Andrada Costoiu | Instructor
 

Module description: Race is an exceedingly complex concept transcending disciplines, coloring everything from our daily lives to policy making. In this module, we will begin by disentangling the scientific construction of race and discuss the development of scientific thought about human genetic diversity, social Darwinism, and the eugenics movement. Then we consider the social construction of race. We discuss implicit bias and try to understand how humans socially categorize and how implicit social cognition can lead to prejudice and stereotyping. The last two weeks are dedicated to examining social inequalities and the role of public policy in reflecting, promoting, and perpetuating systemic racism.

This module is designed to boost your awareness and learning about race and to stimulate your thoughts about what you can do in your own community to promote less discrimination and fight prejudice. You do not have a heavy reading load, and you do not need to acquire the reading materials from a library or anywhere online. These, together with other materials for this module, will be placed in a common Google folder, and you will be given access to the folder in mid-June (in case you want an early start with the materials).

Short bio (Andrada Costoiu): I am primarily interested in human rights, social justice, and equality. I have a deep passion for education and enriching my students’ knowledge as well as mine. I am the author of Under the Iron Curtain, a novel set in communist Romania and published by Niculescu Publishing House, Bucharest, in July 2021. I have also published works on immigration and identity issues in various political science journals and volumes (i.e., Journal of Identity and Migration Studies; a volume on Romanian identity published by Cambridge Scholars).

A fun fact about me is that I enjoy flying, and I am currently working on getting my commercial pilot license. This was one of my passions, and now I finally get to spend time cruising and maneuvering in the sky. I am looking forward to meeting and working with you all this summer!

 Uma Miskinyar | Tobis Distinguished Junior Mentor
 

Bio: My name is Uma Miskinyar, and I’m a rising high school senior at Tesoro, tea and coffee enthusiast, basketball player, and avid global affairs researcher. Some facts about me is that I run my high school’s MUN and Speech & Debate teams, I co-run the school paper, and I founded of a bipartisan organization that focuses on finding the common ground with geopolitical issues through the examination of foreign policy. I have had the privilege of interning for both republican and democratic politicians and the US State Department, where I have had the ability to gain a wide array of perspectives from both sides of the spectrum. In my free time, I like thrifting, listening to music, driving down PCH, and getting boba. I am looking forward to being your Teaching Assistant! Ms. Andrada is the best, and you’re all in great hands :)

 Kiyaan Parikh | Instructor
 

Module description: Welcome and excited to work with everyone over the coming summer. This module looks at intimate violence and seeks to understand its long term legacies. Big ideas that we will cover include generational trauma, victimhood and perpetration and collective memory. Together, we want to explore how violence is remembered, how it is processed in a community and the politics that surround and inform those processes. The goal of the module is to explore both broad theories of trauma and its impact and more case specific analyses of how memory is practiced on a day to day level. Through this topic space we will explore critical research skills such as hypothesis development, synthesizing theories and putting ideas into dialogue. We will also discuss inference, research design and strengths of various methodologies in answering our big idea questions.

Readings for this module will be fairly interdisciplinary across social science and humanities providing a sampling platter of how various traditions research, define and unpack these questions. Specific cases include the Cultural Revolution in China, the wars during the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Partition of South Asia and the Grenada Revolution among others.

A little about me: Hi everyone! I'm Kiyaan Parikh a rising 4th year in the PhD program here at UCI. This is my second year working in this program and I am glad to be back. My primary research focus is on the legacies of violent conflicts, political trauma and persistence of hateful mobilization. Most specifically, I look at how the memory of violence is politically mobilized in subsequent generations to help nationalist political groups come to power.

Personally, I was born and raised in Long Beach, California and I did my undergrad at UC Berkeley. I enjoy cooking, board and video games with friends and basketball. You will also likely see my cats make guest appearances during any video meetings we have. Excited to work with everyone and looking forward to a great summer.

 Kristen Renwick Monroe;
Director, Center for the Scientific Study of
Ethics and Morality
 

Modules description: Academics are not great at publicizing scholarly work. This module will attempt to do this, working on the assumption that occasionally academics actually discover something useful that might help people decrease hate in the world. Students in Module 3 will distill the findings about how to combat the hate that causes genocide and discrimination by reading The Heart of Altruism: Perceptions of a Common Humanity (1996), The Hand of Compassion: Portraits of Moral Choice during the Holocaust (2004), and Ethics in an Age of Terror and Genocide (2012). After a brief tutorial discussion of the issues involved in using social media, especially for young people, we will break into groups and prepare short videos, drawing on Professor Monroe’s filmed interviews with morally courageous people, featured in these books, to ask what drove their moral choices. Students then will post these on various forms of social media. Students may wish to read these three books before the module begins.

