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Stanford e-Kobe Guest Speaker: Hinako Saldi Sato

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Stanford e-Kobe is an online course for high school students in Kobe City, Japan. Launched in fall 2021, it is offered by the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) in collaboration with the Kobe City Government. The Instructor of Stanford e-Kobe is Alison Harsch. One of the key themes of the course is diversity and Hinako Saldi Sato focused her talk on women’s empowerment. SPICE is grateful to Mayor Kizo Hisamoto for his vision and leadership, and to Superintendent Jun Nagata, Board of Education, for his unwavering support. SPICE also greatly appreciates Toshihiro Nishiyama, Board of Education member, and Satoshi Kawasaki and Akito Ojiro, Kobe City staff, who serve as liaisons between SPICE and the Kobe City Government.

Hinako Saldi Sato is musician, educator, marketer, and community leader with a passion to create opportunities and platforms for people around the world to connect and learn through music. After graduating from Berklee College of Music, Hinako gained recognition as a performer with internationally acclaimed acts such as Women of the World, a collective of innovative musicians from across the globe. Between 2016 and 2019, Hinako helped to manage the Boston chapter of Women in Music, which is dedicated to fostering equality in the music industry through the support and advancement of women. In January 2019, Hinako launched Women in Music’s first chapter in Japan, in hopes of contributing to creating a platform that would serve to advance and elevate women’s roles and voices in the music industry. Hinako now works as the marketing lead at the Tokyo-based Ableton KK, the Asia Pacific (APAC) division of the German music software/hardware company.

Hinako shared four reflections on her life experiences that clearly resonated in the 26 students in Stanford e-Kobe and especially among the girls.

  • Hinako grew up in an environment where most musicians were male, and she was often the only girl in the room.
  • She was fortunate to have been offered multiple opportunities to study and excel in her career—thanks to schools, organizations, and communities that cared about diversity, equity, and inclusion (including being the recipient of both merit-based and need-based scholarships).
  • She has witnessed so many women in her life who are struggling or are at disadvantages because of gender roles, gender bias, and other gender-based inequality.
  • She didn’t have a role model or someone who was like her until she went to the United States for high school and this reinforced her desire to advocate for greater representation among girls and women.


These four reflections continue to shape her mission in life in multiple ways. As a musician, she has performed with Women of the World, which showcases four different singers from the United States, India, Italy, and Japan. Currently, Women of the World performs in 37 different languages, and Hinako noted that “it’s like you’re in a musical journey around the world.” In teaching, her philosophy is that education is a lot about “leading out” or reinforcing in people what potential they have and what they already know. As a community leader, she has organized groups such as Boston Joshikai, which has the goal of forming a sisterhood among Japanese women residents as a way to build their social capital. Boston Joshikai helps to fight the “scarcity mindset” that sometimes arises when one is a minority in a foreign country. As a public speaker at events such as the International Women in Business Conference 2018, she strives to encourage women to think beyond borders. Finally, at Ableton KK, an important focus of her work is about lowering barriers for people to enter the world of music-making through the use of music technology tools, especially in the education sector.

There are many examples of how music can be used to empower not just women, but also certain minority groups.

During the question-and-answer period, student Hinata Ogawa asked, “Can music contribute to women’s empowerment in some way?” Sato replied, “Yes, absolutely. Actually, at Women in Music in Japan we wrote an article about the history of feminism in the music industry, in which we were just touching upon this topic for the Japanese music scene. When you listen to Japanese pop music, for example, the lyrics are mostly about heterosexual relationships like romantic relationships right? But in the U.S., you see a lot of music that talks about female empowerment like Beyonce’s ‘Run the World’ or you know like Sara Bareilles’ ‘Brave.’… There are many examples of how music can be used to empower not just women, but also certain minority groups. And in Japan, if you check out female rappers like hip hop scene, they are speaking out, talking about feminism in the form of rap and it’s quite exciting… like Daimon Yayoi.”

