Tag Archives: Social Sciences

When Elon Musk promised that Twitter ( re-branded as X ) will allow a wider range of content, including some that was previously banned as hate speech, disinformation, or conspiracy-centric, concerns over disinformation in political discourse heightened. But the challenge of democratic discourse in light of misinformation and disinformation is a historic challenge. Social media just speeds the process. Yet a significant concern is discerning who best to regulate what constitutes disinformation, in light of the political power of censorship.
We look at how disinformation has spread worldwide, shifting politics and challenging democracies. What are the most effective ways to counter disinformation? How might it be different for states, than for individuals? [ dur: 58mins. ]

Elzbieta Drazkiewic is Senior Research Fellow at the Slovak Academy of the Sciences. She is the author of “Taking vaccine regret and hesitancy seriously. The role of truth, conspiracy theories, gender relations and trust in the HPV immunisation programmes in Ireland” and co-author of “What Should Academics Do About Conspiracy Theories? Moving Beyond Debunking to Better Deal with Conspiratorial Movements, Misinformation and Post-Truth” (with Jaron Harambam).
Nora Benavidez is Senior Counsel and Director of Digital Justice & Civil Rights at Free Press. She also serves as Faculty Associate at Arizona State University’s Cronkite Institute. She is the author of “Now What? Fixing Facebook to Protect Us All” and “Facebook Ought to be Protecting Democracy Every Day.”
Corneliu Bjola is Associate Professor in Diplomatic Studies at the University of Oxford and Head of the Oxford Digital Diplomacy Research Group. He is the author of Digital Diplomacy and International Organizations: Autonomy, Legitimacy and Contestation (with R Zaiotti) and Countering Online Propaganda and Violent Extremism: The Dark Side of Digital Diplomacy (with J. Pamment).

Recorded May 2022.

This program is produced by Ankine Aghassian, Doug Becker, Melissa Chiprin and Sudd Dongre.

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Scholars' Circle Interviews

Scholars’ Circle – Insights into Private Military Corporations, their function and deployment by State and international corporations – July 23, 2023

July 23, 2023 host

Private Military Corporations have become a growing element of the warfighting landscape. States have historically had a monopoly on the use of military force. But private corporations challenge this monopoly. How much do they increase the lethality and likelihood of war? How much can private corporations be regulated? And what are the challenges to regulation? We explore the political, military, legal, and socioeconomic implications of private military corporations. [ dur: 58mins. ]

Ori Swed is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work at Texas Tech University. He is the editor of The Sociology of Privatized Security with Thomas Crosby. He is the author of “The Afghanistan War’s Legacy: The Reimagining of the Outsourcing of War and Security” and “No Accounting for Bad Contracting: Private Military and Security Contracts and Ineffective Regulation in Conflict Areas“
Sorcha MacLeod is an Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen and member of the United Nations Working Group on the use of Mercenaries. She is the author of Certifying Private Security Companies: Effectively Ensuring the Corporate Responsibility to Respect Human Rights?, Defining private security accountability and Regulating human rights in the context of outsourcing military logistics and armed security.
Christopher Kinsey is Lecturer in the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London. He is the author of International Law and the Control of Mercenaries and Private Military Companies, Turning war into business: Private security companies and commercial opportunism and the book Corporate Soldiers and International Security: The Rise of Private Military Companies
Anna Leander is Professor and Chair of the International Relations and Political Science Department at the Geneva Graduate Institute. She is the author of The Power to Construct International Security: On the Significance of Private Military Companies and Militarization matters: rhetorical resonances and market militarism. She is co-editor of Handbook of Private Military-Security Companies with Rita Abrahamsen.

This program is produced by Ankine Aghassian, Doug Becker, Melissa Chiprin and Sudd Dongre.

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Scholars' Circle Interviews

Scholars’ Circle – Politics, Violence and Memory The new social science of the Holocaust – April 30, 2023

April 30, 2023 host

New research on the Holocaust, on Jewish resistance and local collaboration in the killing offers insights into genocides, atrocities, and political violence. We discuss this research and other social science findings about the Holocaust in a new book Politics, Violence, Memory: The New Social Science of the Holocaust.

How does historical memory make researching the Holocaust a greater challenge? [ dur: 58mins. ]

Jelena Subotic is Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University. She is the author of Hijacked Justice: Dealing with the Past in the Balkans and Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism.
Jeffrey Kopstein is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust and the editor of Growing Apart? America and Europe in the 21st Century.

Together they are editors of Politics, Violence, Memory: The New Social Science of the Holocaust.

Excerpt from the publisher:

Politics, Violence, Memory highlights important new social scientific research on the Holocaust and initiates the integration of the Holocaust into mainstream social scientific research in a way that will be useful both for social scientists and historians. Until recently social scientists largely ignored the Holocaust despite the centrality of these tragic events to many of their own concepts and theories.
In Politics, Violence, Memory the editors bring together contributions to understanding the Holocaust from a variety of disciplines, including political science, sociology, demography, and public health. The chapters examine the sources and measurement of antisemitism; explanations for collaboration, rescue, and survival; competing accounts of neighbor-on-neighbor violence; and the legacies of the Holocaust in contemporary Europe. Politics, Violence, Memory brings new data to bear on these important concerns and shows how older data can be deployed in new ways to understand the “index case” of violence in the modern world.

