"Private Academies and the Public Good: A Cold War History of Religion and Education in Japan and the US" lecture with Jolyon Thomas, University of Pennsylvania, on Thursday, February 16, at 5:00 p.m. in A.D. White House.

Thomas researches religion in Japan and the United States at the University of Pennsylvania.

Sponsored by the Religious Studies Program with support from Department of Asian Studies, East Asian Program, Department of History, Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Society for the Humanities, and American Studies Program.

Shannon Philip explores the gendering of everyday urban spaces and the social production of gendered violence. Through ethnographic data collected by ‘hanging out’ with young Indian men in New Delhi, he discusses the ways masculinities are constructed and performed, and how these in turn produce hostility, fear, and violence for women and girls accessing the same urban spaces.

Through weaving together material from myriad urban sites like gyms, bars, trains, street corners, night clubs, gay cruising parks as well as shopping malls, Philip explores how there is an attempt to make the city a masculine space, with a hypersexualization of women in the same spaces. However, this process is not even or uniform, with several masculine anxieties and vulnerabilities also emerging in men’s claims on the city from queer and non-masculine bodies. In this way, the urban space becomes an interesting palimpsest to explore the politics of gender, class, sexualities, and violences on an everyday level.

Please join us for this virtual conversation. Register here.

About the Speaker

Dr Shannon Philip is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of East Anglia, UK and a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, UK, and the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. His first monograph has recently been published with Cambridge University Press (2022) titled Becoming Young Men in a New India: Masculinities, Gender Relations and Violence in the Postcolony. Shannon’s new research project comparatively explores youth, sexualities, urban transformations, and gender in South Africa and India.

Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Co-sponsored by the South Asia Program, and the Gender and Security Sector Lab.

With a focus on gang violence in El Salvador, Dr. Córdova’s book examines how organized criminal groups’ operations in the territories they control, and the incursion of the police and military, threaten women’s safety. The main argument establishes that gangs’ territorial control increases women’s daily risk of gender-based violence in the streets of neighborhoods and in the privacy of homes, and that this risk is perpetuated by diminished reporting rates due to widespread distrust in the police, largely resulting from increased police abuse associated with the militarization of public security. The consequences of these dynamics for women’s resistance, particularly implications for international migration, are also explored.

Dr. Córdova’s book project, supported by a 2022 Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Distinguished Scholar Award and a grant from the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame, contributes to the growing literature in political science on criminal violence and militarization by identifying some of the mechanisms that explain women’s increased risk of gender-based violence in territories controlled by organized criminal groups in the midst of state repression.

Dr. Abby Córdova's project builds on and contributes to this research by examining the evidence on the effects of women’s police stations on citizens’ attitudes toward the police and gender-based violence as well as impacts on the incidence of violence against women and reporting rates in the context of Brazil.

Please join us for this virtual conversation. Register here.

About the Speaker

Dr. Abby Córdova is an associate professor of global affairs in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Córdova’s research examines the consequences of inequality and marginalization for democracy, integrating topics related to violence against women, organized crime, militarization, and international migration in the context of Central America, Mexico, and Brazil. She was awarded the Harry Frank Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar Award in 2022.

Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Co-sponsored by the Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program, and the Gender and Security Sector Lab.

It’s been over 30 years since Congress enacted the most recent set of comprehensive immigration reforms: the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 and the Immigration Act of 1990. These bipartisan yet hotly contested bills passed only after a debate spanning five presidential administrations, eight congressional sessions, and painful compromises by all parties. Even then, both bills died on the House floor before being resurrected at the 11th hour.

Can lessons learned during the last round of reform be applied to future debates? Charles Kamasaki, author of “Immigration Reform: The Corpse That Will Not Die” (Mandel Vilar Press, 2019), thinks so. The book provides a history of how the 1980s-era reforms were enacted along with a summary of developments since then. It concludes with seven lessons that advocates and lawmakers should consider in advancing future immigration reform.

Join us for this discussion with Mr. Kamasaki, Cornell Law School professor Steve Yale-Loehr, and Wall Street Journal immigration reporter Michelle Hackman.