Other student questions and comments focused on the importance of expanding one’s circle or community; the importance of improving child care systems to help women in the workplace and to provide childcare leave systems for fathers; addressing stereotypes of women and the importance of mindset; and addressing gender bias in schools. Instructor Harsch commented, “Listening to the questions and comments by my students made me realize what a great role model Hinako is to them and other youth in Japan who have the good fortune to cross paths with her. Hinako was the final lecturer for this year’s class and I can’t think of a more ideal lecturer given the way that she engaged them to critically think about gender-related issues and self-empowerment.”

Be Kobe monument in Kobe, Japan


Observing the class on women’s empowerment helped me realize that Stanford e-Kobe is empowering students to aspire to “BE KOBE,” the city’s civil pride message to gather the idea that what makes Kobe attractive is the citizens who are proud to take on new challenges. The BE KOBE Monument[1] was installed in the Meriken Park to commemorate the 150th anniversary of opening the Port of KOBE in 2017. I am very confident that the Stanford e-Kobe students will carry the spirit of BE KOBE into their very bright futures.

[1] Photo courtesy Kobe City Government.

 

Alison Keiko Harsch

Alison Keiko Harsch

Instructor, Stanford e-Kobe
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Hinako Saldi Sato, Women of the World, Japan tour, 2015
Hinako Saldi Sato (far left), Women of the World, Japan tour, 2015; photo credit Rio Ito
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Empowering Japanese women through community building

State Violence: Problematic Policing and Criminalization in Comparative Perspective

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Join the REDI Task Force for the next event in our "Critical Conversations: Race in Global Affairs" series as we examine policing and criminalization.

Activist calls to "defund the police" have catalyzed new conversations about the function and purpose of policing. Yet the realities of policing and criminalization, as a function of a state-apparatus that protect power and private property, are varied and complex. Beyond the day-to-day experiences of traffic violations or emergency calls, policing can be expanded to analyze institutions and communal experiences of criminalization - from the military to schooling to struggles for democracy. One broad area of agreement is the disproportionate harm that policing and criminalization has on marginalized and dispossessed populations, from Black schoolchildren to vigilantism in a post-apartheid state. This panel will travel the globe, describing specific cases in Africa, the U.S., and Latin America, articulating the connections between state violence, criminalization, and policing.

This online event is free and open to the public.

Speaker bios:

Didi Kuo

Didi Kuo is the Associate Director for Research and Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics, with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. Her recent work examines changes to party organization, and the impact these changes have on the ability of governments to address challenges posed by global capitalism. She is the author of Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which examines the role of business against clientelism and the development of modern political parties in the nineteenth-century. 

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective, which examines problems such as polarization, inequality, and responsiveness, and recommends possibilities for reform. She also teaches in the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She is a non-resident fellow in political reform at New America, where she was a 2018 Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.
 

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Subini Annamma is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Her research critically examines the ways students are criminalized and resist that criminalization through the mutually constitutive nature of racism and ableism, how they interlock with other marginalizing oppressions, and how these intersections impact youth education trajectories in urban schools and youth prisons. Further, she positions students as knowledge generators, exploring how their narratives can inform teacher and special education. Dr. Annamma’s book, The Pedagogy of Pathologization (Routledge, 2018) focuses on the education trajectories of incarcerated disabled girls of color and has won the 2019 AESA Critic’s Choice Book Award & 2018 NWSA Alison Piepmeier Book Prize. Dr. Annamma is a past Ford Postdoctoral Fellow, AERA Division G Early Career Awardee, Critical Race Studies in Education Associate Emerging Scholar recipient, Western Social Science Association's Outstanding Emerging Scholar, and AERA Minority Dissertation Awardee. Dr. Annamma’s work has been published in scholarly journals such as Educational Researcher, Teachers College Record, Review of Research in Education, Teaching and Teacher Education, Theory Into Practice, Race Ethnicity and Education, Qualitative Inquiry, among others.

 

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Kanisha Bond is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Binghamton University (SUNY). Bond earned a PhD in Political Science from Penn State University, an MPP (International Development & Crime Policy) from Georgetown University, and a BA (International Relations & Spanish) from Bucknell University. Bond's work orbits one central research question: How do organization and identity influence dynamics of political challenge in polarized societies? She uses quantitative and qualitative methods to examine specifically mobilization and institution-building among radical socio-political groups around the world, and particularly in North America, Latin America, and Africa. Her written work has been published in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, International Negotiation, Qualitative and Mixed Methods Research, and the Newsletter of the Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. She has contributed book reviews to the American Journal of Sociology and Journal of Conflict Studies, and research-based public commentary to Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Adi Magazine.

