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.

Rights Make Might: Global Human Rights and Minority Social Movements in Japan

-

 



EMERGING ISSUES IN CONTEMPORARY ASIA

A Special Seminar Series

RSVP required by Tuesday, May 7, 2019

RSVP Now

 

ABSTRACT: Why have the three most salient minority groups in Japan - the politically dormant Ainu, the active but unsuccessful Koreans, and the former outcaste group of Burakumin - all expanded their activism since the late 1970s despite the unfavorable domestic political environment? My investigation into the history of the three groups finds an answer in the galvanizing effects of global human rights on local social movements. Drawing on interviews and archival data, I document the transformative impact of global human rights ideas and institutions on minority activists, which changed the prevalent understanding about their standing in Japanese society and propelled them to new international venues for political claim making. The global forces also changed the public perception and political calculus in Japan over time, catalyzing substantial gains for the minority movements. Having benefited from global human rights, all three groups repaid their debt by contributing to the consolidation and expansion of international human rights principles and instruments. The in-depth historical comparative analysis offers rare windows into local, micro-level impact of global human rights - complementing my other projects on the relationship between international human rights and local politics, which employ cross-national quantitative analyses - and contributes to our understanding of international norms and institutions, social movements, human rights, ethnoracial politics, and Japanese society. 
 
Kiyoteru Tsutsui
PROFILE:   Kiyoteru Tsutsui is Professor of Sociology, Director of the Center for Japanese Studies, and Director of the Donia Human Rights Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research on globalization of human rights and its impact on local politics has appeared in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Social Problems, Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and other social science journals. His book publications include Rights Make Might: Global Human Rights and Minority Social Movements in Japan (Oxford University Press 2018), and a co-edited volume (with Alwyn Lim) Corporate Social Responsibility in a Globalizing World (Cambridge University Press 2015). He has been a recipient of National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, National Science Foundation grants, the SSRC/CGP Abe Fellowship, Stanford Japan Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship, and other grants as well as awards from American Sociological Association sections on Global and Transnational Sociology (2010, 2013), Human Rights (2017), Asia and Asian America (2018), and Collective Behavior and Social Movements (2018).
 

 

McClatchy Hall, Building 120, Studio 40
450 Serra Mall
Stanford University

Kiyoteru Tsutsui Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan
Seminars

SCPKU announces its newest fellows

News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs


Faculty Fellow:

  • Gerald Fuller - Professor, School of Engineering, Chemical Engineering, July-August, 2019

Pre-Doctoral Fellows:

  • Yunxin Li - History, August – September, 2019
  • Kyueun Lee – Medicine/Health Research and Policy, July – September, 2019
  • Jaemin Jee – Political Science, March 2019 – March 2020
  • Robert Xu - Linguistics, March – April, 2019

 

Graduate Seminars:

Title: " Chinese Corporations:  A Case Study Workshop "

  • Dates: June 17-July 5, 2019
  • Instructor: Andrew Walder, Professor of Sociology and FSI Senior Fellow
  • Eligibility: Enrolled Stanford University students in good academic standing
  • Stanford student application deadline: April 15, 2019
  • Read more and apply here

 Title: " Rheology of Complex Liquids"

  • Dates: July 15- August 2, 2019
  • Instructor: Gerald Fuller, Professor of Chemical Engineering, the School of Engineering
  • Eligibility:  Enrolled Stanford University students in good academic standing (class is full)
  • Read more here
Hero Image
[photo of a class]
All News button
1

Marriage, Fertility and Rapid Population Aging: Japan’s Distinctive Demographic Landscape

-

 


EMERGING ISSUES IN CONTEMPORARY ASIA

A Special Seminar Series

RSVP required by Friday, April 29, 2019

RSVP Now

 

