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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.

Stanford Japan Barometer Unveils Insights into Japanese Public Opinion on Same-Sex Marriage and Marital Surname Choices

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What policy options does the Japanese public prefer, and what might shift its attitudes? These are some questions the Stanford Japan Barometer (SJB) sets out to answer. SJB is a large-scale public opinion survey on political, economic, and social issues in Japan. Co-developed and led by Stanford sociologist Kiyoteru Tsutsui, the deputy director of APARC and director of the Center’s Japan Program, and Dartmouth College political scientist Charles Crabtree, a former visiting assistant professor with the Japan Program, SJB has so far published the results from its first two waves.

Wave 1 focused on issues related to gender and sexuality in Japanese politics, while Wave 2 focused on issues related to foreign policy and national defense. SJB findings fielded in these two waves indicate that most Japanese support recognizing same-sex unions, legalizing a dual-surname option for married couples, promoting women’s leadership in society, and that, in a Taiwan contingency, ​​Japanese people would be hesitant to fight China but would respond to a request from the U.S. military for logistical support.

Jointly with the Japan Program, GLOBE+, an international news outlet operated by the esteemed Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, is publishing a series highlighting SJB findings. You can read an English translation of the first three pieces in this series. Here, we provide an English translation of the latest installment in the series, published on September 19, 2024. The translation was initially generated via DeepL. The text below was edited for accuracy and style.


Japanese Public Opinion on Legalizing Same-Sex Unions


Japan remains the only G7 country that has not legalized same-sex marriage or introduced a partnership system that offers marriage-equivalent rights at the national level. It is also the only country worldwide that mandates married couples to adopt the same surname.

Yet, according to the SJB survey, 47.2% of respondents were either "very much in favor" (18.6%) or "somewhat in favor" (28.6%) of legalizing same-sex marriage in Japan. In contrast, 15.8% were either "very much against" (6.8%) or "somewhat against" (9.0%), while 36.9% held a neutral stance, being “neither in favor nor against.” Support for same-sex marriage outpaced neutral responses by nearly three times.

The survey also explored public support for same-sex couples in leadership roles by asking respondents what kind of individuals they would like to see as members of the Diet or as outside directors of companies.

Participants were asked to consider six key attributes when identifying the types of candidates they would prefer to see in the next House of Representatives elections:

  • Age (from 32 years old to 82 years old, in 10-year increments)　
  • Gender　
  • Marriage (married, never married, divorced, same-sex couple)　
  • Number of children　
  • Educational background　
  • Work experience (11 types, including finance, economy, industry, and foreign affairs bureaucrats, business owners and executives, governors, local legislators, and homemakers)


Respondents were asked to create two “candidate images” by randomly combining six attributes and selecting one in a two-choice format. The same question was repeated a total of 10 times with different choices. The responses obtained from all survey participants were tabulated and analyzed.

The reason for the complexity of the method is that, from a statistical point of view, it allows the researchers to get closer to the “true feelings” (public opinion) of the respondents.

For each of the attributes, the percentage would be 50% if the respondents were indifferent to sexual orientation, but 45% of the respondents were in favor of electing a person from a same-sex couple to the National Assembly and 43.5% were in favor of electing a person from a same-sex couple to be a non-executive director, showing a downward trend in support. Although many people are in favor of same-sex marriage, it is evident that there is still a sense of discrimination against sexual minorities holding important public positions.

Of note, male respondents were less supportive of electing a person from a same-sex couple to the National Assembly, at 37.6%, compared to 50.6% of women. Support for electing a person from a same-sex couple to the National Assembly was also lower among respondents aged 70 and older at 31.1%, and higher among younger respondents: 58.9% of those aged 18 and 19, 60.5% of those aged 20 to 24, and 56.5% of those aged 25 to 29.

To identify what conditions could move public opinion, the researchers designed seven prompts regarding same-sex marriage, assigned them randomly to respondents, and compared their answers. The prompts included assumptions such as “In Japanese society, marriage is traditionally between two people of the opposite sex;” “If same-sex marriage is recognized, it will make it easier for same-sex couples to raise children, which may lead to an improvement in the declining birth rate and have beneficial effects for Japanese society;” and “From the perspective of human rights and gender equality, it would be unfair not to recognize same-sex marriage.”

The results show that support for same-sex marriage increases the most when respondents are presented with an argument that not allowing same-sex marriage is unfair from the point of view of human rights and gender equality.
 