She also co-convene the Advancing Research in Conflict (ARC) Consortium Summer Program, which provides methods and ethics training and support to researchers working in violence-affected contexts, and serve on a variety of editorial, review, and advisory boards for organizations that advocate for rigorous and accessible political science in the public interest. 

 

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Dorothy Kronick is an Assistant Professor of Political Science. She studies Latin American political economy, focusing on Venezuela and the politics of crime and policing. Dorothy completed her PhD at Stanford University. Prior to her doctoral studies at Stanford, Dorothy lived in Caracas as a Fulbright Scholar. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review and the Journal of Conflict Resolution; her writing on Venezuelan politics has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, FiveThirtyEight, The New Republic, and Caracas Chronicles, among other outlets.

 

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Nicholas Rush Smith is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York – City College and a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. He is the author of Contradictions of Democracy: Vigilantism and Rights in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Oxford University Press, 2019) and, alongside Erica S. Simmons, co-editor of Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Inquiry (Cambridge University Press, 2021). His work has also been published in African Affairs, American Journal of Sociology, Comparative Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Polity, PS: Political Science and Politics, and Qualitative and Multi-Method Research, among other outlets.

 

 

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Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

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Dorothy Kronick Assistant Professor of Political Science Panelist University of Pennsylvania
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Black History Month Keynote | Re-examining the State’s Police Power, Safety Deprivation and the Meaning of Citizenship for Black Americans

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Join the REDI Task Force for an invigorating keynote speech by Professor Tracey L. Meares, weaving together the past and present linkages between racial inequality and the law.

Safety and security are critical building blocks of community vitality, but too often the state’s response to safety — especially in race-class subjugated communities — is to assume that armed first responders are coincident with public safety. This response is wrong both normatively and empirically, but it does not mean that the state ought to retreat from its obligation to address safety deprivation.  This lecture will focus on the concept of “the police power,” which has a long history outside the policing service, and what it might mean to rethink it.
 

This online event is free and open to the public.

 

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Speaker bio:

Tracey L. Meares is the Walton Hale Hamilton Professor and a Founding Director of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School. Before joining the faculty at Yale, she was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School from 1995 to 2007, serving as Max Pam Professor and Director of the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice. She was the first African American woman to be granted tenure at both law schools.

Professor Meares is a nationally recognized expert on policing in urban communities. Her research focuses on understanding how members of the public think about their relationship(s) with legal authorities such as police, prosecutors and judges. She teaches courses on criminal procedure, criminal law, and policy and she has worked extensively with the federal government having served on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Law and Justice, a National Research Council standing committee and the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs Science Advisory Board.

In April 2019, Professor Meares was elected as a member to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In December 2014, President Obama named her as a member of his Task Force on 21st Century Policing. She has a B.S. in general engineering from the University of Illinois and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.

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Tracey L. Meares Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law and Founding Director of The Justice Collaboratory Speaker Yale University
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India’s Century? A Conversation with Indrani Bagchi

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Time:  7:30am-8:45am  California, USA 2 March 2022 
9:00pm-10:15pm New Delhi, India 2 March 2022
 

India’s international position has evolved sharply in the first two decades of the 21st century, and it is poised to become only more consequential in coming decades. Its strategic interests and influence have now stretched into the distant reaches of the Indo-Pacific, it has emerged as a central actor in managing global governance challenges like climate change, and it may have the capacity to take a commanding position in some key leading-edge technologies. In this webinar, veteran journalist Indrani Bagchi, who spent nearly two decades covering India’s foreign relations for the Times of India, will reflect on India’s recent trajectory and its prospects. Through the prism of some key episodes and issues of India in the 21st century, the webinar will examine India’s capacity and approach to manage international issues, as well as the constraints and challenges Indian policymakers must face. 

