Past Events
Forum (Room 250), Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics
Map / Accessibility / Refreshments Provided
SAMUEL MOYN is Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and Professor of History at Yale University. His areas of interest in legal scholarship include international law, human rights, the law of war, and legal thought, in both historical and current perspective. In intellectual history, he has worked on a diverse range of subjects, especially twentieth-century European moral and political theory. He has written several books in his fields of European intellectual history and human rights history, including The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), and edited or coedited a number of others. His most recent books are Christian Human Rights (2015, based on Mellon Distinguished Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in fall 2014) and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018). He is currently working on a new book on the origins and significance of humane war for Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Over the years he has written in venues such as Boston Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, The Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
Reverberations of Inequality - SAMUEL MOYN
Forum (Room 250), Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics
Map / Accessibility / Refreshments Provided
SAMUEL MOYN is Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and Professor of History at Yale University. His areas of interest in legal scholarship include international law, human rights, the law of war, and legal thought, in both historical and current perspective. In intellectual history, he has worked on a diverse range of subjects, especially twentieth-century European moral and political theory. He has written several books in his fields of European intellectual history and human rights history, including The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), and edited or coedited a number of others. His most recent books are Christian Human Rights (2015, based on Mellon Distinguished Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in fall 2014) and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018). He is currently working on a new book on the origins and significance of humane war for Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Over the years he has written in venues such as Boston Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, The Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
The Place of Race in the Democratic Primaries (Jamelle Bouie)
133 S. 36th Street, Room 250 (The Forum)
Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics
Free and open to the public / Food provided
PLEASE REGISTER HERE
133 S. 36th Street, Auditorium (Lower Level)
Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics
Free and open to the public / Food provided
PLEASE REGISTER HERE
Co-sponsored by the Pi Sigma Alpha Political Science Honor Society and the Penn Wharton Public Policy Initiative.
JOIN THE PENN POLITICAL UNION as its five political parties and guest Jamelle Bouie debate the resolution, “The Trump Administration's immigration policies are rooted in racist ideology.”
THE PENN POLITICAL UNION (PPU) is an undergraduate organization formed in 2014 that features parliamentary-style deliberation on urgent contemporary issues. To represent a wide spectrum of political opinion, students are members of five different political parties: libertarian, conservative, independent, liberal, and progressive.
JAMELLE BOUIE, based in Charlottesville, Virginia and Washington D.C., is a columnist for the New York Times and political analyst for CBS News. He covers campaigns, elections, national affairs, and culture. Prior to the Times, he was chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. And before that, he was a staff writer at The Daily Beast and held fellowships at The American Prospect and The Nation magazine.
PLEASE REGISTER HERE
PPU Debate with Jamelle Bouie - Are Trump's Immigration Policies Racist?
133 S. 36th Street, Auditorium (Lower Level)
Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics
Free and open to the public / Food provided
PLEASE REGISTER HERE
Co-sponsored by the Pi Sigma Alpha Political Science Honor Society and the Penn Wharton Public Policy Initiative.
JOIN THE PENN POLITICAL UNION as its five political parties and guest Jamelle Bouie debate the resolution, “The Trump Administration's immigration policies are rooted in racist ideology.”
THE PENN POLITICAL UNION (PPU) is an undergraduate organization formed in 2014 that features parliamentary-style deliberation on urgent contemporary issues. To represent a wide spectrum of political opinion, students are members of five different political parties: libertarian, conservative, independent, liberal, and progressive.
JAMELLE BOUIE, based in Charlottesville, Virginia and Washington D.C., is a columnist for the New York Times and political analyst for CBS News. He covers campaigns, elections, national affairs, and culture. Prior to the Times, he was chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. And before that, he was a staff writer at The Daily Beast and held fellowships at The American Prospect and The Nation magazine.
