinowitch Reflect on Six (plus!) Decades of Scholarly and Personal Engagement with Russia Open Panel Discussion. Stephen Cohen and Alexander Rabinowitch interviewed by their wives: Katrina vanden Heuvel and Janet Rabinowitch.
- Date:
- 2019-04-05
- Main contributors:
- Parker, Chris
- Summary:
- Show or Tell? Improving Agent Decision Making in a Tanzanian Mobile Money Field Experiment: When workers make operational decisions, the firm's global knowledge and the worker's domain-specific knowledge complement each other. Oftentimes workers have the final decision-making power. Two key decisions a firm makes when designing systems to support these workers are: 1) what guidance to deliver, and 2) what kind of training (if any) to provide. We examine these choices in the context of mobile money platforms?systems that allow users in developing economies to deposit, transfer, and withdraw money using their mobile phones. Mobile money has grown quickly, but high stockout rates of currency persist due to sub-optimal inventory decisions made by contracted employees (called agents). In partnership with a Tanzanian mobile money operator, we perform a randomized controlled trial with 4,771 agents over eight weeks to examine how differing types of guidance and training impact the agents' inventory management. We find agents who are trained in person and receive an explicit, personalized, daily text message recommendation of how much electronic currency to stock are less likely to stock out. These agents are more likely to alter their electronic currency balance on a day (rebalance). In contrast, agents trained in person but who receive summary statistics of transaction volumes or agents who are notified about the program and not offered in-person training do not experience changes in stockouts or rebalances. We observe no evidence of learning or fatigue. Agent-level heterogeneity in the treatment effects shows that the agents who handle substantially more customer deposits than withdrawals benefit most from the intervention. || When Transparency Fails: Bias and Financial Incentives in Ridesharing Platforms: Passenger discrimination in transportation systems is a well-documented phenomenon. With the advent and success of ridesharing platforms, such as Lyft, Uber and Via, there has been hope that discrimination against under-represented minorities may be reduced. However, early evidence has suggested the existance of bias in ridesharing platforms. Several platforms responded by reducing operational transparency through the removal of information about the rider's gender and race from the ride request presented to drivers. However, following this change, bias may still manifest after a request is accepted, at which point the rider's picture is displayed, through driver cancelation. Our primary research question is to what extent a rider's gender, race, and perception of support for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights impact cancelation rates on ridesharing platforms. We investigate this through a large field experiment using a major ridesharing platform in North America. By manipulating rider names and profile pictures, we observe drivers' patterns of behavior in accepting and canceling rides. Our results confirm that bias at the ride request stage has been eliminated. However, at the cancelation stage, racial and LGBT biases are persistent, while biases related to gender appear to have been eliminated. We also explore whether dynamic pricing moderates (through increased pay to drivers) or exacerbates (by signaling that there are many riders, allowing drivers to be more selective) these biases. We find a moderating effect of peak pricing, with consistently lower biased behavior.
- Date:
- 2019-10-17
- Main contributors:
- REEI, Russian Studies Workshop
- Summary:
- Craig Campbell, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin.The Lower Tunguska—a tributary in Siberia that flows into the great Yenisei river—was identified several decades ago as a potential site for a massive hydroelectric dam. If the dam were to be built, it would dramatically transform the river and dislocate thousands of people who live in the flood zone. To this day the dam has not been built, as a result, an entire generation of villagers has had to learn to dwell in the suspended temporality of a deferred catastrophe. Regardless of the construction, drift, and crash of industrial projects, indigenous Evenkis in the area have maintained and adapted their traditional lifeways under dramatically different forms of government and social life. The indeterminacies of future of events—especially catastrophe and planned landscape transformation on grand industrial scales—challenge Evenkis to adapt in a chaotic world and call upon scholars to attend to the entanglements of hope, dread, and anticipation.Craig Campbell’s second book, Agitating Images: Photography Against History in Indigenous Siberiawas published by the University of Minnesota Press in the fall of 2014. He is currently working on the cultural history of an unbuilt hydro-electric dam in Central Siberia, the weird time of a shadow, re-mediations of socialist encounters, and the aesthetics of damaged, degraded, and manipulated photographs. Craig is a member several curatorial groups including Ethnographic Terminalia and Writing with Light, the later explores the persistent mattering of photography and photo-essays to cultural anthropology.
