PIIRS Exploratory and Advanced Seminars, 2008–9 |Project on Democracy and Development | The Global Network on Inequality |

2009–10 Exploratory Seminars

Spring 2010

February 4-6, 2010
From Mongolia to Maasailand: A Comparative Assessment of Linkages between Pastoralist Land Rights and Social-Ecological Sustainability
Director: Daniel I. Rubenstein, Class of 1877 Professor of Zoology; chair, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; and director, Program in African Studies
                                                                   
This seminar proposes to break new ground in both theoretical and applied understanding of pastoralism-policy linkages by looking at the Maasai warriors of East Africa and the Mongolian horsemen of the Central Asian steppes. It brings together a team of leading social and natural scientists who have experience collaborating across disciplines and effecting policy changes. The scholars will investigate the linkages between three domains—national land policy, local social institutions, and environmental conditions—seeking to identify critical feedbacks and exploring if and how dysfunctional linkages can be reformed to catalyze greater system-wide sustainability.

March 5, 2010
Too Cute: Style, Utopia, and American Asia-Mania
Director: Anne A. Chang, professor of English and African American Studies

Current scholarship on Asian Pacific American issues is expanding beyond traditional disciplinary and regional boundaries, signaling the need for new paradigms of understanding aspects of Asian Pacific experiences as well as their roles in American national and cultural identities.  This conference invites scholars and artists from the U.S. and Asia in the fields of cultural and literary studies, art history, and gender studies to converse on these issues. The larger, conceptual goals of this seminar/colloquium are to jump start Asian American Studies at Princeton while reframing the field in transnational and global contexts; forge an opportunity for dialogue between artists and critics and also between U.S. and East Asian scholars; explore the roles of style and pleasure in the project of a liberal utopia; and investigate the concepts of race and nation through the relationship between aesthetic and social modalities of form.

March 11-13, 2010
Anthropology and Social Innovation in teh Field of Global Health
Director: Joao Biehl, professor of anthropology, codirector, Program in Global Health and Health Policy

The seminar will bring together twelve social scientists from the U.S. and overseas to discuss debates over the recent history of magic-bullet approaches to international health and the epistemology and politics of global health. Attention will be given to issues of advocacy, humanitarianism, and philanthropy in light of the “pharmaceuticalization” of health care delivery (with a focus on HIV/AIDS and the control of tuberculosis and malaria). Panel discussions will also include the current challenges of global mental-health programs, the entry of chronic disease into the global health framework, emerging forms of patient mobilization and personhood in the wake of large-scale drug treatment programs, and the role of the judiciary in execution of the right to health. The seminar will enable participating scholars to identify common and divergent themes and discuss the methodological, ethical and policy implications of a critical anthropology of global health.

March 15-17, 2010
Meeting a Grand Challenge to Hydrology: The Global Monitoring of Earth’s Terrestrial Water
Director: Eric Wood, professor of civil and environmental engineering

The hydrology community believes that developing an ability to monitor and predict the movement of water on the landscape globally, at scales of 1 to 5 km, is a grand challenge that is vital to scientific advancement of the field.  Currently, the ability to monitor global terrestrial water is severely lacking due to poor model resolution and related physics, inconsistencies among data sets, and computational challenges.  This exploratory seminar brings together scholars from around the world to brainstorm about and strategies for approaches to overcome these challenges, including identifying needed data sets, potential modeling advancements, and computational needs and solutions.

March 19-21, 2010
Northeast African Literature
Director: Wendy Belcher, assistant professor of comparative literature and African American Studies

This exploratory seminar will investigate the possibilities for jointly studying Northeastern African literatures (those of almost 100 million people in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Somalia) with colleagues from the United States, Europe, and Africa. Since many of these colleagues have never met, the seminar will provide a chance to bridge the immense distances between scholars working on this understudied and significant body of literatures. Most of the seminar will be dedicated to discussing the parameters and key questions of Northeastern African literatures (since the field has yet to be conceptualized as a field) and imagining the most useful ways for scholars dedicated to these literatures to move forward together.

April 30-May 1, 2010
Political Parties in Developing Democracies
Director: Rachel Riedl, postdoctoral research associate, PIIRS

The transition to democracy across the developing world has led to the construction of new constitutional orders, new institutions of representation, and new forms of linkages between citizens and their government.  While scholars across the disciplines have generated an array of theories about the causes of democratic transitions and the design of constitutional institutions, little is known about extra-constitutional or informal structures of representation and their influence on democratic institutions. Although parties appear to be endogenous to democracy, their organization and the overall structure of the party system is never designed a priori, but rather emerges from and evolves with social, economic, and political factors. This seminar will focus on four key themes in order to advance this discussion: frameworks for studying political parties in developing democracies; voter-party linkages; party and party-system development; and party-system change.

Fall 2009

October 2–3, 2009
The Contemporary Study of Saint-John Perse
Directors: Carol Rigolot, Council of the Humanities, and Susan Stewart, Annan Professor of English

The goal of this exploratory seminar is to bring together ten to twelve scholars from France, Ireland, Tunisia, Cyprus, Guadeloupe, and the United States for two days of discussion on future directions in scholarship about the French modernist poet/diplomat, Saint-John Perse/Alexis Leger (1887–1975), recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960. His poetry is a cross between Whitman, in breadth and voice, and Mallarmé, in allusion and enigma. The complete poems consist of more than 400 pages in the Pléiade edition.