Speaker: 

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Indrani Bagchi is CEO-designate at Ananta Aspen Centre, India. She was Associate Editor with the Times of India, where she reported and analyzed foreign policy issues for the newspaper from 2004 until 2022. As Diplomatic Editor, Indrani covered the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) on her news beat, and interpreted and analyzed global trends with an Indian perspective. Earlier, Indrani worked with India Today, the Economic Times and The Statesman, and has held fellowships at Oxford University and the Brookings Institution. She is a Fellow of the Kamalnayan Bajaj Fellowship Class 3 of the Ananta Aspen Centre and a member of Aspen Global Leadership Network. She graduated from Loreto College, Calcutta University with English honors. 

Moderator:

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Arzan Tarapore is the South Asia research scholar at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, where he leads the newly-restarted South Asia research initiative. He is also a senior nonresident fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research. His research focuses on Indian military strategy and contemporary Indo-Pacific security issues. Prior to his scholarly career, he served as an analyst in the Australian Defense Department. Arzan holds a PhD in war studies from King’s College London. 

 

This event is co-sponsored by Center for South Asia

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Indrani Bagchi, CEO-designate, Ananta Aspen Centre, India<br> Panelist

Arzan Tarapore

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Arzan Tarapore is a Research Scholar whose research focuses on Indian military strategy and regional security issues in the Indo-Pacific. In academic year 2024-25, he is also a part-time Visiting Research Professor at the China Landpower Studies Center, at the U.S. Army War College. Prior to his scholarly career, he served for 13 years in the Australian Defence Department in various analytic, management, and liaison positions, including operational deployments and a diplomatic posting to the Australian Embassy in Washington, DC.

His academic work has been published in the Journal of Strategic Studies, International Affairs, The Washington Quarterly, Asia Policy, and Joint Force Quarterly, among others, and his policy commentary frequently appears on platforms such as Foreign Affairs, the Hindu, the Indian Express, The National Interest, the Lowy Institute's Interpreter, the Brookings Institution’s Lawfare, and War on the Rocks.

He previously held research and teaching positions at Georgetown University, the East-West Center in Washington, the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, and the RAND Corporation.

He earned a PhD in war studies from King's College London, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a BA (Hons) from the University of New South Wales. Follow his commentary on Twitter @arzandc and his website at arzantarapore.com.

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Examining the U.S.-China Rivalry Without Racism

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How can we understand the geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and China without fueling anti-Asian hate?

Join REDI's student representatives, Maddy Morlino and Miku Yamada, for an open discussion on how we can avoid contributing to racial discrimination when engaging in academic dialogues on U.S.-China competition.

This in-person event will facilitate an open dialogue with participants and invited speakers, FSI Senior Fellow Thomas Fingar and Postdoctoral Fellow, Dongxian Jiang. Since seating is limited, registration is reserved for current Stanford faculty, students, and staff only with a Stanford.edu email.

Confirmed attendees will be notified by email on February 22.

Speaker bios:

Thomas Fingar is a Shorenstein APARC Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He was the inaugural Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow from 2010 through 2015 and the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford in 2009. From 2005 through 2008, he served as the first deputy director of national intelligence for analysis and, concurrently, as chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Fingar served previously as assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (2000-01 and 2004-05), principal deputy assistant secretary (2001-03), deputy assistant secretary for analysis (1994-2000), director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific (1989-94), and chief of the China Division (1986-89). Between 1975 and 1986 he held a number of positions at Stanford University, including senior research associate in the Center for International Security and Arms Control.

Dongxian Jiang is a political theorist and intellectual historian. His primary research interests lie in comparative political theory, the history of political thought, and pressing practical questions of democratic and international politics, including Western and non-Western perspectives on human rights, democracy, good governance, and political legitimacy. He is also interested in the transmission and traveling of political ideas across divergent intellectual traditions. He holds a B.A. in International Politics and Philosophy from Peking University, an M.A. in Political Science from Duke University, and a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University (as of September 2020). Dongxian Jiang is currently Civics Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Political Science, Stanford University.

