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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.
Lecture delivered by Ezelle Sanford III, PhD (Assistant Professor, Department of History, Carnegie Mellon University) on September 30, 2022. This event is a part of the IUPUI Center for Africana Studies and Culture's "Black Health Equity Speaker Series" and was cosponsored by the IUPUI Medical Humanities and Health Studies program and the John Shaw Billings History of Medicine Society. Includes an introduction by Leslie Etienne (Founding Executive Director of the Center for Africana Studies and Culture and Director of Africana Studies Program, IUPUI).
We live in an age when mobile touchscreen devices are customarily “on” and in-hand. As a consequence, we frequently engage in practices that involve documenting the self in motion, our geolocational beads (or arrows) locating us and guiding us to destinations of interest (e.g., ATMs, gas stations, restaurants, friend’s houses). These are the sorts of habits our technologies engender. And I contend that, in doing so, they help form and regulate conduct in a nonconscious, habitual—even neurophysiological—manner. In which case, it is at the nonconscious level of existence that habit change needs to work. In this talk, I will draw on American pragmatist Charles Sanders Pierce’s account of habit change to discuss how our geolocative devices might orient us differently in relation to the landscapes and urban terrains we traverse. To provide example of what habit change might look like in the mobile, connected present, I discuss three collaborative mapping projects in whose design and development I have participated. These projects—Augusta App, Ghosts of the Horseshoe, and Ward One App—have afforded me opportunities to explore how the very mechanisms through which technologies of connectivity and location awareness shape habit might also serve as vehicles for re-appropriating social, political histories and practices in the service of habit change.
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.
Poster presented at the Indiana University Medical Student Program for Research and Scholarship (IMPRS) Research Symposium held on July 27-28, 2023 in Indianapolis, Indiana.
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.
Soprano Virginia MacWatters was known not only for her impressive operatic career during which she performed in opera houses throughout the United States, Europe, and South America, but also for her dedication to teaching. In 1957 she joined the voice faculty of the Indiana University School of Music where she remained until her retirement in 1982. “Una Voce Poco Fa” is composed by Gioachino Rossini, an Italian composer, for the opera The Barber of Seville in 1816. The title translates as “A voice a little while ago” and is a highly popular piece in the comedic operas. Virginia performed as Rosina in 1949. “I Love You So” is piece from the Merry Widow, a German operetta composed by Franz Lehar.
"It's been a real adventure, but he just was thrown in the mix with his three brothers." Al and Linda Hublar talk about the lack of support and resources available when their son Mark was born with Down syndrome in the 1960s. They have made a point of treating him the same as his siblings without disabilities. Linda and Al were interviewed in New Albany, Indiana in 2017.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics & American Institutions was an endowed ethics research center established in 1972 at Indiana University Bloomington. Through its programming, the Poynter Center addressed bioethics, religion, political ethics, research ethics, professional and educational ethics, technology, and many other areas. Initiatives over the years included courses such as "The Citizen and the News," supported by the Ford Foundation, which began in the fall of 1975 and studied the institutions that produce news and information about public affairs in America.
Lecture giving Dr. Smelser's understanding of the American Revolution, with his interpretation of the events of the revolution and their meaning for today. Smelser tries to give an unbiased view of the revolution.