Summer 2009

August 27–28
Migrant Youth and Children of Migrants in a Globalized World
Directors: Marta Tienda, Maurice P. During Professor in Demographic Studies; professor of sociology and public affairs; and director, Program in Latino Studies; and Sara McLanahan, William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs; and director, Center for Research on Child Well-Being
                                                                 
This seminar brought together international experts working on child development and migration to begin building a systematic research foundation about the impact of migration on child wellbeing across the globe. This network formalizes ties among research centers and researchers conducting innovative studies on child migration to develop a comparative picture of migrant children and youth in different countries. A major goal was to generate new theoretical insights and to identify high-quality data and methodologies for studying successful adaptation across diverse settings.

2008–9 Exploratory Seminars

Spring 2009

January 6–7
Internationalizing Machado de Assis
Director: Pedro Monteiro, associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese

Literary critics and historians from Europe, the U.S., and Brazil, who are specialists on Machado de Assis, gathered at Princeton to address such questions as: How and when does a “national” literature merit being analyzed at the international level? Are categories such as “local” and “universal,” dear to the cultural critiques of Latin American intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, valid at all? Is “world literature” a heuristically relevant category? If so, what does it mean to integrate a local author into the realm of a “world literature”? What are the aesthetic and political consequences of this integration?

                                                                 
March 20–21
Turkish Modernity and the Social Sciences
Directors: Cemil Aydin, postdoctoral research associate, Department of Near Eastern Studies; and Michael Reynolds, assistant professor of Near Eastern Studies

The seminar explored the state of theory and research on Turkey in the fields of anthropology, political science, history, and sociology to find new ways of interdisciplinary thinking on controversial issues such as center-periphery relations, Alevi and Kurdish identities, the role of religion in public life, and competing visions of internationalisms. A focus on Turkey and the social sciences is significant because Turkish modernization experience has always been a key case study for European social sciences.

March 27–28
Emergent Communication
Directors: Asif Ghazanfar, assistant professor of psychology, and Adele Goldberg, professor of linquistics

Investigators in fields as diverse as robotics, computer science, cognitive development, neuroscience, anthropology, and linguistics have begun converging on a pluralistic explanation for the complex behavior of communication—an explanation that includes important roles for simple, domain-general rules operating in development and evolution, as well as in the structure of the social environment. This seminar provided an opportunity for junior and senior researchers from seemingly disparate fields to get together for focused discussion on this unifying theme of emergent communication.

April 10–11
The Interface between Information Theory and Estimation Theory
Director: Sergio Verdu, Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering

The discovery by Guo, Shamai, and Verdu of an unexpected connection between information measures and the estimation measure known as minimum mean-square error, resulted in a surge of interest in the interface between the disciplines of information theory and estimation theory. This exploratory seminar brought together leading researchers from around the world who are currently exploring the boundaries, connections, and applications of the interface between information theory and estimation theory to fields as varied as digital communications, data compression, physics, control, and financial mathematics.

Fall 2008
November 13–15
New Directions in Gender Studies and Medieval German Studies
Director: Sara Poor, associate professor of German
The seminar brought together scholars of medieval German literature and gender studies from North America and Germany to facilitate an exchange of ideas about current work and to explore potential new directions that work might take. Topics covered included the relationship between religious reform and women’s literacy, obscenity and gender in late medieval German culture, discourses of victimhood and masculinity around 1500, late medieval “fake” mystics, gender and law in medieval literature, emotions and gender, and modern theory and gender. <read report>

2007–8 Exploratory Seminars

Spring 2008
March 28–29
Reception of Netherlandish Art in Asia in the Early Modern Period
Director: Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Frederick Marquand Professor of Art and Archaeology
Kaufmann and a group of nine European and Asian scholars in the fields of economic and art history explored the Asian reception of European art in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Emphasis was placed on artistic exchange between the Netherlands through the Dutch East India and parts of Asia, including China, Japan, India, and Sri Lanka. The group established the groundwork for further collaboration and plan to apply to the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study for further support. <read report>

April 25–26
Sustaining the Global Commons: An Experimental Approach
Directors: Deborah Prentice, professor of psychology; Daniel I. Rubenstein, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology; and Simon Levin, the George M. Moffett Professor of Biology
The seminar explored human behavior and cooperation and its effects on the global commons in which we live. Prentice, Rubenstein, and Moffet led a group of twenty-one scholars in economics, education, political science, sociology, game theory, psychology, evolutionary biology, and environmental economy in an endeavor to expand the extant literature through experimental games to provide insight into the issues associated with sustaining the commons. <read report>

May 2–3
Sigmund Freud and Art
Director: Ruben Gallo, associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese
The seminar gathered scholars from the U.S., U.K., Europe, and Australia for a discussion of Freud’s extensive collection of archaeological antiquities—a collection of over 1,000 works from around the world. It examined the possibility of conducting a detailed analysis of significant parts of the collection and of exploring the relation between his writings and those objects. <read report>

May 3–4
Genre and Tradition in Early Medieval China
Director: Martin Kern, professor of East Asian Studies; and Ping Wang, assistant professor of East Asian Studies
Kern, Wang, and a group of language, literature, culture, and civilization scholars from the U.S., China, and Taiwan prepared the ground for an international conference on the formation of the Chinese literary tradition in the early medieval period. Most importantly, they addressed the concept of specific textual continuities and differences in which texts might refer to earlier writings and give evidence of specific aesthetic and ideological expectations. The group’s ultimate goal is to produce a volume of original research to be published in both English and Chinese. <read report>

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