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Thomas Fingar FSI Senior Fellow Speaker Stanford University
Dongxian Jiang Political Science Postdoctoral Fellow Speaker Stanford University
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Stanford e-Hiroshima: Empowering Youth in Hiroshima

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Kouji Yamada (MBA, Harvard), former Visiting Lecturer, Hitotsubashi University Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy, is an advisor to Stanford e-Hiroshima. His parents, Ryuji and Nanako, are supporters of Stanford e-Hiroshima, which is an online course that SPICE offers to high school students in Hiroshima. Taught by Rylan Sekiguchi, Stanford e-Hiroshima was launched in 2019 with the support of the Hiroshima Prefectural Board of Education. SPICE is grateful to Governor Hidehiko Yuzaki for his vision and leadership and Superintendent Rie Hirakawa for her unwavering support.

Ryuji Yamada adjusts the window shades to savor the view that grows elusive to his aging eyes. If you gaze towards Diamond Head from the Yamadas’ condominium, kite surfers glide in and out of your perspective in some random Brownian motion; their paths, pace, and direction seem chaotic. They all share the same wind, waves, and current, but the skill of the rider to look ahead and channel the energies around them sends them on very different and wonderful journeys. 

“I was just 14 living in Hiroshima and still a minor when the bomb dropped. My brother was only one year older but considered an adult and was sent on work detail for defense preparations. He had to walk through ground zero to come home. My father had a meeting at City Hall, but the ferry was cancelled. We all survived, but the blast sent us in very different directions.

“They rebuilt the community with their personality, spirit, and bare hands, but I was pushed inward to my studies. I needed to comprehend the natural force that had wrought so much destruction.

“In the sixties, foreign exchange was scarce, and I was one of the first scientists that the Japanese government sponsored to do research abroad. At Cornell, Robert Wilson guided my career and brought me along to establish what became Fermilab in 1967. We built Fermilab as an oasis of fundamental research in the Illinois prairie. We thought that the pursuit of knowledge would unite us. Wilson’s famous defense in April 1969 of Fermilab to Congress seems even more relevant today.

‘Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things that we really venerate and honor in our country and are patriotic about. In that sense, this new knowledge has all to do with honor and country, but it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending.’”[1]


Nanako Yamada also grew up in Hiroshima, but her greatest challenges were still ahead of her. “In the ’70s, there were few role models for women in building identity outside of the home in middle America. But when it became apparent that our second child was uncontrollable in his adolescent years, I decided to lead by example and went back to school to rekindle my love for learning. At Northern Illinois University, Helen Merritt guided me through a career in art history, and we authored several books together.

“Our specialty was kuchie woodblock prints from the late 19th to early 20th century. They offered a glimpse into a culture in flux. Western influences disrupting Japanese culture after Commodore Perry’s black ships forced the opening of Japan.

“What to accept, what to reject. What to cherish and what to disavow. Even when you think you stand still, you are always changing, and hopefully growing. Captured in the woodblocks is a narrative. Some cautionary, some celebratory, but all are educational if your eye and mind are willing to engage.

“When we heard about the SPICE program for Hiroshima, we were honored to stand by the Hiroshima Board of Education and continue the legacy of exploration and learning. Technology allows the new generation to not only be buffeted by social media but to also make profound connections to community, both near and far. Hopefully the students can find their own Robert Wilsons and Helen Merritts. We were blessed to make these relations, but we would have never found them without exploring and engaging. We didn’t have a grand plan, but we never stopped looking. We look forward to seeing what wonderful things they will find.”

Stanford e-Hiroshima is one of SPICE’s local student programs in Japan.

To stay informed of news about SPICE, join our email list and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram

[1] Fermilab; https://history.fnal.gov/historical/people/wilson_testimony.html [access date: February 5, 2022].

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SPICE Honors Top Students from 2020–2021 Regional Programs in Japan

Congratulations to the eight student honorees from Hiroshima Prefecture, Kawasaki City, Oita Prefecture, and Tottori Prefecture.
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Rylan Sekiguchi at Hiroshima University High School with Kenzi Watanabe, Principal, and Akiyoshi Kai, Head of R&D Department and member of the Mathematics Department
Rylan Sekiguchi at Hiroshima University High School with Kenzi Watanabe, Principal, and Akiyoshi Kai, Head of R&D Department and member of the Mathematics Department; photo courtesy Rylan Sekiguchi
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Ryuji and Nanako Yamada share reflections on their lives in Hiroshima and their American mentors.

