**** PLEASE NOTE CHANGE OF SPEAKER***

Dr. Susan Kasedde currently serves as Senior Advisor and Team Leader on HIV and Adolescents for UNICEF based in New York since November 2009. In this role, she has contributed towards global level evidence generation, technical guidance development, advocacy, global partnership development, and technical assistance towards the global response towards HIV prevention, treatment and care in adolescents aged 10 - 19. Since 2011, on behalf of UNICEF, Susan has coordinated a series of efforts including documentation of global practices in the care of adolescents living with HIV; mathematical modeling with the Futures Institute to assess the impact and cost of scale up of proven high impact HIV prevention, treatment and care interventions within a holistic response, on new HIV infections and AIDS deaths in adolescents; and a systematic review with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to confirm evidence on effective approaches for programming to reduce HIV infection, illness and death in adolescents. This work has contributed to stronger advocacy and technical guidelines for programming for adolescents, a group of children previously largely neglected. In 2013, the documentation on adolescents living with HIV was a major contribution to the new WHO guidelines on HIV testing and counseling and care in adolescents. The impact modeling and systematic review are among a series of key papers that will be released in a special supplement on HIV prevention, treatment and care in adolescents at the International AIDS Society Conference in Melbourne, Australia in 2014.

 Susan joined UNICEF having served since 2007 as Regional Adviser with the UNAIDS Regional Office for Eastern & Southern Africa. In that role, she was responsible for coordinating analytic work on the epidemic and response and modes of HIV transmission in several high HIV burden countries, working extensively with government teams and partners in the highest HIV burden countries in the world to use an incidence model to predict the next 1000 new HIV infections and assess alignment of national strategies with the national epidemic. Susan has over 18 years of experience working on adolescents sexual and reproductive health of which 16 of those have been focused on HIV in adolescents. Susan holds a doctorate in Epidemiology and Population Health from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, a Masters degree in Public Health from Boston University and Bachelors degrees in Biomedical Science and French. Susan is a national of Uganda and speaks English and French.

In the early twentieth century, against the backdrop of colonial violence, the Japanese annexation of Korea, and World War I, religious and secular groups in East Asia voiced support for a new ethos of humanitarian internationalism.  This presentation examines the confluences between millenarian "new religions" such as Chŏndogyo (Korea), Ōmotokyō (Japan), and Daoyuan (China), Bahá'ís, Esperantists and other groups espousing world peace, gender and social equality, and religious unity.  Under the scrutiny of the Japanese imperial state, these communities presented teachings that were inimical to colonial hierarchies, but they had to do so without resort to the standard means and methods of social, economic, and political reform, such as protests, provocative civil disobedience, lobbying, electioneering, coercion, and either the threat or actual use of political violence.

Vietnamese diasporic relations affect and are affected by events inside Viet Nam.  In her recent book, Transnationalizing Viet Nam, Prof. Valverde explores these connections to convey a nuanced understanding of this globalized community.  She will argue that Vietnamese immigrant lives are inherently transnational.  Drawing on 250 interviews and nearly two decades of research, she will show how diasporic Vietnamese form virtual communities in cyberspace, organize social movements, find political representation, and engage in dissent—and how tensions based on generation, gender, class, and politics threaten to divide them.  Copies of the book will be available for sale.

Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis. She received her B.A. in Political Science and Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her teaching, research, and organizing interests include: Southeast Asian American history and contemporary issues, mixed race and gender theories, social movements, Fashionology, Aesthetics, Diaspora, and Transnationalism Studies. She authored Transnationalizing Viet Nam: Community, Culture, and Politics in the Diaspora. Professor Valverde founded Viet Nam Women's Forum (1996-2006), a virtual community with hundreds of women internationally that mobilized for change in Viet Nam and abroad, and Fight the Tower (2013), a movement to resist and demand justice against discriminatory practices directed against women of color in the academy. Professor Valverde was a Luce Southeast Asian Studies Fellow at the Australian National University (2004), Rockefeller Fellow for Project Diaspora at the University of Massachusetts, Boston (2001-02), and a Fulbright Fellow in Viet Nam (1999). As a passionate advocate for the arts, she curated the exhibit Áo Dài: A Modern Design Coming of Age (2006) for the San Jose Museum of Quits and Textiles in partnership with Association for Viet Arts, and consults for the annual Áo Dài Festival held in San Jose, California (2011-present). She is currently co-curating an upcoming exhibit (2015) for the Vietnam National Museum of Fine Arts to commemorate the 40^th anniversary of the end of the Second Indochina War.

Copies of Transnationalizing Viet Nam will be available for signing and sale by the author following her talk.

Vietnamese news accounts of labor-management conflicts, including strikes, and even reports of owners fleeing their factories raise potent questions about labor activism in light of this self-proclaimed socialist country’s engagement in the global market system since the late 1980s. In explaining Vietnamese labor resistance, how important are matters of cultural identity (such as native-place, gender, ethnicity, and religion) in different historical contexts? How does labor mobilization occur and develop? How does it foster “class moments” in times of crisis? What types of "flexible protests" have been used by workers to fight for their rights and dignity, and how effective are they?

