Links to Event Materials:

• Professor David Broniatowski's Slides 

The Stanford Cyber Policy Center continues its online Zoom series: Digital Technology and Democracy, Security & Geopolitics in an Age of Coronavirus. These webinars will take place every other Wednesday at 10am PST. 

The next event, Digital Disinformation and Health: From Vaccines to the Coronavirus, will take place Wednesday, April 8, at 10am PST with Kelly Born, Executive Director of the Cyber Policy Center, in conversation with Professor David Broniatowski, from George Washington University, Professor Kathleen M. Carley, from Carnegie Mellon University, and Professor Jacob N. Shapiro, from Princeton University. 

In particular, Professor Broniatowski will discuss the results of new studies regarding bots and trolls in the vaccine debate, as well as what makes messages go viral from the standpoint of Fuzzy Trace Theory. Professor Carley will explore how information moves from country to country, with a look at both the differences in who is broadcasting certain types of disinformation and the role bots play in the spread. Professor Shapiro will speak to trends and themes we are seeing in coronavirus disinformation narratives and in news reporting on COVID-related misinformation.

 
Professor David Broniatowski conducts research in decision-making under risk, group decision-making, system architecture, and behavioral epidemiology. This research program draws upon a wide range of techniques including formal mathematical modeling, experimental design, automated text analysis and natural language processing, social and technical network analysis, and big data. Current projects include a text network analysis of transcripts from the US Food and Drug Administration's Circulatory Systems Advisory Panel meetings, a mathematical formalization of Fuzzy Trace Theory -- a leading theory of decision-making under risk, derivation of metrics for flexibility and controllability for complex engineered socio-technical systems, and using Twitter data to conduct surveillance of influenza infection and the resulting social response. 
 
Professor Kathleen M. Carley is Director of the Center for Informed Democracy and Social-cybersecurity (IDeaS) and the director of the center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS). She specializes in network science, agent-based modeling, and text-mining within a complex socio-technical system, organizational and social theory framework. In her work, she examines how cognitive, social and institutional factors come together to impact individual, organizational and societal outcomes. Using this lens she has addressed a number of policy issues including counter-terrorism, human and narcotic trafficking, cyber and nuclear threat, organizational resilience and design, natural disaster preparedness, cyber threat in social media, and leadership.   
 
Professor Jacob N. Shapiro is professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and directs the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, a multi-university consortium that compiles and analyzes micro-level data on politically motivated violence in countries around the world. His research covers conflict, economic development, and security policy. He is author of The Terrorist’s Dilemma: Managing Violent Covert Organizations and co-author of Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict. His research has been published in broad range of academic and policy journals as well as a number of edited volumes. He has conducted field research and large-scale policy evaluations in Afghanistan, Colombia, India, and Pakistan.

Kelly Born is the Executive Director of Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, where she collaborates with the center’s program leaders to pioneer new lines of research, policy-oriented curriculum, policy workshops and executive education. Prior to joining Stanford, she helped to launch and lead The Madison Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, one of the largest philanthropic undertakings working to reduce polarization and improve U.S. democracy.  There, she designed and implemented strategies focused on money in politics, electoral reform, civic engagement and digital disinformation. Kelly earned a master’s degree in international policy from Stanford University.

The 2017 iteration of the Festival de Marseille, with its dual sub-themes of “Focus Afrique” and “Focus Marseilles”, produced a space of being-in-common in response to the divided political climate of France. It encouraged a rethinking of citizenship and nationhood in terms of an inoperative community, rather than a center-periphery dualism.  For three weeks, the festival's performers danced, acted, and embodied their identities as a reminder that (the identity of social) space is constantly re-produced and re-inscribed with new meaning. Stemming from a larger ethnographic study that investigates the political potential of the festival as an intervention into fraught immigration policies of integration particular to France, this essay reimagines the Festival de Marseille—danse et arts multiples 2017 as a successful production of space for rehearsing an inoperative community in Europe’s most diverse city, as it contextualizes place, body, event, and the commons at the site of the festival. Located at the periphery of Europe, the Mediterranean, and North Africa, Marseille lives as a city on the edge, a geographic point that decenters the border of French national identity. Yet through its temporary occupation of the city, the festival crossed spatial, aesthetic, and thematic divisions of the center and periphery through its installation.
 