SPICE’s Rylan Sekiguchi Selected as a Cohort Fellow for the Movers and Shakas Program

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Rylan Sekiguchi has been selected as a cohort fellow for the Movers and Shakas program (M&S)—an initiative to attract remote workers, especially returning kamaʻāina (Hawaiʻi residents), to create a more innovative, resilient, and sustainable Hawaiʻi. The rationale for the establishment of M&S is based on the following.

“Brain drain” is an enduring challenge for Hawaiʻi as we lose key talent and family members to economic opportunities on the continent. M&S focuses on “brain gain” to grow and diversify Hawaiʻi’s economy so that local folks can come home and never have to leave in the first place.

A recent article, “Hawaiʻi’s Population Drain Outpaces Most States—Again,” in Honolulu Civil Beat features comments by M&S Director Nicole Lim. In the article, she notes, “The overall goal is really brain gain. How to tie people into Hawaiʻi for the good of Hawaiʻi.”

Selected from thousands of applicants, Sekiguchi is one of 50 in the second M&S cohort contributing to the community through volunteer projects and developing personal and professional relationships with people from diverse backgrounds. Sekiguchi is working primarily with the PA‘I Foundation, which is led by Executive Director Vicky Holt Takamine, a respected kumu hula (master teacher of hula), well-known Native Hawaiian advocate, and valuable proponent of M&S in the local community.

The Movers and Shakas program is based on three key pillars.

  • Learn: Cultural education helps cohort fellows understand the historical and current context of Hawaiʻi, allowing them to build stronger personal relationships and connect more deeply with Hawaiʻi.
  • Contribute: Volunteering allows cohort fellows to contribute their unique professional skillsets and experiences to local nonprofits and startups while learning about Hawaiʻi from community leaders in a reciprocal relationship.
  • Connect: Community building centers around the two-way sharing of knowledge, ideas, and culture to foster strong bonds between individuals, within the cohort, with volunteer partner orgs, and with the general public.
     

Following a recent visit to the Bishop Museum, designated as the Hawaiʻi State Museum of Natural and Cultural History, Sekiguchi reflected on his experience. “Though I was born and raised in Hawaiʻi, it wasn’t until I moved to the continent as a student at Stanford University that I began to truly recognize my connection to this place. After being away for 19 years, M&S has been an incredibly meaningful experience for me and an extraordinary opportunity to reconnect with Hawaiʻi. It’s also been inspiring to connect with my M&S cohort mates, many of whom also have personal connections to the state. Someday, I hope to connect my SPICE work more closely with the M&S community.”

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Rylan Sekiguchi

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Indigenous Voices: Educational Perspectives from Navajo, Native Hawaiian, and Ainu Scholars in the Diaspora

This article recaps a June 18, 2021 webinar that featured three Native and Indigenous scholars and includes recommendations for using the webinar recording in classrooms.
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SPICE’s Rylan Sekiguchi Is the 2021 Franklin R. Buchanan Prize Recipient

Rylan Sekiguchi was announced this week as the recipient of the 2021 Franklin R. Buchanan Prize for his authorship of What Does It Mean to Be an American?
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Stanford Professor Kären Wigen gives a virtual seminar for Stanford SEAS Hawaii
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Teachers in Hawaii Connect with Stanford Scholars

Twenty-four high school educators comprise the inaugural cohort of Stanford/Freeman SEAS Hawaii Fellows.
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Rylan Sekiguchi (front row, fourth from the right) with his cohort mates on Oahu; photo courtesy Movers and Shakas
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Movers and Shakas is an initiative to attract remote workers, especially returning kamaʻāina, to create a more innovative, resilient, and sustainable Hawaiʻi.

Surveilling the Future of American Intelligence

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James Bond; Jason Bourne; Jack Bauer: cinema spies like these are the suave and daring face of spycraft and intelligence for most people.

