2022/23 Sociology Seminar Series
20th April 13:00-14:00| D422, Newman Building, School of Sociology/ Zoom ((opens in a new window)Register Here)
Uğur Ümit Üngör |University of Amsterdam
Assad’s Militias and Mass Violence in Syria
Abstract: From the outbreak of the uprising in March 2011, a central element of the Assad regime’s violent crackdown on the mass protests in Syria was its deployment of a large number of pro-government militias, the so-called “Shabbiha”, a catch-all category for irregular, pro-government militias dressed in civilian gear and linked organically to the regime. When the uprising erupted, they carried out storming of neighborhoods, dispersion of demonstrations, as well as property crimes, torture, kidnapping, assassination, sexual violence, and massacres. In this talk, Üngör will attempt to understand these armed groups by focusing on their changing relationship with the state. The value of this approach is that it can develop the thesis that whereas the Shabbiha may seem like a novel phenomenon, they have deeper roots in history. Rather than relying on weak state theories, the talk examines paramilitarism through the prism of the Syrian state’s changing ability to covertly outsource and subcontract illegal and illegitimate violence against civilians. This research is based on a historical-sociological lens, using both close analysis of unique primary documents, immersive ethnography during nine years of fieldwork across Europe and the Middle East, and most importantly: in-depth interviews with approximately 40 Shabbiha paramilitaries.
Bio;Uğur Ümit Üngör is Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute in Amsterdam. His main area of interest is the history and sociology of mass violence, with a particular focus on the modern and contemporary Middle East. He has won several academic awards and held visiting positions in Dublin, Vancouver, Budapest, Toronto, Los Angeles, and Edinburgh. He has published books and articles on various aspects and cases of genocide, including the Armenian genocide. His most recent publication is Paramilitarism: Mass Violence in the Shadow of the State (Oxford University Press, 2020), Syrian Gulag: Inside Assad’s Prisons, 1970-2020 (I.B. Tauris, 2023), and Assad’s Militias and Mass Violence in Syria (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, 2023). He is an editor of the Journal of Perpetrator Research, and was coordinator of the Tadamon massacre project.
30th March 2023 13:00-14:00| D422, Newman Building, School of Sociology/ Zoom ((opens in a new window)register here)
Francesca Lessa |University of Oxford
No Safe Haven: South America’s Operation Condor and Transnational Repression
Abstract:Transnational repression, i.e., the deliberate targeting of refugees and dissidents by states across borders, is a relatively understudied subject in international relations. This article analyzes why and how governments persecute political opponents abroad. It uses the case study of Operation Condor in 1970s South America to derive broader insights to help sharpen our understanding of transnational repression in world politics. I illustrate why and how South American criminal states willingly forewent key aspects of their sovereignty to establish a sophisticated system of cooperation to target dissidents abroad. This scheme was a critical extension of these countries’ domestic-level policies against political opposition and enabled them to target politically active refugees wherever they were located. Exiles were perceived as constituting an existential threat to these autocracies’ survival, given their ability to potentially undermine both their internal and external security, which therefore warranted their elimination. I draw on an interdisciplinary methodology, which combines archival research, interviews, trial ethnography, and the analysis of legal verdicts, alongside conclusions derived from our novel dataset, the Database on South America’s Transnational Human Rights Violations (1969–1981) that comprises 805 victims of transnational repression.
Bio;Francesca Lessa is a lecturer in Latin American studies and development at the University of Oxford. She has a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics. Her work focuses on human rights, accountability, impunity, transitional justice, and Operation Condor with a regional focus on South America. In 2022, Yale University Press published her second monograph, The Condor Trials: Transnational Repression and Human Rights in South America. The Condor Trials won the 2023 Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America, sponsored by the Duke Human Rights Center, and received an honourable mention for the 2023 Bryce Wood Book Award of the Latin American Studies Association. Lessa has published widely on transitional justice and human rights in South America in prestigious journals, including Human Rights Quarterly, The Journal of Latin American Studies, The International Journal of Transitional Justice, and The Journal of Human Rights Practice. She is also the honorary president of the Observatorio Luz Ibarburu (Uruguay).
