Modern museums of natural history, ethnography, civilization, and/or cultures typically claim to represent humanity, in its unity and diversity. Yet how did such museums come to be the representatives of humanity? And what has shaped the way such museums have represented humanity? These questions point to the heart of major contemporary controversies surrounding modern museums across Europe and North America. I understand the critical scrutiny of modern museums to be sparked by increasing acknowledgement of their colonial origins, and to be sustained by increasing recognition that the legacies of colonialism have afterlives in museums’ custodianship and representations of material culture, which function to reproduce forms of colonial injustice and alienation. Museums are thus sites where contemporary agents fight over the unfinished project of decolonization. In this paper, I aim to clarify what it might mean to decolonize museums, and what decolonization practices aim towards with respect to redressing different forms of colonial alienation.

Olyvia Christley presented a part of her dissertation project that investigates the relationship between the traditional gender attitudes and support for radical right parties. She argues that support for and the appeal of radical right parties is enmeshed with the gendered logic of masculine protection and feminine vulnerability. Christley finds evidence to support the notion that highly gendered traditionals are more likely to both select radical right parties and find their platforms appealing over mainstream conservative parties as compared to those who harbor egalitarian gender values. Her work has broader implications for being a common denominator of radical right support.

Joshua Kertzer presented a paper which investigates whether advisers systematically affect foreign policy behavior. Kertzer moves beyond the existing emphasis on individual leaders and their psychological predispositions that shape foreign policy outcomes. His approach helps to explain group based decision making based on individual predisposition. Kertzer argues that foreign policy decisions made by leaders are based on the inputs they receive from their advisers. These inputs emanate from the advisers’ hawkish or dovish predispositions. Thus, the more hawkish the cohort of advisers are, the more likely foreign policy decisions made by their leader will result in conflict. Drawing upon extensive archival work from 700,000 National Security Council documents between 1947-1988 to produce 2881 records of formal and informal meetings categorized into speech acts, substantive decisions, and actor background, Kertzer concludes predispositions vary between advisers even within the same administration. His work is significant for three reasons. First, it demonstrates that advisers are influential in foreign policy decision making even though in the extant literature they are overshadowed by influential leaders. Second, it argues that group level decision making can be explained through individual level dispositions. Third, it makes use of computational archival analysis to answer longstanding questions in IR.

Melissa Lee presented a co-authored paper with Nan Zhang and Tilmann Herchenroder which investigates how war shapes the popular imagination of national sovereignty. Lee investigates two competing visions of sovereignty culminated in violence during the American Civil War. The first vision states that wars are expensive in terms of blood and treasure and leaders sacrifice through ideological appeals when they fight (valence) while the second vision argues that wars are disruptive and prompt ideological fervor causing ideological entrepreneurs to promote their visions of national sovereignty. Drawing on an analysis of the grammatical shift in the “United States” from a plural to a singular noun as an indicator of how sovereignty is imagined newspapers between 1800–1899 and all Congressional speeches between 1851–1899, the authors find that war shapes the popular imagination of sovereignty only for winning partisans. Their work identifies a broader mismatch between institutional and ideational foundations of national sovereignty through an extensive linguistic analysis.

Contestation over the structure and location of final sovereign authority — the right to make and enforce binding rules — occupies a central role in political development. Historically, war often settled these debates and resulted in the institutionalization of the victor’s vision of sovereignty. Yet sovereign authority requires more than a set of institutions; it ultimately rests on the recognition and acceptance of the governed. How does war shape the popular imagination of sovereignty? Does war promote ideational convergence around the victor’s ideals, or does it polarize and harden attachments to competing visions of sovereignty? We explore the effect of warfare on imagined sovereignty in the United States, a case where the debate over two competing visions of sovereignty culminated in violence during the American Civil War. We exploit the grammatical shift in the “United States” from a plural to a singular noun as a measure of how sovereignty is imagined, drawing upon two large textual corpuses: newspapers between 1800–1899 and all Congressional speeches between 1851–1899. Our results indicate that war shapes the popular imagination of sovereignty, but for winning partisans only.

We introduce a new financial education that provides rules-of-thumb for consumers of a sub-optimal insurance product with shrouded attributes in India. Our intervention results in a significant decline in potential demand, improving welfare for newly-informed consumers. Using a model of shrouded attributes where financial education is linked to firms' incentives to reveal information, we further show that overall welfare depends on whether firms unshroud the information. We characterize the treatment effect size required for an unshrouded equilibrium, and conclude that significant effects of financial education are a necessary, but not a sufficient condition to improve welfare in retail financial markets.

This paper utilizes Foucault’s analysis of modern systems of punishment to analyze the punishment of revoking citizenship. The punishment of revocation does not conform to several criteria of what Foucault deems are necessary features of modern punishment. First, is that punishment is aimed at rehabilitation, and is concerned with targeting the soul of the condemned, with the body acting as an intermediary between the punitive technique and this soul. Second, is Foucault’s contention that modern forms of punishment have a social function in that through confinement, criminals who deviate from the norms of society in their behavior can be better surveilled and their behavior categorized. Third, punishment, according to Foucault, will increasingly become standardized, with the structure of the prison becoming the dominant mode of dispensing punishment. When examined in terms of its social effects, the punishment of revocation has important features of what Foucault outlines are criteria for modern forms of punishment such as its productive and subject constituting effects. In this paper, I argue that elite discourses construct a criminal subject worthy of the punishment of revocation. I further test the limits of the applicability of extending Foucault’s insights about punishment to the revocation of citizenship by investigating the punishment’s trans-national quality.

Daniel Scur’s research focuses on organizations and how organizational practices affect productivity and labor outcomes across countries and industries. She studies organizational economics with a focus on emerging economies and developing countries. The research questions she is currently working on include why family firms adopt fewer structured management practices (and what to do about it), how school management and personnel policies affect teacher effort and student outcomes, how personnel management affects wages and other employee outcomes in manufacturing firms, and how female leadership influences organizational practices.