Bios:
Professor Kristen Renwick Monroe is the Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine and founding Director of its Ethics Center. With 20 books on politics, ethics, psychology, and science, Monroe is best known for her award-winning trilogy on altruism and moral choice, The Heart of Altruism (1996), The Hand of Compassion (2004), and Ethics in an Age of Terror and Genocide (2012). Her scholarly honors include numerous awards from the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP) and the American Political Science Association (APSA), plus fellowships to The American Academy in Berlin, Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Presidency of the ISPP, and Vice-Presidency of the APSA. Her most recent books are On Ethics and Economics (with Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow), The Unspoken Morality of Childhood (2022), and When Conscience Calls: Moral Courage in Times of Confusion and Despair (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press 2023), which grew out of her work with students in the Summer Mentoring Program at the UCI Ethics Center.

Tobis Distinguished Junior Mentors: Max Razjmoo, Evan Razjmopo, Sienna Shah, Aashna Sharma, Sunny Sun, and Abby Weiland
 

 Yiwen Huang | Instructor
 

Module Description: Memory studies is full of potential for expanding our understanding of the 20th century. How do past revolutions read, feel, look, sound, and even smell like? In this module, we will explore the afterlives of the Maoist-era through multimedia materials and use this as a case study for a more general discussion about the cultural politics of remembering past "events". Here, what's more important than recovering historical facts is an investigation of how the pasts are brought back, through contested memories, to interact with contemporary politics of inequality, nationalism, globalization, etc. You will be encouraged to develop your own research questions, theses, and skills through our discussions.
 
(No prior knowledge about narratology, memory studies, Maoist revolution, or Marxism is required, but if you want to start thinking about these topics, I recommend checking out Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi, published by Verso Books in 2019).

Bio: My name is Yiwen, I am a third year PhD student in political science. As a scholar, I am primarily interested in the relationship between feelings and historical writings. My current project unpacks the ways in which interpreters of contemporary political movements in China exhibit an affective attachment to past revolutions, and how this attachment in turn impacts their epistemological projects. More generally, I work on political theory, narratives and memories, affect theory, and labor politics. Outside of academia, I am also a cat mom who loves to draw, make zines, hold film nights with friends, and explore the great cuisines that Southern California offers.

 William Cullen Kidd | Instructor
 

Module description: This module focuses on constitutional hardball, which are acts that though within the letter of the law still violate important democratic norms. Partisan actors engage in hardball tactics in the pursuit of gaining and then entrenching political advantage, such as making it harder for their political opponents to win elections or stripping their opponents of whatever power is obtained despite those roadblocks. Hardball raises the stakes of political conflict as the loser in an election now potentially faces the possibility of being permanently locked out of power. Given hardball’s potential to weaken democracy, it is important to understand what motivates it and how to get partisans to oppose it.

Students will learn about the political and psychological motivations for why politicians and voters alike support hardball. Students will also contribute to the collection and coding of qualitative data on this subject. The module will also cover basic skills in designing and utilizing surveys for research to hopefully aid students in any research projects they may pursue in the future.

Bio: William Kidd is doctoral student in the Political Science department at UCI. He studies American Politics through the lens of political psychology, in particular focusing on the role partisanship plays in shaping voters’ attitudes and actions even to the extent it can be harmful for democracy as a whole.

 Liz Muehlmann | Instructor
 

Module description: Journalists, academics, and experts have all sounded the alarm bells that democracy in the United States is in peril. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of local and reliable information in the political process and in addressing public health issues. For example, significant changes in quarantine restrictions at the city, county, and state level often sparked considerable public debate and backlash. Local news was vital in disseminating important information not only about the quarantine restrictions but also placing the restrictions within the broader political context. Without local, reliable information from sources they trust, citizens are more likely to make decisions based on partisan cues. This, in turn, leads to greater partisan polarization undermines the consensus necessary for democracy.

Since the legacy media environment—including newspapers, television, and radio—has fragmented, citizens no longer receive their information from one or two outlets. Instead, information is ubiquitous but subject to varying degrees of quality control. While legacy media has been substantially vetted and held to high standards, new media outlets (like Vice and Breitbart) have faced less scrutiny. Additionally, as people turn to social media for information, the algorithms that filter content are largely unseen and unvetted. As a result, people are no longer receiving a set shared facts upon which democracy relies.

As polarization in the United States increases and the media landscape continues to fracture allowing people to choose the information they want to receive, the long-term viability and health of American democracy is at stake. This project begins by creating a new data set that combines detailed information about legacy and new media as well as how people use media to create strong communities. Ultimately, this data will provide a complete picture of the role of the media and how it can be used to create an informed citizenry capable of self-government.

Books or material to consult before the first meeting https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/public-and-broadcasting. If you skimmed the above website, it would be helpful.

Bio: Liz Muehlmann is a fourth-year Political Science Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Irvine. Her dissertation focuses on how citizens use the media to create, maintain, and internalize democratic norms. Social media has become a primary way in which individuals gather information about their friends, families, and communities. However, little is known about whether these sites encourage the adoption of democratic norms, like the peaceful transition of power. In an era of increasing political polarization, Liz investigates whether the media can be used to promote a deeper democratic culture.