2nd March 2023 13:00-14:00| D422, Newman Building, School of Sociology
Cecília Mendes |University of São Paulo
Decolonial studies in language education. Why does this debate matter?
Bio:Cecília Mendes is a doctoral student at the University of São Paulo (USP/ Brazil) in the area of Linguistic and Literary Studies with a governmental grant for occasional research at UCD, in the MA in Race, Migration & Decolonial Studies, in the School of Sociology. She has been a member of the Study Group on Linguistic Education in Foreign Languages in Brazil since 2019. She has worked with English as a foreign language, Portuguese for foreigners, and teacher training, throughout her work in Education in the last 20 years in Brazil.
Her doctoral research deals with translanguage and decoloniality from the perspective of language education in English. Her research seminar aims to discuss linguistic diversity in contexts of migratory flows and intends to break with colonial paradigms in language education. This seminar invites us to discuss the new challenges that expressive human mobility poses in the field of language policies and language education in a position that allows important findings for translingual and decolonial language education, with a plurality of languages and subjectivities, from a Global South political reference, a form of resistance, seeking transformative spaces and social justice in the field of Education.
8th December 2022 16:00 | ESRI, Whitaker Square, Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, Dublin 2
Katharine Donato| Georgetown University, Washington D.C
Borders, Trajectories and Children: U.S. Integration of Migrant and Refugee Minors
Abstract: This talk is about the management and treatment of immigrants who enter as unaccompanied children (UC). It will chronicle changes in the U.S. government's handling of UC from the past up to present, highlighting three periods: shifts before and after 1980 when the Refugee Act was passed, during the 1980s and 1990s when the U.S. enforcement system began to grow and the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement was procured; and after the events of September 11th, 2001 when two legal statutes -- the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act and 2002 Homeland Security Act -- were passed to affect UC treatment and processing. The current system has UC passing through a tangled web of federal, state, and local agencies after they arrive, and their treatment and management starkly contrasts with the values and treatment of the child welfare system. I will also present new findings from 110 UC interviews designed to assess their short- and long-term integration experiences, and then end with a blueprint for systemic reform of the federal and state organizations involved in managing the lives of UC.
Bio: Katharine Donato is the Donald G. Herzberg Professor of International Migration and former Director of the Institute for the Study of International Migration in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She has examined many research questions related to migration, including the economic consequences of U.S. immigration policy; health consequences of migration; immigrant parent involvement in schools in New York, Chicago, and Nashville; deportation and its effects for immigrants; the great recession and its consequences for Mexican workers; U.S. legal visa system; and refugee and migrant integration. Her first book, Gender and International Migration: From Slavery to Present, was co-authored with Donna Gabaccia and published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2015. Several years later, together with Elizabeth Ferris, she co-authored a second book, Refugees, Migration and Global Governance: Negotiating the Global Compacts, published by Routledge in 2019. Professor Donato has also co-edited 8 refereed journal issues and published more than 90 refereed journal articles and book chapters.
23rd November 2022 13:00-14:00 | D422, Newman Building, School of Sociology
Laura Acosta Gonzales| Northwestern University
Fault Line Transformation in Civil War: The Symbolic Third and Conflict Reemergence in Colombia, 1948—1964
Abstract: Sociological research has paid significant attention to internally divided societies with cycles of recurring civil wars. Previous studies stress that fault lines between groups harden during civil war, locking in sociopolitical divisions. Often overlooked is that group divisions are in constant flux and that fault line transformations can also lead to the repetition of civil war. To account for this omission, this talk examines the evolution of group divisions during and between two civil wars in mid-twentieth century Colombia (1948—1964). Drawing on seventeen years of data on political discourse and violent events from historical books and newspapers, the author reveals that violence, and its interpretation in the form of who did what to whom and why, can produce intense intergroup antagonisms that do not necessarily align with the boundaries that people explicitly invoked and responded to in their initial mobilization. When a new understanding of group divisions is widely agreed upon, it assumes a constraining character and reconfigures violent exchanges across the new boundary. These findings highlight that violence and discourse should be studied together to fully understand the mechanisms that reproduce civil war.
