Stanford University

Society

FSI researchers work to understand continuity and change in societies as they confront their problems and opportunities. This includes the implications of migration and human trafficking. What happens to a society when young girls exit the sex trade? How do groups moving between locations impact societies, economies, self-identity and citizenship? What are the ethnic challenges faced by an increasingly diverse European Union? From a policy perspective, scholars also work to investigate the consequences of security-related measures for society and its values.

The Europe Center reflects much of FSI’s agenda of investigating societies, serving as a forum for experts to research the cultures, religions and people of Europe. The Center sponsors several seminars and lectures, as well as visiting scholars.

Societal research also addresses issues of demography and aging, such as the social and economic challenges of providing health care for an aging population. How do older adults make decisions, and what societal tools need to be in place to ensure the resulting decisions are well-informed? FSI regularly brings in international scholars to look at these issues. They discuss how adults care for their older parents in rural China as well as the economic aspects of aging populations in China and India.

Expanding the Agnotological Toolbox: Methods of Sex and Gender Analysis (Chapter in Science and the Production of Ignorance: When the Quest for Knowledge Is Thwarted)

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An introduction to the new area of ignorance studies that examines how science produces ignorance—both actively and passively, intentionally and unintentionally.

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MIT Press
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Dialect Jokebooks and Russian-Yiddish and English-Yiddish Dictionaries (Chapter in The Whole World in a Book: Dictionaries in the Nineteenth Century)

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Edited by Sarah Ogilvie and Gabriella Safran

  • Advances new arguments and theories about the development of lexicography and how changes in the nineteenth century resonate today
  • Covers a wide range of languages, and represents the first time some of these dictionaries have been addressed by academic scholarship
  • Draws on unpublished and archival material not previously analyzed in the literature
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Oxford University Press
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Gabriella Safran
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Le nouveau rêve américain : du Maghreb à la Californie

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Dans ce travail d'ethnographie urbaine qui la conduit de San Francisco à la Silicon Valley, de Los Angeles à San Diego, Marie-Pierre Ulloa se penche sur les diasporas maghrébines qui se sont installées en Californie.

En croisant des voix de différents genres, classes sociales et générations, elle montre comment les Maghrébins vivent le rêve américain dans cet Extrême-Occident qu'est la Californie. Loin des stigmatisations liées au lourd héritage colonial entre la France et l'Afrique du Nord...

À partir d'une centaine d'entretiens et d'une enquête de terrain allant des mosquées aux salles de concerts, des locaux d'associations aux jardins d'enfants, des festivals aux restaurants " ethniques ", Marie-Pierre Ulloa éclaire la construction d'une maghrébinité californienne différente de celle des populations d'origine nord-africaine en France.

En son sein sont aussi pris en compte les Juifs d'Afrique du Nord qui s'en distinguent, tout en s'y incluant. Outre la gastronomie, ce qui unifie ces populations, c'est la langue française, leur lingua franca avec l'anglais. Sans faire preuve d'angélisme, la vision offerte dans cet ouvrage est celle d'une intégration réussie, sans pour autant occulter les ratés du rêve américain.

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Marie-Pierre Ulloa

The Making of World Authorship

 

This workshop is co-sponsored by: Comparative Literature, The Contemporary, the Department of Sociology, Taube Center for Jewish Studies, and The Europe Center

 

McClatchy Hall A

Department of Sociology

Gisèle Sapiro École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Workshops

Regimes of Inequality: The Political Economy of Health and Wealth

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Inequality has become an intractable feature of the rich industrialized democracies, despite consensus among mass publics and experts that more social and economic equality is desirable. This book examines the political dynamics underlying the “new normal” of high and rising inequality since 1980. To do so, it traces the largely unsuccessful attempts of west European governments during this period to reduce socioeconomic inequalities in health. In England, France, and Finland, three quite different countries that span the range of European political economies, governments stated their intention to reduce inequalities in health — yet in all three cases, they were largely unable or unwilling to do what it would take to achieve this goal. Lynch finds that when center-left politicians take up the issue of socioeconomic inequalities in health, they do so in response to perceived taboos against redistribution, public spending and market regulation in a neoliberal era. Reframing inequality as a matter of health, rather than of the maldistribution of political or economic resources, is at best a partial solution, however: It reshapes the policy-making environment surrounding social inequality in ways that make it more difficult to reduce either socioeconomic inequality or health inequalities. Technocratic, medicalized inequality discourses result in shifting the Overton window around inequality away from tried-and-true policy remedies for inequality, and toward complex policy levers that are far more likely to fail. In short, inequality persists despite growing awareness of the harms it creates because of the way political leaders choose to talk about it — and not only because of economic necessity or demands from the electorate.
 
 
Julia Lynch

Julia Lynch is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.  Her research focuses on the politics of inequality and social policy in the rich democracies, particularly the countries of western Europe. She has special interests in comparative health policy and the politics of health inequalities; the politics of aging; and the relationship between party systems and political economy in western Europe. Lynch serves as an expert advisor to the World Health Organization’s European regional office on issues of health equity, and is past chair of the Health Politics and Policy section of the American Political Science Association and past treasurer of the Council for European Studies. She is editor of Socio-Economic Review, a multi-disciplinary journal focusing on analytical, political and moral questions arising at the intersection of economy and society.  At Penn, Lynch is faculty director of the Penn In Washington Program and co-director of the Penn-Temple European Studies Colloquium. Lynch holds a BA from Harvard University, a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and has held visiting appointments at the European University Institute, Sciences Po, and Oxford.
 