Public Opinion on Legalizing Dual-Surname Option for Married Couples


The SJB survey also examined the public opinion of the selective surname system, which would allow married Japanese people to keep their premarital surnames if they wished. In surveying this issue, the researchers used two different question formats to shed light on a debate surrounding the Japanese government’s modification of its public opinion survey on this issue between 2017 and 2021. After the government revised the question asked on this matter, support for the selective surname system dropped from a record high of 42.5% in 2017 to a record low of only 28.9% in 2021. Therefore, the SJB randomly assigned respondents to answer two versions of the government survey under scrutiny, from 2017 and 2021.

In the 2021 government survey, respondents had to read certain materials before saying whether they approve or disapprove of the selective surname system. The materials included two tables. One, titled “Reference Material on Married Couples’ Surnames and Family Names,” explains the current system of married couples' surnames, the selective system of married couples' surnames, and the legal system for the use of the common name of the maiden name, respectively.

The other table explains the options, with the horizontal axis divided into “maintain the system of married couples with the same surname” and “introduce a selective system of married couples with separate surnames,” and the vertical axis divided into “no” and “yes” for “need to establish a legal system for using the maiden name as the common name.”

In 2021, the respondents were asked to choose from the following three options: “It is preferable to maintain the current system of married couples having the same family name;” “It is preferable to maintain the current system of married couples having the same family name and establish a legal system for the use of the maiden name;” and “It is preferable to introduce a selective system of married couples having separate family names.”

On the other hand, the question until 2017 was “Currently, married couples must always take the same surname.” After explaining the current system and the system of selective married couples' surnames, the question was “As long as a couple is married, they should always take the same surname.. If a couple wishes to take their premarital surname, they may change the law to allow each person to take their pre-marital surname. The couple should take the same surname, but it is acceptable to change the law so that a person who has changed his/her surname by marriage can use his/her pre-marital surname as a common name anywhere.”

As a result, under the 2021 method, 30% of the respondents chose “it is better to maintain the current system of the same family name for married couples,” 39% chose “it is better to maintain the current system of the same family name for married couples and establish a legal system for the use of the maiden name as a common name,” and 30% chose “it is better to introduce an optional system of separate family names for married couples.

On the other hand, in the 2017 method, 23% of respondents said “As long as a couple is married, they should always take the same surname (family name), and there is no need to change the current law,” while 57% said “If a couple wishes to take their pre-marital surname (family name), it is fine to change the law to allow each couple to take their pre-marital surname (family name). 57% said they “do not mind” and 19% said they “do not mind” if the law is changed to allow married couples to use their maiden name as a common name even if they wish to keep their maiden name. In other words, 57% of the respondents chose to selectively separate their surnames.

The 2021 method was criticized for how the question was asked, which was different from how it had been asked until 2017 and allegedly induced more support for using common names. The results of the SJB survey show that even if respondents were randomly assigned to the 2017 and 2021 methods at the same time, the results of the 2021 method would show more support for using common names. In other words, one should be wary of citing the results of the 2021 method to argue that support for the use of common names is higher than support for a legal change to selective married couples.

To find out under what conditions public opinion would move toward selective surnames for married couples, the SJB also conducted an experiment on different arguments that might influence support for a legal change to allow married couples to keep different surnames.

The arguments included different prompts: “In Japanese society, there is a tradition that married couples take the same surname once they get married;” “In Japanese society, there is a tradition that married couples take separate surnames once they get married;” “Among those who had surnames in pre-modern Japan, and even in early Meiji Era Japan, it was normal for married couples to have separate surnames after marriage;” “It is largely women who change their surnames after marriage;” “If married couples take different surnames after marriage, it will weaken family ties and have negative impact on children, which will lead to a loss for Japanese society.” The respondents were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the prompts.

The results show that the argument about social costs — how allowing married couples to maintain different surnames would weaken family ties with harmful effects on children — seems to substantially change public attitudes, reducing support for a legal change.

The SJB survey results suggest that responses to polls vary depending on how the questions are asked and on the assumptions made. When looking at poll results, it is therefore important to note the framing of the questions and prompts.

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A new installment of the Asahi Shimbun’s GLOBE+ series highlights Stanford Japan Barometer findings about Japanese public opinion on recognizing same-sex unions and legalizing a dual-surname option for married couples. Co-developed by Stanford sociologist Kiyoteru Tsutsui and Dartmouth College political scientist Charles Crabtree, the public opinion survey tracks evolving Japanese attitudes on political, economic, and social issues and unveils how question framing changes the results of public opinion polls.