PLEASE REGISTER HERE
Room 350, Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics (133 S. 36th Street)
Food provided / Free and open to the public
Muira McCammon (Annenberg School for Communication)
Tweeting and Deleting: Strategic Narratives and Impression Management by U.S. Federal Agencies
Ayesha Mulla (University of Chicago Dept. of Anthropology)
Marwa Na Dena/Don’t Get Us Killed: Reporting Between the Marginal and the Military in Pakistan (PDF)
WHEN, IF EVER, DO DEMOCRACIES PERMIT AND ENCOURAGE THE DELETION of posts on government social media accounts? In a qualitative study employing Freedom of Information Act requests, MUIRA MCCAMMON traces what different federal agencies removed from their Twitter feeds during the Obama and Trump administrations. By putting the records of deleted tweets in conversation with federal agencies’ internal emails and statements to the U.S. press, she examines the informal decisions made by government social media managers and teases apart the communicative strategies that governmental institutions have employed in their tweeting and deleting. She argues that the Federal Records Act in its ambiguity has begotten an informational environment wherein certain types of governmental deletion are dramatically hyped by journalists, while others remain undocumented and left in the government’s archival backstage. This is ultimately about the challenge of tracing these behaviors over time and the ways in which Freedom of Information Act requests can reveal patterns in information disappearance and erasure on corporate social media platforms.
SEVENTEEN YEARS AFTER THE DEREGULATION OF THE MASS MEDIA in Pakistan, private news channels have established themselves as powerful players on the political spectrum, drawing both awe and disdain for their blistering critiques of politicians combined with their race for ratings. Despite their insistence on the “independent” nature of the electronic media, news media professionals are highly attentive to the ways in which their work remains bounded in general by the state. Based on a series of in-depth interviews, AYESHA MULLA examines the politics of media censorship in democratic Pakistan as the authority of television news journalism becomes increasingly destabilized. She analyzes the ways in which the shadow of the deep state featured in her dissertation fieldwork among news media professionals in Karachi and Islamabad. She focuses on the shifts in tone, the anxious laughter and the lengthy pauses that verbose journalists adopted when they would perform an inarticulate critique of the military. Such enactments rest upon the very real dangers of straying past the limits of investigative inquiry in Pakistan, particularly when presented with the fate of their colleagues pursuing critical leads on military activities.
GRAD WORKSHOP - Disappearing Acts: (Self)-Censorship and the Freedom of Information
Room 350, Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics (133 S. 36th Street)
Food provided / Free and open to the public
Muira McCammon (Annenberg School for Communication)
Tweeting and Deleting: Strategic Narratives and Impression Management by U.S. Federal Agencies
Ayesha Mulla (University of Chicago Dept. of Anthropology)
Marwa Na Dena/Don’t Get Us Killed: Reporting Between the Marginal and the Military in Pakistan (PDF)
WHEN, IF EVER, DO DEMOCRACIES PERMIT AND ENCOURAGE THE DELETION of posts on government social media accounts? In a qualitative study employing Freedom of Information Act requests, MUIRA MCCAMMON traces what different federal agencies removed from their Twitter feeds during the Obama and Trump administrations. By putting the records of deleted tweets in conversation with federal agencies’ internal emails and statements to the U.S. press, she examines the informal decisions made by government social media managers and teases apart the communicative strategies that governmental institutions have employed in their tweeting and deleting. She argues that the Federal Records Act in its ambiguity has begotten an informational environment wherein certain types of governmental deletion are dramatically hyped by journalists, while others remain undocumented and left in the government’s archival backstage. This is ultimately about the challenge of tracing these behaviors over time and the ways in which Freedom of Information Act requests can reveal patterns in information disappearance and erasure on corporate social media platforms.
SEVENTEEN YEARS AFTER THE DEREGULATION OF THE MASS MEDIA in Pakistan, private news channels have established themselves as powerful players on the political spectrum, drawing both awe and disdain for their blistering critiques of politicians combined with their race for ratings. Despite their insistence on the “independent” nature of the electronic media, news media professionals are highly attentive to the ways in which their work remains bounded in general by the state. Based on a series of in-depth interviews, AYESHA MULLA examines the politics of media censorship in democratic Pakistan as the authority of television news journalism becomes increasingly destabilized. She analyzes the ways in which the shadow of the deep state featured in her dissertation fieldwork among news media professionals in Karachi and Islamabad. She focuses on the shifts in tone, the anxious laughter and the lengthy pauses that verbose journalists adopted when they would perform an inarticulate critique of the military. Such enactments rest upon the very real dangers of straying past the limits of investigative inquiry in Pakistan, particularly when presented with the fate of their colleagues pursuing critical leads on military activities.