ABSTRACT:  Japan’s population is the oldest in the world and will continue to shrink for the foreseeable future. My first goal in this talk is to provide an overview of Japan’s distinctive demographic landscape, focusing on rapid population aging and its policy implications while also emphasizing the role that declining rates of marriage have played in accelerating population aging via their impact on fertility. After describing the centrality of marriage behavior to our understanding of demographic and societal trends in Japan, my second goal is to present results of new research documenting an unexpected reversal in educational differences in women’s marriage. For decades, highly-educated women have married later and more often remained unmarried than their less-educated counterparts – a pattern thought to reflect the high opportunity costs of marriage in Japan’s gender inegalitarian society. However, my analyses of recent data show that women with a university degree are now more likely than high school graduates to marry, a shift that hints at the possibility of changing norms and expectations regarding women’s employment and economic contributions to the family. Concurrent trends toward continued decline in marriage among low-educated men and women are consistent with emphases on the deteriorating economic circumstances of this group.
 
James Raymo
PROFILE:   Jim Raymo is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also the current Director of Graduate Training of the Center for Demography of Health and Aging and the former Director of the Center for Demography and Ecology. Raymo’s research focuses primarily on evaluating patterns and potential consequences of major demographic changes in Japan. He has published widely on key features of recent family change, including delayed marriage, extended co-residence with parents, and increases in premarital cohabitation, shotgun marriages, and divorce. In other lines of research, he has examined health outcomes at older ages in Japan and their relationship with family, work, and local area characteristics and has examined multiple dimensions of well-being among the growing population of single mothers and their children in Japan. He is currently involved in a new project that explores explanations for low fertility in Japan and another that examines inequalities in children’s development in Japan. His research has been published in top U.S. journals such as American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Demography, and Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences as well as in Japanese journals. 
 
 

McClatchy Hall, Building 120, Studio 40
450 Serra Mall
Stanford University

James Raymo <i>Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison</i>

China Scholars Program online course now accepting applications for Fall 2019

News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

Applications opened yesterday for the China Scholars Program, an intensive, college-level online course on contemporary China for U.S. high school students. The China Scholars Program is offered by the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), Stanford University, and is open to rising 10th, 11th, and 12th graders. The Fall 2019 online course will run from late August through December. Applications are due June 15, 2019.


Stanford University China Scholars Program for high school students
Fall 2019 session (late August through December)
Application period: April 15 to June 15, 2019
 

Accepted applicants will engage in a rigorous academic exploration of key issues in China, spanning politics, economics, social issues, culture, and the arts, with an emphasis on the relationship between the United States and China. In real-time conversations with leading scholars, experts, and diplomats from Stanford University and other institutions, participants will be exposed to the cutting edge of U.S.–China relations and scholarship. Students who complete the online course will be equipped with a rare degree of expertise about China and international relations that may have a significant impact on their choice of study and future career.

As in previous sessions of the China Scholars Program, the Fall 2019 cohort will comprise high school students from across the United States. Participants in the current cohort represent states across the nation, including New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Missouri, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Arizona, California, and Hawaii. The immense diversity of student backgrounds and experiences within each online course allows for an especially rich exchange of ideas and perspectives among the young scholars—a crucial and invaluable component of the learning experience.

“It’s been one of the most fascinating, valuable, and formative classes I have ever taken,” says Rebecca Qiu, a recent alum of the program. “Every week, you discuss pressing topics—from technology censorship to the urban-rural divide—with your motivated peers. During virtual classes, you have the opportunity to ask questions and speak with some of the most influential experts and researchers on modern China—I cannot emphasize how valuable this is. [The China Scholars Program] provides you with a huge breadth and depth of knowledge on China and U.S.–China relations that you cannot find in any typical high school class.”

More information on the China Scholars Program is available at http://chinascholars.org. Interested high school students can apply now at https://spicestanford.smapply.io/prog/china_scholars_program/. The deadline to apply is June 15, 2019.

To be notified when the next China Scholars Program application period opens, join our email list or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

The China Scholars Program is one of several online courses for high school students offered by SPICE, Stanford University, including the Reischauer Scholars Program (on Japan), the Sejong Scholars Program (on Korea), and the Stanford e-Japan Program (on U.S. society, offered to high school students in Japan).