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Serkan Yolacan

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Assistant Professor of Anthropology
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Serkan Yolaçan’s research broadly focuses on the interplay of past and present in the lives of individuals, diasporas, and states. In all his projects, Yolaçan combines broad space and deep history empirically, and history and anthropology methodologically, to generate geo-historical frames that speak to questions of human mobility, international order, and social change.

His book project, Time Travelers: Pasts and Possibilities in the Caucasus, weaves the modern experiences of Turkey, Iran, and Russia through the lens of a diasporic people from the region of Azerbaijan. By placing mobile Azeris at the center of three major states, he ties together their near-synchronous transformations from constitutional revolutions at the beginning of the twentieth century to expansionist agendas in the twenty-first. Yolaçan’s second project is a comparative study of millennial and messianic movements. It explores how embodied authority, eschatological beliefs, and textual traditions interact to create invisible forms of sovereignty.

He is also part of a collaborative project that opens a new inquiry in political anthropology by studying two ubiquitous figures of the 21st century: strongman and informal diplomat. By shifting the basis of understanding their partnership from bureaucracies to networks, law to trust, and protocols to rituals, the project renders these opaque figures legible to ethnographic and historical inquiry while offering new methodological approaches to the study of populism, authoritarianism, diplomacy, and internationalism.

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Kabir Tambar

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Associate Professor of Anthropology
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Kabir Tambar is a sociocultural anthropologist, working at the intersections of politics, language, and religion. He is broadly interested in the politics of history, performances of public criticism, and varieties of Islamic practice in Turkey.

Tambar’s first book is a study of the politics of pluralism in contemporary Turkey, focusing on the ways that Alevi religious history is staged for public display. More generally, the book investigates how secular states govern religious differences through practices of cultural and aesthetic regulation. Tambar is currently working on a new project that examines the historical imagination in contexts of political closure, both at the end of the Ottoman empire and during periods of emergency rule in the era of the nation-state.

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2024 Shorenstein Journalism Award: The New York Times' Chris Buckley on Memory, Forgetting and Reporting on China

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Flyer for the 2024 Shorenstein Journalism Award with headshots of award winner Chris Buckley and panel speakers Oriana Skylar Mastro, Xueguan Zhou, and William Dobson.

*This event is at capacity and registration has closed*

“There is no 'why?' here”: Memory, forgetting and reporting on China

 

The 2024 Shorenstein Journalism Award Honors New York Times’ Chief China Correspondent Chris Buckley


In three decades of reporting in China, and now Taiwan, Chris Buckley has often grappled with how memories of war, revolution, famine, massacre and extraordinary change are preserved, erased, rewritten and fought over. In this talk, he will discuss the power of the past in China under Xi Jinping, and the challenges and rewards of reporting on — and trying to understand — China in an age of shrinking access.

Join APARC as we honor Buckley, winner of the 2024 Shorenstein Journalism Award for his exemplary reporting on societal, cultural, political, foreign policy, and security issues in China and Taiwan.

Buckley's keynote will be followed by a conversation with two experts: Oriana Skylar Mastro, a center fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Xueguang Zhou, the Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development, a professor of sociology, and a Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies senior fellow. The event will conclude with an audience Q&A session.

Moderator: William Dobson, coeditor of the Journal of Democracy and a member of the selection committee for the Shorenstein Journalism Award.

Speakers   
 

Chris Buckley

Chris Buckley grew up in Sydney, Australia, and began studying Chinese at the University of Sydney and the Australian National University. After graduating with a degree in history and abandoning the beginnings of a law degree, he went to Renmin University in Beijing, where he studied Chinese Communist Party history. He later returned to the Australian National University where he did graduate studies at the Contemporary China Center.

Chris has been the Chief China Correspondent for the New York Times since 2019. Before joining the Times in 2012, he was a senior correspondent in Beijing for Reuters News Agency for 7 years, and before that worked as a researcher and reporter for the New York Times and International Herald Tribune in Beijing. He has covered Chinese politics, foreign policy, social change and environmental issues for over 20 years, but is a newcomer to Taiwan where he now lives.

Chris was with colleagues a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting in 2020 for coverage of mass detentions and repressive controls on Uyghurs and other ethnic groups in Xinjiang region. He was also one of the team of reporters that won the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service in 2021 for coverage of the COVID pandemic. Chris spent 76 days in Wuhan during the COVID lockdown there and was then obliged to leave China in May 2020. He spent two and half years working from southern Sydney, where he grew up, and moved to Taiwan in late 2022.