Anna Jayne Kimmel is a second year PhD student in Performance Studies pursuing a minor in Anthropology and graduate certificate in African Studies, with an emphasis in dance, memory, and public performance as politics. Her current research intersects: race, national identity, and post-colonialism through performance. As a dancer, Kimmel has performed the works of: Ohad Naharin, Trisha Brown, John Jaspers, Francesca Harper, Rebecca Lazier, Olivier Tarpaga, Marjani Forte, Susan Marshall, Loni Landon, and Christopher Ralph, amongst others. She holds an AB from Princeton University in French Studies with certificates in African Studies and Dance, and serves on the Future Advisory Board to Performance Studies international.

Speaker Bio:

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Kathryn Stoner is the Deputy Director at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and the Center on International Security and Cooperation at FSI. She teaches in the Department of Political Science at Stanford, and in the Program on International Relations, as well as in the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy Program. Prior to coming to Stanford in 2004, she was on the faculty at Princeton University for nine years, jointly appointed to the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School for International and Public Affairs. At Princeton she received the Ralph O. Glendinning Preceptorship awarded to outstanding junior faculty. She also served as a Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at McGill University. She has held fellowships at Harvard University as well as the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. 

In addition to many articles and book chapters on contemporary Russia, she is the author or co-editor of five books: "Transitions to Democracy: A Comparative Perspective," written and edited with Michael A. McFaul (Johns Hopkins 2013);  "Autocracy and Democracy in the Post-Communist World," co-edited with Valerie Bunce and Michael A. McFaul (Cambridge, 2010);  "Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia" (Cambridge, 2006); "After the Collapse of Communism: Comparative Lessons of Transitions" (Cambridge, 2004), coedited with Michael McFaul; and "Local Heroes: The Political Economy of Russian Regional" Governance (Princeton, 1997). She is currently finishing a book project entitled "Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order" (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

She received a BA (1988) and MA (1989) in Political Science from the University of Toronto, and a PhD in Government from Harvard University (1995). In 2016 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Iliad State University, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia. 

 

Speaker Bio:

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Laura Jakli is a Pre-doctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, and a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation draws on digital survey and ad experiments, machine learning, and qualitative fieldwork to examine the relationship between digital politics and political radicalization. Her related research examines how digital networks shape migration patterns and refugee behavior. She holds a Master of Arts in Political Science with Distinction from the University of California, Berkeley. Her undergraduate degree is from Cornell University, where she graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa.

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Maiko Ichihara is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Law and the School of International and Public Policy at Hitotsubashi University, Japan, and a Visiting Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She is a committee member of the World Movement for Democracy, East Asia Democracy Forum, and Partnership for Democratic Governance (Japan), and is a co-chair of Democracy for the Future project at the Japan Center for International Exchange. Throughout her career, she has undertaken research on international relations, democracy support, and Japanese foreign policy. She earned her Ph.D. in political science from the George Washington University and her M.A. from Columbia University. Her recent publications include: “Universality to Plurality? Values in Japanese Foreign Policy,” in Yoichi Funabashi and G. John Ikenberry, eds., The Crisis of Liberalism: Japan and the International Order (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, forthcoming); “International Power Structure and Strategic Motivations: Democracy Support by Japan and Indonesia,” JICA-RI Working Paper, No. 194 (August 2019); and Japan’s International Democracy Assistance as Soft Power: Neoclassical Realist Analysis (New York and London: Routledge, 2017).

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Nancy Okail is a visiting scholar at CDDRL. She has 20 years of experience working on issues of democracy, rule of law, human rights, governance and security in the Middle East and North Africa region. She analyzes these issues and advocates in favor of human rights through testimony to legislative bodies, providing policy recommendations to senior government officials in the U.S. and Europe. She is currently the president of the board of advisors of The Tahrir Institue for Middle East Policy (TIMEP), previously she was the Institute’s executive director since its foundation. Dr. Okail was the director of Freedom House’s Egypt program. She has also worked with the Egyptian government as a senior evaluation officer of foreign aid and managed programs for several international organizations. Dr. Okail was one of the 43 nongovernmental organization workers convicted and sentenced to prison in a widely publicized 2012 case for allegedly using foreign funds to foment unrest in Egypt. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex in the UK; her doctoral research focused on the power relations of foreign aid. 

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Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication and FSI.  Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, and New York, and as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is also coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 5^th ed., 2016), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes. His current work, for which he has been honored as an Andrew Carnegie Fellow and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration.   He has edited several books, including Public Opinion and Constitutional Controversy (Oxford Press, 2008); The Health Care Case: The Supreme Court’s Decision and Its Implications (Oxford Press 2013); and Solutions to Political Polarization in America (Cambridge Press, 2015).   He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.