 Chloe Lampros Monroe | Instructor
 

Bio: An honors graduate of Bryn Mawr College, where she majored in history, Chloe Lampros-Monroe is a graduate student in public health at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. where she studies maternal and child health, with a special interest in mental health. A former intern at the UCI Ethics Center, Chloe is leading a module this summer on mental health in young people, with a particular focus on mental health throughout high school and the college application period. Chloe is passionate about maternal and child health and youth mental health and hopes to inspire the next generation of students.

 Sofia Fernandes Franco | Instructor
 

Description of the module: The price of a good or service plays an important role in how well it sells. An ethical pricing strategy goes beyond simply following the law. Similarly, not all unethical pricing strategies are fraudulent or illegal. Ethical decisions are difficult sometimes because there isn’t a defined line for morally right and wrong decisions. Producers and retailers practice for the most part ethical pricing strategies to earn profits without defrauding competitors or consumers. This module introduces students to the ethical and (anti)competitive aspects of different pricing strategies in business using graphical analyses, newspaper articles and data applications using excel. Topics covered include price match guarantees, price bundling, price-fixing and price discrimination.

About me: My name is Sofia Franco, and I am an assistant professor of teaching in the Economics Department at UCI. My field of expertise is Urban Economics and I do research involving both theory and applied empirical work. I have taught courses related to managerial economics and strategy and econometrics for both economic and business students for several years. While I think economic theory is important to lay down the foundation for good economic analyses, I also think that going from theory to real world applications is key for students gaining the insights of economic theory and build on their problem-solving skills. As such, all my courses have an important component of economic applications with data and data analysis. I have also taught students ranging from high school (in summer research projects) to undergraduates to master and PhD levels.

 Prince Paa-Kwesi Heto | Instructor
 

Module description: The Africa/China relationship is causing shifts in the Global South in ways last seen during China’s support for anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggles. Chinese-owned companies in Africa, numbering 10,000, makeup approximately two-thirds of the GDP of sub-Saharan countries in total economic output. In the construction sector alone, the annual revenue of Chinese firms averages $40-$50 billion, notably higher than the total value of Chinese aid to Africa in any given year. Similarly, China trains more African students, civil servants, engineers, rising leaders, policy planners, and military professionals than the G7 countries combined. While these trends have received some positive reviews, many of the comments are either misleading, partial truths or outright lies. I ask: What is the true nature of the Africa/China relationship? What can we learn from available data to better understand Beijing’s African policy and intent? How does China fit into Africa’s plans? I put together a working group to explore these questions last. The summer interns will work with primary data collected during group meetings. They will learn to clean transcripts, code, analyze data, and write research reports.

Short Bio: Paa-Kwesi Heto (Ph.D.) is a distinguished political economist and international security expert. He is a Visiting Professor at Soka University of America, Graduate School. He received the 2020 Etel Solingen Outstanding Paper in International Relations Award, the 2020 UCI Inclusive Excellence Ambassador Award, and the Global Connect Program’s 2018 Global Citizens Award - recognizing his research and non-profit work in rural and low-income communities. Paa-Kwesi was part of a team that advised the African Union and the Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) on their trade and investment policy. He also worked on a World Bank project that evaluated: one, the efficiency of trade gateways in the countries where Trade Facilitation Facilities operated, and two, COMESA countries’ ability to implement the 2013 World Trade Organization Bali Trade Facilitation Agreement. In addition, as the Secretary-General of the West Africa Youth Leaders Conference, he championed youth empowerment and capacity-building projects in order to build peace in West Africa. Paa-Kwesi is a transdisciplinary scholar with five master’s degrees in Behavioral Mathematics, Demography and Social Analysis, Political Science, Education, and International Affairs.

 Kristen Aanstoos | Instructor
 

Description: This module explores the relationship between actors in peace processes and political representation in post-conflict states in order to better understand the implications and consequences of inclusive and diverse peacebuilding. Students will engage in hands-on experience researching the effects of local women's participation in peace processes on women's political empowerment and a better understanding of the ethical questions involved in conducting peace processes. In addition to global quantitative data, the research conducted in this module will closely examine four cases: the Philippines, Nepal, El Salvador, and Liberia. Over the course of the module, students will learn how to code both quantitative and qualitative data, how to process and analyze interviews, and how to effectively find, identify, and record information from first-hand accounts and public records on major political events like peace processes. Through this module, students will gain a better understanding of how to conduct ethical qualitative and quantitative research in post-conflict environments.

Bio: Kristen Aanstoos is a 5th-year Ph.D. Candidate in the Political Science department at UCI. Her research looks at the longer-term security and political effects in post-conflict states of women's participation in peace processes. Prior to beginning her Ph.D. at UCI, Kristen was a Foreign Service Officer in the U.S. State Department and served in Hong Kong, Doha, and Washington, DC. Kristen has an MA from King's College London in Conflict, Security, and Development and a BSFS from Georgetown University in International Politics.