Abstract:

For the past several years, and especially since the beginning of the "Arab Spring" in December 2010, Arab regimes have experienced sweeping processes of political decay, disintegration, reform, and revolution. While these are far from finished and clear in their impacts, they have already begun to transform the political parameters affecting peace and stability in the Middle East. The prevailing assumption is that destabilization of the neighborhood has made Israel even more reluctant to take any new initiatives or assume any new risks for a peace agreement with the Palestinians. But the changing regional parameters also generate new opportunities and especially new urgency for obtaining a two-state solution while it is still possible.

We invite you to a special event with Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys, one of the world's largest IT services companies.  Nilekani is also Chairperson of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), an ambitious government program designed to issue biometric identity cards to all citizens of India, with goals such as of reducing corruption in government transfers and increasing financial inclusion for the poor.  The event will give us the opportunity to hear Nilekani's view on the potential of the UID project as well as the vigorous debate it has engendered.   Nilekani will also reflect on business,the economy, and philanthropy in India.  

Matt Bannick, Managing Partner of Omidyar Network, the philanthropic investment firm founded by eBay's Pierre Omidyar, will lead the discussion. Gerhard Casper, former President of Stanford University will make a special introduction.

How do we know that a person is what she claims to be? Or how do we make others believe that we are the person that we claim to be? Sociologists have explored these questions by focusing on face-to-face interaction in various everyday settings. This talk concerns the micropolitics of identification in a more formalized and institutionalized setting, specifically in immigration proceedings. Drawing on the literature on bureaucracy, presentation of self, migrant sending communities, and deviance, the speaker examines how immigration bureaucrats seek to establish migrants’ identities in contemporary immigration proceedings; how migrants challenge these dominant identification practices, notably through their involvement in various “illegal” schemes; and what consequences these micropolitical struggles have for both receiving and sending states. The talk is based on a study of the contestations over family-based immigration in South Korea, which have focused on efforts to establish the kinship and marital status of co-ethnic migrants from China (Korean Chinese migrants). The speaker will show how bureaucrats and migrants mobilize various types of “identity tags,” how migrants combine strategic and moral reasoning as they engage in these micropolitical struggles, and how these struggles influence not only immigration policies in the receiving state but also migration brokerage networks and gender and family relations in the sending states. The talk is based on Kim’s award-winning article in Law and Social Inquiry.

Jaeeun Kim is a postdoctoral fellow at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University (2012-2013). Before joining Stanford, she received her PhD degree in sociology from UCLA (2011) and was a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University (2011-2012). Her dissertation entitled Colonial Migration and Transborder Membership Politics in Twentieth-Century Korea examines diaspora politics in twentieth-century Korea, focusing on colonial-era ethnic Korean migrants and their descendants in Japan and northeast China. Her dissertation has recently been awarded the Theda Skocpol Best Dissertation Award from the Comparative-Historical Sociology Section of the ASA. Kim’s work has appeared in Theory and Society, Law and Social Inquiry, and European Journal of Sociology. Her article in Law and Social Inquiry, entitled “Establishing Identity: Documents, Performance, and Biometric Information in Immigration Proceedings,” has won the graduate and law students best paper award in 2011. After completing her fellowship term at Stanford, Kim will be Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at George Mason University beginning in the fall 2013. 

This event celebrating Sweden's diverse cultures began with a reception at 5pm, followed by the showing of the award winning film Harbour of Hope (2011, Sweden / Poland / Germany / Norway / Denmark; Dir. Magnus Gertten; 76 min) with filmmaker Magnus Gertten. Ozan Sunar, the artistic director of Moriska Paviljongen (also known as "Moriskan"), rounded out the evening with a multi-media presentation on bridging communities through culture.

Lina Khatib is the co-founding Head of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She joined Stanford University in 2010 from the University of London where she was an Associate Professor. Her research is firmly interdisciplinary and focuses on the intersections of politics, media, and social factors in relation to the politics of the Middle East. She is also a consultant on Middle East politics and media and has published widely on topics such as new media and Islamism, US public diplomacy towards the Middle East, and political media and conflict in the Arab world, as well as on the political dynamics in Lebanon and Iran. She has an active interest in the link between track two dialogue and democratization policy. She is also a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, and, from 2010-2012, was a Research Fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.

Lina is one of the core authors of the forthcoming Arab Human Development Report (2013) published by the UNDP, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Syria Justice and Accountability Center. She is also a founding co-editor of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, a multidisciplinary journal concerned with politics, culture and communication in the region, and in 2009 co-edited (with Klaus Dodds) a special issue of the journal on geopolitics, public diplomacy and soft power in the Middle East. She edited the Journal of Media Practice from 2007-2010.

Paul Wise is the Richard E. Behrman Professor of Child Health and Society, Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine, and Senior Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.  He is Director of the Center for Policy, Outcomes and Prevention and a core faculty of the Centers for Health Policy and Primary Care Outcomes Research, at Stanford University.

