Prof. Jennifer Pan, PhD (Stanford University) will give a presentation on her recent publication "Welfare for Autocrats: How Social Assistance in China Cares for Its Rulers". Join via Zoom here.

Jennifer Pan is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Stanford University. Her research focuses on political communication and authoritarian politics. Pan uses experimental and computational methods with large-scale datasets on political activity in China and other authoritarian regimes to answer questions about how autocrats perpetuate their rule. How political censorship, propaganda, and information manipulation work in the digital age. How preferences and behaviors are shaped as a result.

Her book, Welfare for Autocrats: How Social Assistance in China Cares for its Rulers (Oxford, 2020) shows how China's pursuit of political order transformed the country’s main social assistance program, Dibao, for repressive purposes. Her work has appeared in peer reviewed publications such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics, and Science.

BIGSSS Doctoral Colloquium

via Zoom, https://zoom.us/j/98266944212?pwd=MUFpK2ZrZ2VxTHU4SFpsaWdvRytnUT09

Organizers: Dr. Steffen Bandlow-Raffalski / Dr. Mandy Boehnke

Goal and Format

The colloquium offers the opportunity to present current issues (could be questions regarding your methods design, theoretical framework etc.), (first) results of individual dissertation projects or drafts of conference or journal papers and to discuss them with fellows and faculty. Presenters should make clear what they want from the discussion and send these expectations together with at least an abstract of their topic to the participants. The presentation itself should not exceed 25-30 minutes. Typically, presentations will get a short (5-7 min) comment by an expert faculty member or fellow to be followed by an open discussion with the audience. The fellows-first rule applies.

The main topic of this presentation is to analyse the recent reforms and discourses about gender roles as produced and activated by the right-wing populist governments in Hungary (post 2010)  and Poland (post 2015). In the context of a rapid demographic decline that took place in almost all East European Countries, women started to be predominantly perceived through their reproductive functions. In Hungary, pro-natalist policies favouring cash transfers were intensified under the slogans of ‘demographic revolution of the middle class’, with blaming women for falling fertility rates. In Poland, aligned with the Catholic Church, the new government has openly attacked the notion of gender, while limiting access to emergency contraception, IVF treatment, and allowing the repeated attempts to introduce a complete abortion ban, while at the same time investing heavily in child-related policies. Overall, such approach would place more emphasis on supply side of politics. For characterising the recent reforms in Hungary and Poland I am using the notions of maternalism and familialism (and their varieties) and then to analyse the main discourses around maternity in relation to gender roles and other accompanying discourses employed by the right-wing populist governments in the new political contexts. My argument is that the recent developments in these policies and discourses can be interpreted as re-building and strengthening national identities. Specifically, I am using Nira Yuval-Davis’s framework of gendered nationalism. As previous studies often focused on Hungarian-Polish comparison due to differences in their policy mixes, with Hungary being labelled 'public maternalism' or 'comprehensive support' and Poland – 'private maternalism' or 'implicit familialism', this paper demonstrates how the recent reforms contribute to transformation of Polish version of maternalism from 'private' to 'public'.

Please join the lecture via Zoom here.

Plenry discussion of all projects and of the overarching section of the proposal for funding period two.

The title of the lecture and the exact time will be added in the coming weeks.

The title, exact place and time of the workshop will be added soon.