Jocelyn Olcott is a scholar on the feminist history of modern Mexico. Her first book, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico, explores questions of gender and citizenship in the 1930s. She is currently working on two book-length projects: a history of the 1975 U.N. International Women's Year Conference in Mexico City (under contract with Oxford University Press), and a biography of the activist and folksinger Concha Michel. In this talk, Olcott will consider the 1975 UN International Women's Year Conference in Mexico City to discuss the ways that 1970s feminism and the explosion of women's organizing around the world reoriented global policies around a host of issues ranging from population and food security to labor policies and environmental accords. Read more and register at go.osu.edu/olcottj

Jonas Bunte is assistant professor for public policy and political economy at University of Texas at Dallas. He is a political economist with a particular interest in the politics of finance. Bunte analyzes how distributional consequences of financial flows provide domestic actors the incentive for political action, and how domestic institutions shape this process. In this talk, Bunte will discuss how defense cooperation and economic cooperation are related. His research reveals that (1) defense and economic cooperation mutually increase the other, (2) countries that are highly active creditors in the loan network make for unattractive defense partners, (3) countries that borrow from the same creditors are more likely to cooperate in defense, and (4) governments tend to make loans to the same debtors as their defense partners. Read more and register at go.osu.edu/buntej

Paul Staniland is assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he co-directs the Program on International Security Policy. His research interests are in civil war, international security, and ethnic politics, primarily in South Asia. His current book project and related articles examine organizational cohesion and fragmentation in insurgent groups. In this talk, Staniland will offer a new theory of how states evaluate armed groups, arguing that ideological perception and instrumental incentives combine to assign groups to six different political roles. These roles, ranging from mortal enemies to business partners to undesirable, determine the strategies that governments pursue and the orders they seek to construct. Read more and register at go.osu.edu/staniland

This talk examines the changing role of statistics in the apparatus through which objects and practices are known and intervened upon (governed) in Turkey. It argues that statistics are a crucial piece of the assemblage of human and non-human things involved in the large-scale transformation of institutions in Turkey in line with EU norms and standards, and that this work of reforming of institutions, practices and ultimately livelihoods is often undertaken in the name of technical adjustments merely to collect better data. Brian Silverstein, associate professor of anthropology at University of Arizona, uses the case of agriculture and agriculture statistics to show how it is through the reform of statistics along EU standards that a lot of the work of engineering commensurability of social forms is accomplished. Read more and register