The French Culture Workshop is co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, the DLCL Research Unit, the France-Stanford Center, and the Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute.

After a long period of under-appreciation, Michel Serres's prescient and unique writing is now beginning to receive the attention it has long deserved. This talk explores the distinctiveness and contemporaneity of Serres’s thought, paying particular attention to the  "figures" that distinguish not only the themes he addresses, but also the way he approaches and passes between them. What emerges is a picture of a body of work radically distinct from that of his contemporaries Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault, and a set of concerns the timeliness of which is only now becoming evident.

Dr. Christopher Watkin is a Senior Lecturer at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, where he teaches across French and Literary Studies. He is the author of a number of books in modern and contemporary thought, including Phenomenology or Deconstruction? (2009), Difficult Atheism (2011), and French Philosophy Today: New Figures of the Human (2016). His latest monograph, Michel Serres: Figures of Thought, is due to be published with Edinburgh University Press in early 2020. Chris is currently working on a project interrogating the concepts of freedom and liberation in contemporary thought and society in the light of what has been called the Western “emancipation narrative”. He blogs about philosophy and academic research at christopherwatkin.com, and you can find him on Twitter @DrChrisWatkin.  

The French Culture Workshop is co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, the DLCL Research Unit, the France-Stanford Center, and the Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute.

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/P1-Q0OSo4yM

About this Event: The governance of big data and the prevention of their misuse is among the most topical issues in current debates among security experts. But what does it mean when security is not an issue for the stakeholders governing big biomedical data? This paper answers this question by looking at what it describes as a peculiar omission of the issue of security in the biggest harmonization cluster of biomedical research in Europe - BBMRI-ERIC. While it does treat personal data, the risks and threats are constructed through a language of anticipation and self-governance rather than security. The analysis explains why: based on document analysis, interviews, and field research, it studies (1) how are risks and threats constructed in the research with big biomedical data, (2) what regime of their governance is established in this area, and (3) what are the implications for the practices of science and the politics of security. The paper argues that this silence is a by-product of bureaucratization and responsibilization of security, which is in biobanking characteristic by discourse and practices of responsible research, ethics, and law. The paper suggests that this regime of governance precludes the prospects of addressing bigger questions that biobanks may need to deal with in the future, such as regarding the access to the biomedical data by state or private actors and their use for policing, surveillance, or other types of population governance.

Speaker's Biography: Dagmar Rychnovská is Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the Techno-science and societal transformation group at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna. She holds a PhD in International Relations (Charles University in Prague), an MA in Comparative and International Studies (ETH Zurich and University of Zurich), and an LLM in Law and Politics of International Security (VU University Amsterdam). Her research interests lie at the intersection of international relations, security studies, and science and technology studies. Her current research explores security controversies in research and innovation governance, with a focus on bioweapons, biotechnologies, and biobanks.

On January 11, 2020 Taiwan held its presidential and legislative elections. Many observers expected the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to run an online disinformation campaign during the lead-up to the election in support of their preferred candidate, Han Kuo-yu, who was challenging incumbent Tsai Ing-wen. Such concerns were increased by demonstrated PRC online disinformation targeting the Hong Kong protests, and claims by an alleged PRC spy saying he led disinformation efforts targeting Taiwan during the 2018 elections. 

In this talk, we delve into case studies that highlight the role social media plays in disinformation at large in the Taiwanese information environment. We examine that while the fears of disinformation were generally not realized, we did find evidence of coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook, in particular on fan Pages and Groups for the two candidates. Our findings hold implications for researchers trying to distinguish authentic hyper-partisan domestic activism from coordinated disinformation. 

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Carly Miller is a social science researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory. In addition to covering the Taiwanese election, she assists the team in other digital forensic research and thinking about how researchers external to social media platforms think about disinformation campaign and concepts such as attribution. Before coming to Stanford, Carly was a Team Lead at the Human Rights Investigations Lab at Berkeley Law School where she worked to unearth patterns of various bad actors’ media campaigns. Carly received her BA with honors in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in May 2019.

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Vanessa Molter is a Research Assistant at SIO and a Master in International Policy candidate at Stanford University, where she focuses on International Security in East Asia. At SIO, she monitors and writes on the Taiwanese social media environment. Previously, she has studied Taiwanese security affairs at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei, Taiwan, a government-affiliated defense think-tank. Vanessa is fluent in Mandarin and holds a B.S. in International Business and East Asian studies from Tubingen University, Germany.

Abstract: A Supply and Demand Framework for YouTube Politics (with Joseph Phillips)

Youtube is the most used social network in the United States. However, for a combination of sociological and technical reasons, there exist little quantitative social science research on the political content on Youtube, in spite of widespread concern about the growth of extremist YouTube content. An emerging journalistic consensus theorizes the central role played by the video "recommendation engine," but we believe that this is premature. Instead, we propose the "Supply and Demand" framework for analyzing politics on YouTube. We discuss a number of novel technological affordances of YouTube as a platform and as a collection of videos, and how each might drive supply of or demand for extreme content. We then provide large-scale longitudinal descriptive information about the supply of and demand for alternative political content on YouTube. We demonstrate that viewership of far-right videos peaked in 2017.

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TEC will be canceling all public events and seminars until at least April 15th due to ongoing developments associated with COVID-19.

How do we explain that the European Union gained so much authority, especially in economic areas? Most explanations of the EU usually start off by misdescribing how much authority it exerts over its member-states. Classic IR theorists in realist or liberal traditions describe the EU as a strong international regime, allowing them to explain it simply as a response to especially-strong regional versions of the exogenously-given conditions that ostensibly favor international cooperation elsewhere. Even more endogenously-inclined theorists who explain the EU as an ideational or institutionally path-dependent project tend to describe it as a quasi-federation that still falls well short of a “United States of Europe.” But if the EU certainly lacks some important powers of federal states, in some core areas it has surpassed them. Employing a comparison of the EU to three Anglo-Saxon federations (United States, Canada, Australia), we show that today’s EU actively exercises authority over states’ market openness and fiscal discipline that these federations have never claimed. This re-description of the EU outcome displays just how far Europe has departed from the expectations of classic IR theories, and highlights the kind of strongly endogenous ideational and institutional explanation it requires. Co-author: Craig Parsons, University of Oregon.

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Since the summer of 2019, he is also a Senior Fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He also currently serves as the Chair of the Executive Committee of the European Union Studies Association (EUSA).

Matthijs is the editor (with Mark Blyth) of the book The Future of the Euro published by Oxford University Press in 2015, and author of Ideas and Economic Crises in Britain from Attlee to Blair (1945-2005), published by Routledge in 2011. The latter is based on his doctoral dissertation, which received the Samuel H. Beer Prize for Best Dissertation in British Politics by a North American scholar, awarded by the British Politics Group of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in 2010.

In 2018, he won the Best Paper Award from APSA’s European Politics and Society section for “When Is It Rational to Learn the Wrong Lessons?” (co-authored with Mark Blyth). Among various other research and writing projects, he is currently working on a book-length manuscript that delves into the collapse of national elite consensus around European integration.

Dr. Matthijs received his BSc in applied economics with magna cum laude from the University of Antwerp in Belgium, and his MA and PhD in international relations from Johns Hopkins University.