Related article:

 

Hero Image
Stanford University online courses for high school students
SPICE at Stanford University offers several online courses for high school students.
Stanford University
All News button
1

Fertility Behavior and Fertility in China: Past, Present and Near Future

-

China possesses a large amount of historical demographic data showing that it has been a population giant in the world for at least two thousand years. Partly for this reason, a number of conclusions or suggestions about China’s past fertility regime have been widely accepted. Recent historical demographic investigations, however, have shown that many of these conclusions or suggestions are incorrect and need further consideration. This presentation reports these research findings and briefly examines China’s recent fertility changes. On the basis of that it makes some comments on major characteristics of China’s current fertility patterns and factors affecting fertility changes in the near future.

zhongwei
Zhongwei Zhao graduated from University of Cambridge with a PhD in 1993. Since then he has worked at the East-West Center, Hawaii, University of New South Wales, Australian National University, and University of Cambridge. Since 2008, he has been a professor at the School of Demography at the ANU. Zhao has been doing research in the following research areas: Historical demography, Computer microsimulation, Fertility, Mortality, Changes in kinship structure and household composition, Famine demography, Inequality in population health, Environmental impacts on mortality changes, and Population changes in Asia. He has co-edited three books (including recent Routledge Handbook of Asian Demography) and published many articles and book chapters by leading demography journals and academic publishers.  

Zhao, Zhongwei Professor, The School of Demography at the Australian National University
Seminars

Social Voting in Semi-Authoritarian Systems

-

Abstract:

In dominant-party states, why do individuals vote in elections with foregone conclusions when they are neither bought nor coerced? I propose that a social norm of voting motivates turnout in these least-likely contexts. Motivated by the belief that regimes reward high turnout with public goods, citizens view elections as an opportunity for community-wide benefit and use social sanctions to enforce the norm. Using lab-in-the-field voting experiments together with survey data, I document the strong influence of a social norm of voting in two semi-authoritarian states in east Africa, Tanzania and Uganda. I find that norm compliance is driven by those most dependent on their local community. This project helps to explain high turnout in elections, individual-level variation in voting behavior, and authoritarian endurance. The results suggest that rather than government accountability, elections may instead be about local accountability to one's community.

 

Speaker Bio:

leah1 small
Leah is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France and a research affiliate at MIT GOV/LAB. She received her PhD in political science from MIT in 2018. Leah studies political behavior in sub-Saharan Africa and examines questions of citizen engagement, compliance, and government accountability. Her current book project investigates how social norms of voting help to explain high turnout in dominant-party states in East Africa. She is also working on a project on urban informality in Lagos, Nigeria. Before starting graduate school, Leah worked as the program manager at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in Nigeria.

 

Leah R. Rosenzweig

0
CDDRL Postdoctoral Scholar, 2020-21
thumbnail_leah1_small.jpg

My research centers on topics in comparative politics and the political economy of development. I focus on the micro-foundations of political behavior to gain leverage on macro-political questions. How do autocrats survive? How can citizen-state relations be improved and government accountability strengthened? Can shared identities mitigate out-group animosity? Adopting a multi-method approach, I use lab-in-the-field and online experiments, surveys, and in-depth field research to examine these questions in sub-Saharan Africa and the US. My current book project reexamines the role of elections in authoritarian endurance and explains why citizens vote in elections with foregone conclusions in Tanzania and Uganda. Moving beyond conventional paradigms, my theory describes how a social norm of voting and accompanying social sanctions from peers contribute to high turnout in semi-authoritarian elections. In other ongoing projects, I study how national and pan-African identification stimulated through national sports games influence attitudes toward refugees, the relationship between identity, emotions, and belief in fake news, and how researchers can use Facebook as a tool for social science research.

postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France
Seminars

The Polarization of Nationalist Cleavages and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

-

Abstract:

Using survey data from a variety of sources, I examine how multiple conceptions of American nationhood shaped respondents’ voting preferences in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and how the election outcome built on long-term changes in the distribution of nationalist beliefs in the U.S. population. The results suggest that nationalist beliefs constituted important cultural cleavages that were effectively mobilized by candidates from both parties. In particular, exclusionary varieties of nationalism were associated with Trump support in the Republican primary and the general election, while disengagement from the nation was predictive of Sanders support in the Democratic primary. Furthermore, over the past twenty years, nationalism has become sorted by party: Republicans have become predominantly ethno-nationalist, while Democrats have increasingly embraced a creedal conception of nationhood. The resulting mutual reinforcement of nationalist cleavages with other sources of distinction is likely to shape future elections and threaten the stability of U.S. democracy.

 

Speaker Bio:

bonikowski head shot full size
Bart Bonikowski is Associate Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, Resident Faculty at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, a Faculty Affiliate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (where he co-directs the Research Cluster on Global Populism / Challenges to Democracy), and a 2018-19 Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellow in Communication at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Relying on survey methods, computational text analysis, and experimental research, his work applies insights from cultural sociology to the study of politics in the United States and Europe, with a particular focus on nationalism, populism, and the rise of the radical right. His research has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Sociology, Social Forces, British Journal of Sociology, European Journal of Political Research, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Brown Journal of World Affairs, and a number of other peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.
 
Bart Bonikowski Associate Professor of Sociology at Harvard University
Seminars

My Vision for Kaohsiung: Reshaping Party Politics and Public Service in Taiwan’s Democracy

-

RSVPs for this event are now closed. This event is open only to the Stanford community; a valid Stanford ID will be required to enter. 

NOTE: THIS EVENT IS CLOSED TO THE MEDIA

Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu

Han Kuo-yu was elected Mayor of Kaohsiung, Taiwan, in November 2018, becoming the first member of the Kuomintang (KMT) to hold that office since 1998. He served as a member of the Legislative Yuan from Taipei County from 1993-2002, and later became the general manager of the Taipei Agricultural Products Marketing Corporation. 

Mr. Han graduated from Soochow University (Taipei) with a degree in English literature, and earned a master’s degree in law from National Chengchi University’s Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies.
 
This event is co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution and the Taiwan Democracy and Security Project, part of the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative. 
 
Download pdf

Philippines Room
616 Serra Mall
Encina Hall, 3rd Floor, Central (C330)
Stanford, CA 94305

Han Kuo-yu Mayor of Kaohsiung, Taiwan

What do Americans Really Think about Conflict with Nuclear North Korea?

-

sagan 3x2 copy
The volatile relationship between the United States and North Korea has left the American public questioning whether North Korea is a threat or not. Existing polls suffer from poor design and, thus, provide a confusing and often contradictory narrative of U.S. public opinion on North Korea. As a result, a number of critical questions remain unanswered: Are Americans willing to live with the North Korean nuclear threat? Under what conditions would the public support using military force to accomplish what sanctions and diplomacy have not? What are the characteristics of the individuals willing to risk war against North Korea today? Professor Scott D. Sagan will discuss the findings of a recent survey experiment and offer a unique perspective to the ongoing public debate.

Scott D. Sagan is the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, the Mimi and Peter Haas University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University. From 1984 to 1985, he served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. Sagan has also served as a consultant to the office of the Secretary of Defense and at the Sandia National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In 2017, he received the International Studies Association’s Susan Strange Award which recognizes the scholar whose “singular intellect, assertiveness, and insight most challenge conventional wisdom and intellectual and organizational complacency" in the international studies community. Sagan was also the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences William and Katherine Estes Award in 2015, for his pioneering work addressing the risks of nuclear weapons accidents and the causes of nuclear proliferation.     

 

Okimoto Conference Room
Encina Hall, 3rd Floor
616 Serra Street, Stanford

Scott D. Sagan <i>Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, Stanford University</i>
Seminars
Korean Studies Colloquium Series
Subscribe to Society