Oriana Skylar Mastro

Oriana Skylar Mastro is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Courtesy Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, where her research focuses on Chinese military and security policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, war termination, and coercive diplomacy. She is also a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She was previously an assistant professor of security studies at Georgetown University. Mastro continues to serve in the United States Air Force Reserve, for which she currently works at the Pentagon as Deputy Director of Reserve Global China Strategy. For her contributions to U.S. strategy in Asia, she won the Individual Reservist of the Year Award in 2016 and 2022 (FGO).

She has published widely, including in International Security, Security Studies, Foreign Affairs, the Journal of Strategic Studies, The Washington Quarterly, the Economist, and the New York Times. Her most recent book, "Upstart: How China Became a Great Power" (Oxford University Press, 2024), evaluates China’s approach to competition. Her book, "The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime" (Cornell University Press, 2019), won the 2020 American Political Science Association International Security Section Best Book by an Untenured Faculty Member.

She holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University.

Headshot of Xueguang Zhou

Xueguang Zhou is the Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development, a professor of sociology, and a Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies senior fellow. His main area of research is on institutional changes in contemporary Chinese society, focusing on Chinese organizations and management, social inequality, and state-society relationships.

One of Zhou's current research projects is a study of the rise of the bureaucratic state in China. He also studies patterns of career mobility and personnel flow among different government offices to understand intra-organizational relationships in the Chinese bureaucracy. Another ongoing project is an ethnographic study of rural governance in China.

The latest book, "The Logic of Governance in China: An Organizational Approach," draws on more than a decade of fieldwork to offer a unified theoretical framework to explain how China's centralized political system maintains governance and how this process produces recognizable policy cycles that are obstacles to bureaucratic rationalization, professionalism, and the rule of law.

His other recent publications examine the role of bureaucracy in public goods provision in rural China, interactions among peasants, markets, and capital, access to financial resources in Chinese enterprises, multiple logics in village elections, and collusion among local governments in policy implementation.

Before joining Stanford in 2006, Zhou taught at Cornell University, Duke University, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is a guest professor at Peking University, Tsinghua University, and the People's University of China. Zhou received his Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford University in 1991.

Moderator
 

William Dobson

Will Dobson is the coeditor of the Journal of Democracy. Previously, he was the Chief International Editor at NPR where he led the network’s award-winning international coverage and oversaw a team of editors and correspondents in 17 overseas bureaus and Washington, DC. He is the author of The Dictator’s Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy, which examines the struggle between authoritarian regimes and the people who challenge them. It was selected as one of the “best books of the year” by Foreign Affairs, the Atlantic, The Telegraph, and Prospect, and it has been translated into many languages, including Chinese, German, Japanese, and Portuguese.

Prior to joining NPR, Dobson was Slate magazine’s Washington Bureau Chief, overseeing the magazine’s coverage of politics, jurisprudence, and international news. Previously, he served as the Managing Editor of Foreign Policy, overseeing the editorial planning of its award-winning magazine, website, and nine foreign editions. Earlier in his career, Dobson served as Newsweek International’s Asia Editor, managing a team of correspondents in more than 15 countries. His articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. He has also served as a Visiting Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Dobson holds a law degree from Harvard Law School and a Master’s degree in East Asian Studies from Harvard University. He received his Bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, from Middlebury College.

William Dobson

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Chris Buckley, New York Times’ Chief China Correspondent

Oriana Skylar Mastro

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Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Courtesy Assistant Professor of Political Science
Faculty Affiliate at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
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Oriana Skylar Mastro is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Courtesy Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, where her research focuses on Chinese military and security policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, war termination, and coercive diplomacy. She is also a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She was previously an assistant professor of security studies at Georgetown University. Mastro continues to serve in the United States Air Force Reserve, for which she currently works at the Pentagon as Deputy Director of Reserve Global China Strategy. For her contributions to U.S. strategy in Asia, she won the Individual Reservist of the Year Award in 2016 and 2022 (FGO).

She has published widely, including in International Security, Security Studies, Foreign Affairs, the Journal of Strategic Studies, The Washington Quarterly, the Economist, and the New York Times. Her most recent book, Upstart: How China Became a Great Power (Oxford University Press, 2024), evaluates China’s approach to competition. Her book, The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime (Cornell University Press, 2019), won the 2020 American Political Science Association International Security Section Best Book by an Untenured Faculty Member.

She holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University.

Her publications and commentary can be found at orianaskylarmastro.com and on Twitter @osmastro.