Julia Lynch Speaker University of Pennsylvania
Lectures

Germany, Europe and Russia

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Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/BGjRsO0fKds

 

About this Event: Germany plays a key role in shaping European and Western policy toward Russia.  Berlin is a leading voice within the European Union on Russian issues, and Chancellor Angela Merkel co-chairs with the French president the "Normandy" effort that seeks to broker a setttlement between Ukraine and Russia to the conflict in Donbas.  Emily Haber, the German ambassador to the United States, will join us for a conversation on how Berlin sees the Russian challenge and how the West should respond.

 

About the Speaker: Emily Margarethe Haber has been German Ambassador to the United States since June 2018. 

Immediately prior to this, Haber, a career foreign service officer, was deployed to the Federal Ministry of the Interior, serving as State Secretary overseeing security and migration at the height of the refugee crisis in Europe. In this capacity, she worked closely with the US administration on topics ranging from the fight against international terrorism to global cyberattacks and cybersecurity. In 2009, she was appointed Political Director and, in 2011, State Secretary at the Foreign Office, the first woman to hold either post. 

Emily Haber is married to Hansjörg Haber. The couple has two sons. 

Emily Margarethe Haber German Ambassador to the United States
Seminars

Jaqueline Bemmer

Encina Hall
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA  94305

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Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar at The Europe Center, 2019-2020
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Jaqueline Bemmer is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Law Faculty of the University of Vienna and a Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar at The Europe Center. She is a Celticist, historian and legal scholar, specializing in early medieval Irish law as well as late Roman law. She earned her DPhil in History from the University of Oxford producing the first thesis on the law of pledging in early medieval Ireland, focused around the legal tract Bretha im Ḟuillemu Gell (Judgements on Pledge Interests). 

Her current monograph: ‘Poena: conceptions of pain and suffering in late Roman legal sources’ deals with a critical period of transition and multi-normativity in European legal history situated at the threshold between the fading Roman Empire in the West and the rise of Christendom and small Germanic kingdoms in early medieval Europe, examining normative approaches to punishment, criminal procedure and penal policies. She is hosted by Prof. Walter Scheidel.

Jaqueline Bemmer has taught Irish, Welsh and Roman law as well as Latin legal terminology. She is a member of The Royal Historical Society and the Irish Legal History Society, and was a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Scots Law, University of Aberdeen. She is articles editor for the Journal of the European Society for Comparative Legal History and has most recently been selected for participation in the Wallace Johnson Program at The Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University.

Jussi Behrndt

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Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professor at The Europe Center, 2019-2020
Professor of Mathematics, Graz University of Technology
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Jussi Behrndt studied Mathematics and Physics at the Technical University of Berlin and obtained his Masters degree in 2002 and his Doctoral degree in 2005. From 2005-2008 he held the position of Research Associate at the Technical University of Berlin and a Postdoc position at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. Behrndt completed his Habilitation in Mathematics in 2008 and held appointments as visiting professor at the Technical University of Vienna and the Technical University of Berlin, before becoming a full professor in Mathematics at Graz University of Technology in 2011.

Behrndt's research focuses on functional analysis, operator theory, and mathematical physics, with an emphasis on spectral theory and perturbation methods for differential operators. Among his current research interests are Schrödinger and Dirac operators with singular potentials, related approximation problems, Dirichlet-to-Neumann maps and Titchmarsh-Weyl m-functions, and various abstract extension theory problems for symmetric operators and relations.

Jussi Behrndt has published more than 100 articles in mathematical journals and conference proceedings volumes, and organized several international math conferences and workshops in the area of operator theory. His most recent monograph "Boundary Value Problems, Weyl Functions, and Differential Operators" was published at the beginning of 2020 in the Springer book series Monographs in Mathematics.

Professor Behrndt is currently teaching for the Department of Mathematics the course MATH 258: Topics in Geometric Analysis (Winter Quarter).

Yvonne Franz

Encina Hall
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA  94305

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Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar at The Europe Center, 2019-2020
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Yvonne Franz studied geography at the University in Cologne and the University of Vienna where she also received her doctorate in urban geography in 2013. As a university assistant (prae-doc) at University of Vienna she coordinated the Erasmus Mundus Masters in Urban Studies 4CITIES and conducted extensive fieldwork on gentrification and urban rejuvenation policies in New York City, Vienna and Berlin. After the completion of her doctorate, the successful approval of research proposals within the Joint Programming Initiative Urban Europe allowed her to join the Institute of Urban and Regional Research (ISR) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences as a post-doc researcher. Currently, she is affiliated to the University of Vienna, Department of Geography and Regional Research as a postdoc university assistant. Her research projects include the INTERREG Central Europe (funded by the European Regional Development Fund) on “Integrating Refugees in Society and the Labour Market Through Social Innovation - SIforREF” as well as research projects on arrival spaces and housing transition in Vienna. She teaches courses within the fields of urban geography and urban studies both at the University of Vienna and other universities. In addition, she is the local coordinator of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master in Urban Studies (4CITIES). Her research interests lie in the fields of urban geography with a special focus on neighbourhood development, urban revitalisation and gentrification as well as urban planning and governance. Comparative analyses with Berlin, Bologna and Ljubljana are part of her ongoing research collaborations.

During her visit as Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar at The Europe Center, Yvonne will continue analysis and writing on spaces of encounter and social innovation in neighbourhood development.

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