January 11: In the Hegemon’s Shadow: How Security Amendments to a U.S. Government Grant Shape Firm Behavior (Pre-analysis Plan)” - Zikai Li and Alex Tippett *joint with Workshop on International Politics

January 18: Kate Baldwin, Yale University

January 22: “Re-inventing the Schoolmaster, teacher training in early 19th century London” - Ksenia Podvoiskaia, Department of History

Virtually on alternate Tuesdays from 5:00 to 6:20pm Central Time 

January 9: “Feminist Aspirations and ‘The Thing Everyone Seems to Worry About Being Mistaken for Doing: Theology'” - Hannah Jones, CSGS Dissertation Fellow, PhD Candidate, Divinity School

January 11: "Whispers of Free Labor: A New Reading of the Bracero Program's Demise" - Nahomi Esquivel, specail joint seassion with Latin American History Workshop *special date/location: Pick 118

January 10: "No estan solos, You Are Not Alone: Resisting U.S. Immigrant Detention from the Inside-Out" - Ramón Garibaldo Valdéz 

January 10: Plant-Human Hybrids in the Peruvian Amazon, Lorna Hadlock

January 22:  “Materializing intersectional oppression: An exploitation-first theory of class, gender, and race” - Nicholas Vrousalis

January 17: “Translating Nahua Textile Knowledge, Language and Femineity in the Early Hispanic World” - Andrea Reed Leal

January 19: Dalton Conley, Professor in Sociology, Princeton University

Thursdays 3:30 - 5pm in Pick Hall 506 & Zoom

January 11: In the Hegemon’s Shadow: How Security Amendments to a U.S. Government Grant Shape Firm Behavior (Pre-analysis Plan)” - Zikai Li and Alex Tippett *joint with Comparative Politics Workshop

January 18: “From the Bronze Age to Bismarck: Reconceptualizing Power as Adaptive Problem Solving and State Fitness in International Relations” - Meghan Iverson

Ilana Ventura, a PhD candidate in sociology and Angela García, an Assistant Professor of the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice & previous CISSR 20-21 Fellow explore the economic and socio-psychological migrant remittances from the U.S. during the pandemic. Remittances refers to the act of migrants sending money to their countries of origin for their family residing in the homeland. Within the scope of their paper, Ventura and García explain that especially for the smaller economies in the Global South, remittances can contribute more to the household economy than the domestically-earned active incomes of the family members, and for the some of the poorest states in the world, the remittances can sometimes accumulate to a larger portion of or even exceed the country’s GDP. Since many of these immigrant workers were employed within the service sector, and the service sector was among the hardest hit, the income consistency, security, and financial sustainability became topics of concern for the migrant workers. According to Ventura and García’s analysis, the remittance networks widened in the spirit of community and cooperation during the pandemic and the circulation schemes flexed to include not only direct family members but also acquaintances, and the social environment of these family members. Beyond these widened networks of circulation, remittances remained the same or even increased for migrant workers who were considered essential staff during the pandemic, such as nurses, direct supply chain workers like long distance transportation and medical cold chain employees, and employees whose jobs could also be performed remotely. For the food and short distance transportation industry, entertainment, hospitality, and some other sectors, the limiting effect of the pandemic was more pronounced and hence was the direct effect of the process to the money-making abilities of the workers in these industries. So, for workers in those industries, remittances slowed down, decreased in frequency, or periodically stopped during the pandemic. Still, as noted above, these decreases were sometimes compensated by the wider social networks and communal care that took place. Read the article published in the International Migration Review.

In his article "Facing the Flames: The Herskovitses, Trinidad, and the anthropological imagination", Assistant Professor of Anthropology & 23-24 CISSR Book Fellow, Ryan Cecil Jobson, looks at the work of anthropologist Melville Herskowirz in Africa during the early twentieth century. Twentieth century was a time during which social sciences had split more and more into sub-disciplines, flexed their scope, and these differences between disciplines became more prominent. During this time, Herskowitz studied Trinidad, a country with a colonial history, and looked carefully at the cultural practices and rituals of an island, Toco, within the country. Shortly before Herskowitz’s visit to the country, an oil production facility had caught fire and many people lost their jobs. Focusing on this critical moment, Jobson asks why Herskovitz excluded such a traumatic and tectonic experience from his analysis, and why he focused exclusively on the cultural peculiarities of the region. Asst. Prof. Jobson asks, employing a counterfactual thought experiment, how the dynamics of labor, economic disadvantage, colonialism, and production interact with cultural texture. In the end, Asst. Prof, Jobson proposes the discipline of anthropology move beyond relativist and culture-oriented analyses and plunge more deeply into the structural and experiential junctures of the human practices. Read the full article in American Ethnologist.