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Xueguang Zhou

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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development
Professor of Sociology
Graduate Seminar Professor at the Stanford Center at Peking University, June and July of 2014
Faculty Affiliate at the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions
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Xueguang Zhou is the Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development, a professor of sociology, and a Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies senior fellow. His main area of research is on institutional changes in contemporary Chinese society, focusing on Chinese organizations and management, social inequality, and state-society relationships.

One of Zhou's current research projects is a study of the rise of the bureaucratic state in China. He works with students and colleagues to conduct participatory observations of government behaviors in the areas of environmental regulation enforcement, in policy implementation, in bureaucratic bargaining, and in incentive designs. He also studies patterns of career mobility and personnel flow among different government offices to understand intra-organizational relationships in the Chinese bureaucracy.

Another ongoing project is an ethnographic study of rural governance in China. Zhou adopts a microscopic approach to understand how peasants, village cadres, and local governments encounter and search for solutions to emerging problems and challenges in their everyday lives, and how institutions are created, reinforced, altered, and recombined in response to these problems. Research topics are related to the making of markets, village elections, and local government behaviors.

His recent publications examine the role of bureaucracy in public goods provision in rural China (Modern China, 2011); interactions among peasants, markets, and capital (China Quarterly, 2011); access to financial resources in Chinese enterprises (Chinese Sociological Review, 2011, with Lulu Li); multiple logics in village elections (Social Sciences in China, 2010, with Ai Yun); and collusion among local governments in policy implementation (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 2011, with Ai Yun and Lian Hong; and Modern China, 2010).

Before joining Stanford in 2006, Zhou taught at Cornell University, Duke University, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is a guest professor at Peking University, Tsinghua University, and the People's University of China. Zhou received his Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford University in 1991.

The Institutional Foundations of the Chinese Bureaucratic State

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Alisha Cherian

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Alisha Elizabeth Cherian joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as APARC Predoctoral Fellow for the 2024-2025 academic year. She is a PhD candidate in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University. She received her BA from Vassar College in Anthropology and Drama with a correlate in Asian Studies, and her MA in the Social Sciences from the University of Chicago.

Her dissertation, entitled "Beyond Integration: Indian Singaporean Public Urban Life", investigates how enforced racial integration shapes racial formations and race relations in Singapore. Her project explores everyday encounters and interactions that are structured, but not overdetermined, by the state's multiracial policies as well as colonial histories and regional legacies of Indian indentured and convict labour. With her research, she seeks to contribute to a more ethnographic understanding of how plural societies are approached both scholarly and practically.

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Xinxin Lu

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Xinxin Lu joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as visiting student researcher in the fall of 2025 until winter 2026. She is currently a doctoral student in Sociology at Tsinghua University. Her dissertation focuses on "The Dying and the Chinese Family: The Economic, Moral, and Cultural Logic of End-of-Life Care in China."

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Matthew Dolbow

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Visiting Scholar at APARC, 2024-2026
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Matthew Dolbow joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as visiting scholar from 2024 to 2026 from the U.S. Department of State.  Before coming to APARC, Mr. Dolbow strengthened U.S. military deterrence capabilities in Asia as the U.S. Consul General in Okinawa, Japan.  As Chief of Staff in the U.S. National Security Council’s international economics office during the first Trump administration, Mr. Dolbow helped compile the 2017 U.S. National Security Strategy, which declared for the first time that "economic security is national security," and thus helped to establish a new bipartisan U.S. consensus on innovative trade, investment screening, and energy policies that increased U.S. competitiveness and secured the U.S. defense industrial base. As head of economic strategy at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing from 2013 to 2016, Mr. Dolbow created a Department of State-wide training program that taught colleagues to track and assess China's Belt and Road Initiative projects.  While at APARC, he will be conducting research on competition with China related to technology, innovation, human capital, and national security.

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Shilin Jia

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Shilin Jia joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow on Contemporary Asia for the 2024-2025 academic year.  He was previously a postdoctoral teaching fellow in computational social science at the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. degree in sociology. He received an M.A. degree in sociology from National Chengchi University, Taiwan and a B.A. degree in Philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley. His scholarly interest lies in applying computational methods to the study of political culture and organizations, with a special focus on post-reform China.

Jia has spent years analyzing job transfers of communist party elites in China. It is a project that he built up from scratch by using machines to code party elites’ CVs. His goal is to understand how the party-state has evolved through the division of labor and circulation of its elite members. He is also working on a computational content analysis project tracking ideological changes in the full text of 60 years of the People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China. The aim of that project is to understand how incompatible ideas in an ideological system can be gradually reconciled and how the concept of “market” was unfettered in that process. More recently, He has started a new project building word-embedding models based on multiple languages of Google N-grams and studying identity formation across language communities.