Dr. Wise received his A.B. degree summa cum laude and his M.D. degree from Cornell University, a Master of Public Health degree from the Harvard School of Public Health and did his pediatric training at the Children's Hospital in Boston.  His former positions include serving as the Director of Emergency and Primary Care Services at the Children's Hospital, Boston, Director of the Harvard Institute for Reproductive and Child Health at Harvard Medical School, and Special Assistant to the U.S. Surgeon General.  Prior to moving to Stanford University, Dr. Wise was Vice-Chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities in the Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, the academic and research base of Partners in Health.

Rajaie Batniji is a resident physician in internal medicine at Stanford and a CDDRL affiliate. His research examines the selection of priority diseases and countries in global health, and he is interested in global health financing and the priority-setting process of international institutions. His work has also examined social determinants of health in the Middle East. At FSI, Dr. Batniji is co-investigator on Global Underdevelopment Action Fund projects explaining U.S. global health financing and political causes of public health crisis.

Dr. Batniji received his doctorate in international relations (D.Phil) from Oxford University where he studied as a Marshall Scholar. He also earned a M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine and M.A. and B.A. (with distinction) degrees in History from Stanford University. Dr. Batniji was previously based at Oxford's Global Economic Governance Program, and he has worked as a consultant to the World Health Organization.

In our current societies, the media are backbone institutions of social life, a tool through which we can strength or deteriorate our democracy. Each society decides if it works exclusively for the market or if it conditions business goals to preserve collective responsibility. The media are nuclear tools to accomplish the right balance between the two.  Unfortunately, nowadays such balance is neither a priority of public media sector nor a private one. The speech of the media has shifted, with consent and complicity of all the stakeholders, and has diminished responsibility criteria and installed partisanship and special interest and business. Reversing this process is an emergency, but the absence of imminent danger, unlike what it happens with the economic crisis, has not forced us to assume our obligations. Consequently, without being aware of it, we are marginalizing media content that can contribute to public service. The dependence between politicians and journalists makes them forget that they must serve the public interest. They are too involved in their own fight to survive and as a result subject the law, subsidies and news to their own interests. This lecture will analyze the mechanisms and trends through which the mass media stabilize irresponsibility and encourage a sensationalist discourse that, in turn, distance the citizen from public affairs.


Mònica Terribas was born in Barcelona (1968). She is a journalist and has been teaching at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra since 1993. She obtained her degree of Journalism at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (1991) and a doctoral fellowship by the British Council and La Caixa to study the links between the concept of public sphere and national identity in the media (Ph.D,  University of Stirling, Scotland, 1994). She combined her studies with her professional career as a journalist in the radio news services in 1986 and continued in 1988 in TV3 - Televisió de Catalunya- as a screenwriter, coordinator, editor and presenter of several television programs, among which the late night news program, La Nit al Dia (2002-2008).  In May 2008 she was appointed General Manager of TV3, responsible for the six public channels of the Catalan media corporation up to April 2012.  Since August 2012, she is the editor and CEO of ARA, which includes a newspaper and the net news leader platform. Among other awards, she received the National Award of Journalism and National Award of Culture.

This event is part of The Europe Center's Iberian Studies Program lecture series and the Journalism and Literature series presented by the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, the Stanford Humanities Center and The Europe Center.

In societies with continuous in-and-out migration in relatively short periods the formation of dominant culture comes into shape as "popular". Continental theories for defining people's culture mostly assume some permanent structures (cultural preferences of elites or classes) in modern societies, yet not so successful for explaining the rise of popular cultures in societies like the USA. Turkey, as a country of migratory waves from its birth, is a pristine example of such a process and unique for its elites' interventions into the cultural sphere. The talk is broadly concerns with three dynamics on the formation of Turkish popular culture - demographic transition, elitist cultural policies, and partly oppositional character of people's taste.

Orhan Tekelioğlu is Chair of Department of New Media at Bahçeşehir University (Istanbul, Turkey) and Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennyslvania’s Annenberg School of Communication.  He is a scholar of cultural sociology including such research fields as media consumption, the history of Turkish popular music, the sociological features of Turkish literature, and the cultural politics of the Republican period. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the Middle Eastern Technical University (Ankara, Turkey) and his Magisterartium degree in Sociology from the University of Oslo. He taughted in Departments of Political Science and Turkish Literature at the Bilkent University in Ankara, in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University, and acted as Acting Dean of the Faculty of Communication at the Izmir University of Economics. Dr. Tekelioğlu conducts field studies on popular television dramas and reality shows, and history of jazz and popular music in Istanbul. He has published articles in Turkish and in English and submitted papers to numerous national and international congresses. Among his publications are Pop Ekran [Pop Screen, 2013], Pop Yazılar, [Pop Essays, 2006], Foucault Sosyolojisi [Sociology of Foucault, 2003], Şerif Mardin’e Armağan, [A Festschrift for Şerif Mardin, 2005), "Modernizing reforms and Turkish music in the 1930s"  (Turkish Studies, 2001), and “Two Incompatible Positions in the Challenge Against the Individual Subject of Modernity” (Theory& Psychology, 1997).

Co-sponsored by the Mediterranean Studies Forum, Program on Urban Studies, the Europe Center, and Turkish Students Association