That’s a problem, says Amy Zegart, a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). In her new book, Spies Lies and Algorithms, Zegart draws on her expertise in U.S. intelligence and national security to debunk some of the pop cultural tropes around spycraft, many of which have a surprisingly pervasive influence on how both the public and policymakers understand the intelligence community.

She joins FSI Director Michael McFaul on World Class podcast to talk about the book and what she’s learned from her research about the challenges the U.S. intelligence community will need to meet in order to stay competitive in a rapidly-evolving, increasingly digital world.

Listen to the full episode now. A transcript and highlights from their conversation are available below.

Click the link for a transcript of “Spies, Lies and Algorithms with Amy Zegart."

The Origins of Spies, Lies and Algorithms


When I was a professor at UCLA, I was teaching an intelligence class. On a lark, I did a survey of my students and I asked them about their spy-themed entertainment viewing habits, as well as their attitudes towards certain intelligence topics like interrogation techniques.

What I found was there was a statistically significant correlation between their spy-themed viewing habits; people who watch the show 24 all the time were far more pro-waterboarding, among other things, than students who didn't watch spy-themed entertainment.

This got me really thinking, what do people know about espionage? Where do they get this information? And what I found is that most Americans don't know anything about the intelligence community, and when you're talking about spy agencies in a democracy, that's really problematic.

The original book was going to be more of a textbook for the class I was teaching, but as I write it, so many things started to change in the intelligence community, both politically and technologically. So with that in mind, I tried to make it forward looking to where intelligence needs to go, not just backward to where it’s been.

Spies, Lies and Algorithms, by Amy Zegart

Spies, Lies and Algorithms

Amy Zegart
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Who are the Spies?
 

The biggest surprise for me came from the research I did on open-source intelligence and nuclear threats. If ever there was an area you would think spy agencies would have cornered the market on intelligence, it would be nuclear threats.

But what I found is that there's a whole ecosystem of non-governmental people tracking nuclear threats around the world and actually uncovering really important things. That includes some open-source nuclear sleuths here at Stanford among my colleagues at CISAC.

The more I dug into this, the more I realized that open-source intelligence and publicly available data is the ballgame in the future of intelligence. Secrets still matter; but they matter a whole lot less than they did even ten years ago.

There is so much insight that we can glean from open-source information, but the intelligence community has to figure out better ways to connect with organizations and people who are in this ecosystem.

Open-source intelligence and publicly available data is the ballgame in the future of intelligence. Secrets still matter; but they matter a whole lot less than they did even ten years ago.
Amy Zegart
Senior Fellow at CISAC

What are the Lies?


Intelligence is about deception. We don't want our enemies to understand all of our military capabilities, for example, or what our intentions are.

But I think the technology and data revolutions of the last few decades has also changed the nature of deception. It’s gone from elites deceiving elites about where their troops are, and whether they're going to attack, to mass audience deception and this disinformation-information warfare of domestic audiences like we're experiencing here in the United States.

Understanding deception, not in a pejorative sense but as an analytic frame, is critically  important to being able to gather and analyze intelligence correctly.

We're drowning in data. If intelligence is in the business of collecting or finding needles in haystacks, the haystacks are growing exponentially.
Amy Zegart
Senior Fellow at CISAC

The Power of Algorithms in Intelligence


We're drowning in data. The amount of data on Earth is estimated to double every two years. Think about that for a minute. It's just an astounding amount of data. And it's too much for any human to deal with.

So, if intelligence is in the business of collecting or finding needles in haystacks, the haystacks are growing exponentially. The intelligence community has to use artificial intelligence and other tools to augment human analysts. AI frees up analysts to then ask questions about things like intent, which humans can figure out much better than machines.

Imagine an algorithmic red team: you have humans that are developing assessments of what is Putin going to do in Ukraine, and you've got a red team that's just algorithms aggregating data, so that you have a sort of competitive analysis between humans and machines that can make the humans better. Those are the kinds of things that intelligence agencies need to be doing much more with AI.

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Amy Zegart

FSI Senior Fellow at CISAC
Full Profile

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Amy Zegart joins Michael McFaul on World Class podcast to talk about Spies, Lies and Algorithms, her new book exploring how the U.S. intelligence community needs to adapt to face a new era of intelligence challenges.

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