At APARC, while continuing to work on his existing projects, Jia began a book manuscript that provides a comprehensive analysis of the changing career patterns of CCP elites over 30 years of China’s economic reform. 

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Meredith Weiss

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Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Southeast Asia, Fall 2024-Winter 2025
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Meredith L. Weiss joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as 2024-2025 Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Southeast Asia from September 2024 to April 2025. She is Professor of Political Science in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy at the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). In several books—most recently, The Roots of Resilience: Party Machines and Grassroots Politics in Southeast Asia (Cornell, 2020), and the co-authored Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, 2022)—numerous articles, and over a dozen edited or co-edited volumes, she addresses issues of social mobilization, civil society, and collective identity; electoral politics and parties; and governance, regime change, and institutional reform in Southeast Asia, especially Malaysia and Singapore. She has conducted years of fieldwork in those two countries, along with shorter periods in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Timor-Leste, and has held visiting fellowships or professorships in Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, and the US. Weiss is the founding Director of the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium (SEAC) and co-edits the Cambridge Elements series, Politics & Society in Southeast Asia. As a Lee Kong Chian NUS–Stanford fellow, she worked primarily on a book manuscript on Malaysian sociopolitical development.

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CDDRL Visiting Scholar Teaching Fall Course on Global Feminisms

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Nora Sulots
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Mona Tajali, a scholar of gender and politics, has been a visiting scholar at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law since 2023. Her research interests include women’s political participation and representation in Muslim countries, with a comparative focus on Iran, Afghanistan, and Turkey, as well as the institutionalization of women’s rights in semi- or non-democratic contexts. This fall, Tajali brings her extensive expertise to Stanford's undergraduates through a new course, FEMGEN 202: Global Feminisms. Tajali previously designed and taught this course as an associate professor of international relations and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Agnes Scott College, a historically women’s liberal arts college in Atlanta.

"Global Feminisms" is designed to explore the diverse and often conflicting ways in which feminists around the world advocate for gender equality. The course promises to provide students with an interdisciplinary framework to critically engage with feminist theories and practices on a global scale. Rather than merely surveying the various feminist movements, FEMGEN 202 aims to equip students with the analytical tools to understand and research feminist activism across different cultural and political contexts.

The course begins with foundational concepts such as intersectionality, othering, and postcolonial feminism. These concepts are crucial for understanding the historical power dynamics and hierarchies that have shaped feminist discourses, particularly in non-Western contexts. Tajali’s course also delves into the complexities of religiously inspired forms of feminism, including Islamic feminism, challenging students to think beyond traditional Western feminist paradigms.

Tajali’s course is particularly timely as the global feminist movement continues to navigate the challenges of building solidarity across borders. Students will be encouraged to consider how feminists with diverse backgrounds and perspectives can work together to address common concerns, despite sometimes having opposing views on how best to improve the status of women.

Tajali’s academic journey has been marked by a deep commitment to understanding and advancing women’s rights in complex political contexts. Tajali is the author of several significant works, including Women’s Political Representation in Iran and Turkey: Demanding a Seat at the Table (2022) and Electoral Politics: Making Quotas Work for Women (2011), both of which are accessible as open-access publications. Her co-edited volume, Women and Constitutions in Muslim Contexts (2024), was also published this year, applying a gendered lens to the study of national constitutions of several Muslim countries. Her research has been further published in both academic and popular outlets, among them the Middle East Journal, Politics & Gender, The Conversation, and The Washington Post.

Beyond her academic contributions, Tajali has been an active participant in transnational feminist networks. She is a long-term collaborator with Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML), a global solidarity network that advocates for women’s rights in Muslim contexts. Since 2019, she has also served on the executive board of WLUML, further bridging the gap between academia and grassroots activism, and currently directs their Transformative Feminist Leadership Institute.

As Tajali brings her expertise to Stanford this fall, students will have the unique opportunity to engage with global feminist issues through the lens of a scholar deeply immersed in both academic research and practical advocacy. "Global Feminisms" promises to be a transformative course that not only broadens students’ understanding of feminism worldwide but also prepares them to contribute thoughtfully to the ongoing global conversation about gender equality.

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The course taught by Mona Tajali will examine feminist theories and concepts that can help students better appreciate the diversity and heterogeneity among feminisms, as well as the role and potential of cross-border solidarity and collective action around various feminist concerns.

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