Based on her just-published book, Ties that Bind: Cultural Identity, Class, and Law in Vietnam's Labor Resistance, Prof. Trần will highlight labor activism since French colonial rule in order to understand labor issues and actions in Vietnam today. Her analysis will focus on labor-management-state relations, especially with key foreign investors/managers (such as from Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong) and ethnic Chinese born and raised in Vietnam. She will convey the voices and ideas of workers, organizers, journalists, and officials and explain how migrant workers seek to empower themselves using cultural resources and appeals to state media and the rule of law. Copies of her book will be available for sale at her talk.

Prof. Trần's current research on global south-south labor migration focuses on Vietnamese migrants working in Malaysia and returning to Vietnam. In 2008 she was a Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow on Southeast Asia. Her co-authored 2012 book, Corporate Social Responsibility and Competitiveness for SMEs in Developing Countries: South Africa and Vietnam, compared the experiences of small-and-medium enterprises in these two countries. Her many other writings include (as co-editor and author) Reaching for the Dream: Challenges of Sustainable Development in Vietnam (2004). She earned her PhD in Political Economy and Public Policy at the University of Southern California in 1996 and an MA in Developmental Economics at USC in 1991.

Copies of Ties that Bind: Cultural Identity, Class, and Law in Vietnam's Labor Resistance will be available for signing and sale by the author following her talk.

Abstract
I will discuss an ambitious project by the Program on Liberation Technology to fight corruption with mobile phones. The project is being designed with partners in four states of India on issues such as education, health and social protection for some of the most vulnerable communities in India.  The project has started at a time when technology for transparency and accountability projects have come under increasing scrutiny. For example, a series of papers have questioned if transparency has an impact in improving accountability, and thus have raised questions on the very premise of such projects.  Similarly, the Open Data movement succeeded in getting data in the public sphere but most datasets are languishing with no takers.  He will discuss what these studies mean for the project, and some insights from it on designing technologies for transparency and accountability.

Abstract: 

Do human rights institutions work? To answer this question we examine the effect of these institutions on two kinds of outcomes: physical integrity rights (freedom from torture, government-sponsored killing, political imprisonment, and the like) and civil and political rights (freedoms of speech, assembly, movement, and religion, as well as voting and workers' rights). Our analysis covers up to 143 countries, including some of the world's worst abusers, over the period 1981 to 2004. We arrive at two main conclusions. First, national human rights institutions improve physical integrity outcomes but not civil and political rights practices. This finding reflects a greater worldwide focus on extreme violations such as torture, but also points to widespread resistance among non-Western governments to "Western" civil and political rights standards. Second, we find that time matters: the establishment of a human rights institution contributed initially to greater reports of physical integrity abuses, but practices improved significantly after only four or five years. These institutions shine a bright spotlight on countries negative practices, making it more likely that abuses are detected and cataloged. Over time, however, they help to curb egregious human rights violations. Our findings suggest that human rights institutions are not just futile exercises in governmental hypocrisy; rather, they work to improve human rights practices regardless of the intent of governments.

Speaker bios: 

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His recent publications include “Conditional Decoupling: Assessing the Impact of National Human Rights Institutions” (with W. Cole) American Sociological Review 702-25 2013; “National Incorporation of Global Human Rights: Worldwide Expansion of National Human Rights Organizations, 1966-2004” (with Jeong-Woo Koo).  Social Forces. 87:1321-1354. 2009; “Human Rights in Social Science Textbooks: Cross-national Analyses, 1975-2008” (with J. Meyer and P. Bromley). Sociology of Education 83: 111-134.  2010; “The Worldwide Spread of Environmental Discourse in Social Science Textbooks, 1970-2010 (with P. Bromley and J. Meyer) Comparative Education Review 55, 4; 517-545. 2011; ‘The Formalization of the University: Rules, Roots, and Routes” (With T. Christensen) Higher Education 65: 695-708 2013; and “The World Society Perspective: Concepts, Assumptions, and Strategies” Comparative Education 423-39 2012.

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Recent publications include “Conditional Decoupling: Assessing the Impact of National Human Rights Institutions, 1981 to 2004,” American Sociological Review 78(4):702–725 (with Francisco Ramirez); “Strong Walk and Cheap Talk: The Effect of the International Covenant of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights on Policies and Practices,” Social Forces 92(1):165–194; “Government Respect for Gendered Rights: The Effect of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women on Women’s Rights Outcomes, 1981–2004,” International Studies Quarterly 57(2):233–249; and “Human Rights as Myth and Ceremony? Reevaluating the Effectiveness of Human Rights Treaties, 1981–2007,” American Journal of Sociology 117(4):1131–1171. He is also author of Uncommon Schools: The Global Rise of Postsecondary Institutions for Indigenous Peoples (Stanford University Press, 2011).