- Date:
- 2019-02-20
- Main contributors:
- Pisano, Linda, Shanahan, James
- Summary:
- In the throes of awards season, commentary on celebrity fashion choices runs rampant. This week, Professor Linda Pisano, chair of the Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance department, talks costume design, style trends, and how we can contextualize red carpet fashion.
- Date:
- 2019-10-21
- Main contributors:
- reei
- Summary:
- This talk will focus on the scholarly activities of Julia Averkieva and Archie Phinney, anthropologists mentored by Franz Boas, the “father of modern anthropology” and a seminal figure in 20th century North American anthropology. While a Soviet exchange student at Columbia University in 1929-1931, Averkieva accompanied Boas in fieldwork among the Kwakiutl people of British Columbia. Phinney, a Nez Perce Indian, taught and conducted research at the Leningrad Academy of Sciences from 1932 to 1937, serving for many years as a field agent in the Bureau of Indian Affairs upon his return to the United States.
- Date:
- 2019-04-19
- Summary:
- Folklorists and anthropologists have explored children's preoccupation with supernatural entities for decades, and the development of the internet has given rise to online video formats for supernatural practices that are popular among children in Russia and beyond. Drawing on ethnographic research in Russian children's summer camps and online digital ethnography, this talk addresses children's supernatural beliefs, play, and imagination. A doctoral candidate in anthropology at the European University in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Angelina Kozlovskaia has presented her research at conferences in Russia as well as India, Australia, Finland, Belgium, and Estonia. During Spring 2019 she is a visiting scholar with the Russian and East European Institute and the Russian Studies Workshop.
- Date:
- 2019-02-06
- Summary:
- The current paradigm of political science suggests that authoritarian regimes suppress freedoms of speech and press as significant threats to autocratic survival. However, evidence now suggests that autocratic governments can exploit such ostensibly democratic institutions in new and surprising ways. Among the most salient examples are Russia and China where media outlets (even the freest ones) figure in the autocratic toolbox, a phenomenon that lends credence to the idea of self-development of non-democratic regimes. Valerii Nechai is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Applied Political Science at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. His research addresses the interaction of media and politics.
- Date:
- 2019-04-04
- Summary:
- Technological, communicative, political, and commercial challenges in the contemporary media sphere are transforming journalism. This talk addresses the impact of those challenges on perceptions of the journalistic profession among Russian journalists themselves. Marina Berezhnaia chairs the Department of TV and Radio Journalism in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Saint Petersburg State University (SPbSU). She has published textbooks in journalism and scholarly articles on journalistic ethics and the treatment of social issues in the media. Prior to joining the SPbSU, she pursued an active career in publishing and telejournalism.
- Date:
- 2019-01-14
- Main contributors:
- Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Ron Osgood, Patrick C. Shih
- Summary:
- Date:
- 2019-01-14
- Main contributors:
- Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, John Bodnar
- Summary:
- This paper will explore the way American soldiers from three different wars wrote about their experiences. It will attempt to unravel the fragile relationship between patriotic accounts of war that tended to uphold noble ideals validating the nation's war effort and thepossibility that war could actually produce laudable traits andmore tragic stories that refused to efface the confusion and pain military conflict imposed upon individuals. As such, it will explore the problem of memory and trauma and the significant tension soldiers faced when they attempted to recreate their experience for a public audience that could not know what it had been like. The part of the paper devoted to World War II will focus on the fiction of Norman Maile and the autobiography of William Manchester--both combat vets. Mailer's renowned novel, The Naked and the Dead, recast the "Good War" in a highly critical light that exposed the deep strain of violence that he felt marked American society and explained why it spared no expense in bringing ruin to the Japanese. Manchester acknowledged the violence and carnage but sought to extract from it tales of heroic men and who cared deeply for each other. Such narratives contrast sharply with those coming from the experience of Vietnam. Vets like Ron Kovic, Tim O'Brien and others mounted withering attacks on any notion that patriotic service could result in anything positive or nurture admirable character traits. In some ways the World War II stories were actually more conflicted than those formed in Southeast Asia in the 1960s. The final part of this brief paper will explore the outpouring of literature produced by men who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Again, significant differences are evident among the fighters themselves. A greater effort is made in this most recent contest to restore some faith in traditional patriotic ideals. This effort has had some success but has been hotly contested by tales that absolutely reject any attempt to use patriotic honor to wipe out the memory of pain and loss.
