College Hall, Room 200
Free and open to the public / Food will be served.

Co-sponsored by the Pi Sigma Alpha Political Science Honor Society, The Jack Miller Center, and the Penn Wharton Public Policy Initiative.

JOIN THE PENN POLITICAL UNION as its five political parties debate the resolution, “The political atmosphere at Penn and other similar institutions is hostile to the free exchange of ideas.”

Silverstein Forum, Stiteler Hall First Floor (Accessibility)
Free and open to the public / Food provided

Discussant: William Schultz (Mitchell Center Postdoctoral Fellow)

All attendees are encouraged to read Prof. Yukich's paper, available here.

ANTI-MUSLIM DISCRIMINATION HAS BECOME A CENTRAL ISSUE in the current U.S. political climate. Professor Yukich presents the first large-scale audit study of anti-Muslim discrimination in the U.S. that incorporates an intersectional framework including religion, ethnicity, and gender. Fictitious resumes were sent to 1,000 entry-level job openings in eight cities across the U.S. The study reveals that the amount of discrimination Muslims face depends on their ethnicity and gender: Arab Muslim men have the lowest callback rate, but white women face the largest penalty for being Muslim. These findings have implications for public policy and advance theories of intersectionality by demonstrating the inadequacy of additive approaches to discrimination.

GRACE YUKICH is Associate Professor of Sociology at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. She is a sociologist whose research, writing, and teaching focus on immigration, religion, social movements & politics, race & ethnicity, and culture. Her first book, One Family Under God: Immigration Politics and Progressive Religion in America (2013), is an ethnographic study of how immigration is changing the relationship between religion and politics in the United States, especially migration from Latin America. She is currently finishing research for her next book, using experimental methods to measure discrimination against Arab American Muslims in the U.S. job market.

All attendees are encouraged to read Prof. Yukich's paper, available here.

Aaron Shapiro (Annenberg School for Communications)
"Performance and Performativity in Predictive Policing"

Hao Jun Tam (Penn Dept. of English)
"Diasporic South Vietnam: Pacifist Nationalism and Its Militant Shadow in Ly Tho Ho’s Novel Sequence"

Silverstein Forum, Stiteler Hall First Floor (Accessibility)
Free and open to the public / Co-sponsored by the Penn Dept. of Religious Studies
Discussant: Sarah Barringer Gordon (Penn Law)

All attendees are encouraged to read Prof. Balmer's paper, available here.

THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT’S MOST CHERISHED AND DURABLE MYTH IS ITS MYTH OF ORIGINS. According to this well-rehearsed narrative, articulated by Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and countless others, after nearly half a century of electoral quiescence evangelical leaders were shaken out of their political complacency by the United States Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision of January 22, 1973.  This abortion myth collapses, however, in the face of historical scrutiny – scrutiny carried out over decades by Professor Balmer to ascertain the true origins of the Religious Right.  It was a quest that took him to denominational records, magazine sources, and the archives of such institutions as Liberty University, Bob Jones University, the presidential libraries of Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Jimmy Carter, and the American Heritage Center in Laramie, Wyoming.  The real origins of the Religious Right, it turns out, were far from highminded and revolved around a fight between Bob Jones University and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) over the admission of African-American students. All attendees are encouraged to read Prof. Balmer's paper, available here.

RANDALL BALMER is the John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College. A prize-winning historian and Emmy Award nominee, he has published more than a dozen books, including Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter and The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics and Beyond. His second book, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America, now in its fifth edition, was made into an award-winning, three-part documentary for PBS. His op-ed articles have appeared in newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, the Des Moines Register, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Anchorage Daily News, and the New York Times.

College Hall, Room 209 (Accessibility)
Free and open to the public / Lunch provided

Sarah Khan (Columbia University, Political Science) 
"Personal is Political: Prospects for Women’s Substantive Representation in Pakistan"

Joseph Wuest (University of Pennsylvania, Political Science) 
"'Why is My Child Gay?': PFLAG and the Origins of the ‘Born This Way’ Gay Political Identity"

In her paper, SARAH KHAN develops and tests a theory of how gender inequality within the household is reproduced in the political sphere, undermining prospects for women’s substantive representation. Drawing on an original face-to-face survey conducted in 800 households in the Faisalabad district of Pakistan, she shows that men and women within the same household prioritize systematically different public goods and services based on the context-specific division of household labor. Using a novel behavioral measure of political communication, she demonstrates that women attach a lower value to their distinctive preferences than men, and are less willing to communicate these preferences to political representatives. The gendered asymmetry in preference assertion has implications for democratic theories of representation: it suggests that the link between political participation and substantive representation may be undermined by gender inequality within the household. 

In his paper, JOSEPH WUEST focuses on how the budding LGBTQ movement’s project of making alliances with scientific and medical actors and institutions in the late 1970s and 1980s established the foundations of the “born this way” gay political identity that would come to define the movement’s articulation of gay identity. He argues that the use of scientific expertise in the movement’s political discourse facilitated the creation of the relatively conservative neoliberal version of gay politics that has defined the contemporary LGBTQ movement. Looking to the origins and development of the family-based gay rights organization PFLAG as a case study, he demonstrates how these scientific alliances led the movement to adopt a narrow biodeterministic conception of what it means to be “gay.” This effectively limited the bounds of queer politics, abandoning the more radical early 1970s gay liberation movement’s project of exposing heterosexuality and homosexuality as false and constraining social categories.