This program is produced by Ankine Aghassian, Doug Becker, Mihika Chechi, and Sudd Dongre.

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Scholars' Circle Interviews

Scholars’ Circle – Story of Christmas Truce during WWI in 1914 ; Science of Compassion, a sense of humanity – December 25, 2022

December 24, 2022 host

Why did soldiers on the front line ( in Flanders on 1914 ) of one of the deadliest wars lay down their arms and play soccer with the very men they were supposed to shoot? We’ll revisit the Christmas truce of 1914 with Stanley Weintraub, author of, Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce. [ dur: 23 mins. ]

Stanley Weintraub is a Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at Penn State University. He is the author of more than 50 books including “Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce.“

Then, on the Scholars’ panel, we explore the Science of Compassion. What is it and how does it impact society? Can we learn to be compassionate? [ dur: 35mins. ]

Iain Wilkinson is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent’s School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research. He is the author of Suffering: A Sociological Introduction and Anxiety in a Risk Society
Dr. Paul Gilbert is the head of the Mental Health Research Unit as well as Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Derby. His books include Compassion-Focused Therapy: Distinctive Features and The Compassionate Mind: A New Approach to Life’s Challenges
Dr James R. Doty is a Clinical Professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University and Founder and Director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. He is the co-author of Surgical Disorders of the Sacrum

This program was first broadcast on Dec. 2017.

This program is produced with contributions from the following volunteers: Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin, Anaïs Amin, Tim Page, Mike Hurst and Sudd Dongre.

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Scholars' Circle Interviews

Scholars’ Circle – Disinformation in our time – May 1, 2022

May 1, 2022 host

With the news that Elon Musk intends to purchase Twitter and with promises that the social media company will allow a wider range of content, including some that was previously banned as hate speech, disinformation, or conspiracy-centric, concerns over disinformation in political discourse have been heightened. But the challenge of democratic discourse in light of misinformation and disinformation is a historic challenge. Social media just speeds the process. Yet a significant concern is discerning who best to regulate what constitutes disinformation, in light of the political power of censorship.
We look at how disinformation has spread worldwide, shifting politics and challenging democracies. What are the most effective ways to counter disinformation? How might it be different for states, than for individuals? [ dur: 58mins. ]

Elzbieta Drazkiewic is Senior Research Fellow at the Slovak Academy of the Sciences. She is the author of “Taking vaccine regret and hesitancy seriously. The role of truth, conspiracy theories, gender relations and trust in the HPV immunisation programmes in Ireland” and co-author of “What Should Academics Do About Conspiracy Theories? Moving Beyond Debunking to Better Deal with Conspiratorial Movements, Misinformation and Post-Truth” (with Jaron Harambam).
Nora Benavidez is Senior Counsel and Director of Digital Justice & Civil Rights at Free Press. She also serves as Faculty Associate at Arizona State University’s Cronkite Institute. She is the author of “Now What? Fixing Facebook to Protect Us All” and “Facebook Ought to be Protecting Democracy Every Day.”
Corneliu Bjola is Associate Professor in Diplomatic Studies at the University of Oxford and Head of the Oxford Digital Diplomacy Research Group. He is the author of Digital Diplomacy and International Organizations: Autonomy, Legitimacy and Contestation (with R Zaiotti) and Countering Online Propaganda and Violent Extremism: The Dark Side of Digital Diplomacy (with J. Pamment).

This program is produced by Ankine Aghassian, Doug Becker, Melissa Chiprin and Sudd Dongre.

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Scholars' Circle Interviews

Scholars’ Circle – Black Women Intellectuals how they empowered the civil rights struggle – March 20, 2022

March 20, 2022 host

What role have black women played in the civil rights era and black empowerment in addressing issues of white supremacy? We explore the importance of black women intellectuals, the way in which they have framed the scholarship, the analysis, and policies. [ dur: 34mins. ]

Ashley Farmer is Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies & History at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era and co-editor of New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition. She is also the Co-Editor and Curator of the Black Power Series with Ibram X. Kendi.

Several states have passed legislation barring teaching critical race theory in public schools. Today we explore critical race theory and how race is taught. How should academics proceed in light of the political backlash to teaching about race? [ dur: 22mins. ] This was originally recorded July 21, 2021. This is an excerpt, the complete version can be heard here.

Utz McKnight is Chair of the Department of Gender and Race Studies and Professor of Political Science at the University of Alabama. He is the author of Race and the Politics of the Exception: Equality, Sovereignty, and American Democracy and Everyday Practice of Race in America: Ambiguous Privilege.
Laura E. Gómez is Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. She has taught the Critical Race Studies Program in the law school’s upper-year curriculum. Professor Gómez has co-founded and served as the first co-director of UCLA School of Law’s Critical Race Studies Program. She is the author of Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism and Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race. 2nd ed.
David Livingstone Smith is Professor of Philosophy at New England University. He is the author of Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It, and the forthcoming Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization.

This program is produced by Maria Armoudian, Doug Becker, Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin and Sudd Dongre.

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By Maria Armoudian