- Date:
- 2019-01-14
- Main contributors:
- Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Rebecca Wingo
- Summary:
- The History Harvest is a community-centered, student-driven archival project that empowers community voices through material-based oral histories. Over the course of a semester, History Harvest students partner with a community to run an event in which community members bring artifacts of significance. Students record community members as they tell stories about their objects and digitize the artifacts for a shared online archive. The community members then take their items back home; there is no acquisition. This one-day event is a bit like Antiques Roadshow, except everything is valuable. More than a singular event, however, the History Harvest can be a litmus test for the success of a community partnership.
- Date:
- 2019-01-14
- Main contributors:
- Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, David S. Ferriero
- Summary:
- Ferriero will discuss the planning process for a major exhibit on the Vietnam War within the context of the mission of the National Archives. Particular focus will be on how the principles of Open Government—transparency, collaboration, and participation—impacted that process. Building on the success of the National Archives Citizen Archivist Project, Ferriero will share how the lessons learned have influenced his agency’s approach to exhibit and education planning, with an emphasis on the exhibit commemorating the Vietnam War. Remembering Vietnam is a media-rich exploration the Vietnam War, featuring interviews with Americans and Vietnamese veterans and civilians with firsthand experience of the war’s events as well as historic analysis. It is a fascinating collection of newly discovered and iconic original documents, images, film footage, and artifacts that illuminate 12 critical episodes in the war that divided the peoples of both the United States and Vietnam, covering the period 1946 to 1975. The exhibit encourages visitors to answer these questions: Why did the United States become involved in Vietnam? Why was the war so long? Why was it so controversial? The sacrifices made by veterans and their families, the magnitude of death and destruction, and the war’s lasting effects require no less. Remembering Vietnam is a resource for refreshing our collective memory. National Archives records trace the policies and decisions made by the architects of the conflict. Its collection of evidence provides an opportunity for new insight and greater understanding of one of the most consequential wars in American history.
- Date:
- 2019-01-14
- Main contributors:
- Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Kurt Luther
- Summary:
- Stories of war are complex, varied, powerful, and fundamentally human. Thus, crowdsourcing can be a natural fit for deepening our understanding of war, both by scaling up research efforts and by providing compelling learning experiences. Yet, few crowdsourced history projects help the public to do more than read, collect, or transcribe primary sources. In this talk, I present three examples of augmenting crowdsourcing efforts with computational techniques to enable deeper public engagement and more advanced historical analysis around stories of war. In “Mapping the Fourth of July in the Civil War Era,” funded by the NHPRC, we explore how crowdsourcing and natural language processing (NLP) tools help participants learn historical thinking skills while connecting American Civil War-era documents to scholarly topics of interest. In “Civil War Photo Sleuth,” funded by the NSF, we combine crowdsourcing with face recognition technology to help participants rediscover the lost identities of photographs of American Civil War soldiers and sailors. And in “The American Soldier in World War II,” funded by the NEH, we bring together crowdsourcing, NLP, and visualization to help participants explore the attitudes of American GIs in their own words. Across all three projects, I discuss broader principles for designing tools, interfaces, and online communities to support more meaningful and valuable crowdsourced contributions to scholarship about war and conflict.
- Date:
- 2019-01-14
- Main contributors:
- Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Ron Osgood, Patrick C. Shih
- Summary:
- Date:
- 2019-01-14
- Main contributors:
- Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Heather Stur
- Summary:
- For as much as has been written and produced about the Vietnam War, the voices telling the story have remained much the same. Historians and journalists have privileged American male combat veterans of the war and high-ranking U.S. policymakers, while in Vietnam, the official state story is one of U.S. imperialists versus Vietnamese freedom fighters. Lost in these tellings of the story was South Vietnamese veterans and their families, anticommunist Vietnamese citizens, political activists of all stripes in South Vietnam, American women who served in the war, U.S. support or rear echelon troops, U.S. Embassy employees, and troops of the "free world" forces in Vietnam. These voices are crucial for understanding how the conflict developed and played out, what its consequences were, and what its legacies are.
- Date:
- 2019-01-14
- Main contributors:
- Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Edward Linenthal
- Summary:
- The mass slaughter of 1864-1865 in the American Civil War eroded traditional belief in martial sacrifice as redemptive, blood shed for the new birth of the nation. Narratives in tension continued through both World Wars and the Korean War and gained intensity with the erosion of popular support for the war in Vietnam. The “dope and dementia,” “quagmire,” and “atrocity producing context” narrative templates clashed with traditional patriotic narratives of America at war.