Forum (Room 250), Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics
Map / Accessibility / Refreshments Provided
Read a chapter from Prof. Harris' book here.
OVER SEVEN MILLION AMERICANS are either incarcerated, on probation, or on parole, with their criminal records often following them for life and affecting access to higher education, jobs, and housing. Court-ordered monetary sanctions that compel criminal defendants to pay fines, fees, surcharges, and restitution further inhibit their ability to reenter society. Sociologist ALEXES HARRIS presents findings from her book, A Pound of Flesh: Monetary Sanctions as Punishment for the Poor, which draws from extensive sentencing data, legal documents, observations of court hearings, and interviews with defendants, judges, prosecutors, and other court officials. Highlighting variations in how monetary sanctions are imposed, she shows how judges and court clerks hold a considerable degree of discretion in sentencing and rely on individual values—such as personal responsibility, meritocracy, and paternalism—to determine how much and when offenders should pay. Harris finds that fiscal sentences, imposed disproportionately on low-income minorities, help create a permanent economic underclass of those too poor to make make regular payments towards this pernicious debt. Finally, Harris proposes ways to end a two-tiered legal system that imposes additional burdens on already-marginalized groups.
ALEXES HARRIS is a University of Washington Presidential Term Professor in Sociology. Her research interests focus on social stratification processes and racial and ethnic disparities. She investigates how contact with varying institutions (educational, juvenile and criminal justice and economic) impact individuals' life chances. Her book, A Pound of Flesh (2016), documents the contemporary relationship between the United States' systems of social control and inequality. Using a mixed-method approach (court observations, interviews with court actors and defendants, review of legal statute and cases, and statistical analysis of court automated data), it analyzes the particular policies and mechanisms used within the criminal justice system to impose and monitor sanctions to poor people who do not pay their legal debts, and I examine the consequences of this process. Outlining how local community and court culture and financial constraints influence contemporary notions of who should be held accountable for their actions by the criminal justice system, Harris argues that monetary sanctions serve as a punishment tool that permanently penalize and marginalize the poor.
REVERBERATIONS OF INEQUALITY - A Pound of Flesh: Monetary Sanctions and the Punishment Continuum (Alexes Harris)
Forum (Room 250), Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics
Map / Accessibility / Refreshments Provided
Read a chapter from Prof. Harris' book here.
OVER SEVEN MILLION AMERICANS are either incarcerated, on probation, or on parole, with their criminal records often following them for life and affecting access to higher education, jobs, and housing. Court-ordered monetary sanctions that compel criminal defendants to pay fines, fees, surcharges, and restitution further inhibit their ability to reenter society. Sociologist ALEXES HARRIS presents findings from her book, A Pound of Flesh: Monetary Sanctions as Punishment for the Poor, which draws from extensive sentencing data, legal documents, observations of court hearings, and interviews with defendants, judges, prosecutors, and other court officials. Highlighting variations in how monetary sanctions are imposed, she shows how judges and court clerks hold a considerable degree of discretion in sentencing and rely on individual values—such as personal responsibility, meritocracy, and paternalism—to determine how much and when offenders should pay. Harris finds that fiscal sentences, imposed disproportionately on low-income minorities, help create a permanent economic underclass of those too poor to make make regular payments towards this pernicious debt. Finally, Harris proposes ways to end a two-tiered legal system that imposes additional burdens on already-marginalized groups.
ALEXES HARRIS is a University of Washington Presidential Term Professor in Sociology. Her research interests focus on social stratification processes and racial and ethnic disparities. She investigates how contact with varying institutions (educational, juvenile and criminal justice and economic) impact individuals' life chances. Her book, A Pound of Flesh (2016), documents the contemporary relationship between the United States' systems of social control and inequality. Using a mixed-method approach (court observations, interviews with court actors and defendants, review of legal statute and cases, and statistical analysis of court automated data), it analyzes the particular policies and mechanisms used within the criminal justice system to impose and monitor sanctions to poor people who do not pay their legal debts, and I examine the consequences of this process. Outlining how local community and court culture and financial constraints influence contemporary notions of who should be held accountable for their actions by the criminal justice system, Harris argues that monetary sanctions serve as a punishment tool that permanently penalize and marginalize the poor.