Bio: Laura is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University (USA) and a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Trinity College, Dublin. Her research brings a historical and comparative perspective to questions of nation formation and the construction and transformation of social identities and symbolic boundaries over time, especially as these processes sustain violence and war. Her work has been published in Theory and Society, Social Forces, and Quality & Quantity.
27th October 2022 13:00-14:00 | Zoom Event ((opens in a new window)Register here)
Ayşe Yetiş-Bayraktar| Marmara University, Istanbul
Between the Tick and the Tock: A Glimpse into Household Division of Labor and Work-Life Balance in Turkey.
Abstract: Division of labor within the family and the work-life balance are ever more important for the sustainability of daily life, especially with the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic. With both spouses spending more time at home and working remotely, there is an undeniable increase in housework, and the delicate elements that make up the work-life balance become more complex and vulnerable with the flexibility of working hours. The aim of this study is to statistically reveal the use of time within the family in Turkey. I use the Time Use Data collected by TurkStat between 2014-15, and the working sample comprises of people over the age of 15 who have been married at least once. The analyses suggest that the time that women and men spend on housework, child and adult care and assistance shows statistically significant differences according to gender. The time devoted to housework and childcare is much less for men than for women. Time spent on the road (commuting) and time devoted to socializing is higher for men in general and across all age groups. Time spent on the road is higher for both sexes in the working population age group than in other age groups. The time devoted to socialization increases with age for both sexes. Durations are calculated on the basis of one weekday and one weekend day. Although there is literature that calculates weekly time, calculations based on daily duration and separating weekdays and weekends in terms of the collection technique of time logs yield healthier results in terms of both technique and time perception.
Bio: Ayşe Yetiş Bayraktar, PhD, is a faculty member of the Department of Sociology at Marmara University and a board member of the Population and Social Policies Research Center. She completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2013, and worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Sociology at Boğaziçi University between 2013-2016. Her main areas of interest are family, work-life balance, social stratification and inequality, and the sociology of time. Yetiş-Bayraktar's article titled “From the Shop Floor to the Kitchen Floor: Maternal Job Complexity and Children's Reading and Math Skills”, published in Work and Occupations magazine in 2013, was nominated as a Kanter Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research) finalist in 2014.
6th October 2022 13:00-14:00 | D422, UCD School of Sociology, Newman Building
Eva Zschirnt | University of Amsterdam
Ethnic discrimination in the market place: Insights from field experiments in Switzerland
Abstract: Discrimination against ethnic minorities is a well-documented phenomenon, especially in labour and housing markets. Recent meta-analyses and reviews have demonstrated that this phenomenon is pervasive across countries and time and that it persists despite the majority of countries having anti-discrimination laws in place. Because discrimination is (in most cases) no longer easily observable, field experiments, and correspondence tests in particular, have become a popular technique to ascertain if and to what extent it persists in the marketplace. These studies have limitations, though, as they often only record one particular case at a single time. However, when combined with other data, such as employer characteristics or attitudes toward immigration, these experiments can provide useful additional insights.
In this talk, Eva will be presenting field experimental work on ethnic discrimination from the case of Switzerland and discuss how correspondence test results can be further exploited and combined with other data sources.
Bio: Eva is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. She received her PhD at the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland) and was awarded a two-year Max Weber Fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence (Italy). Her research interests focus on social inequalities in the context of migration and integration, the position of migrants and members of minority groups in the labour and housing market, and the use of experiments in the social sciences. She has published in Journals such as the Journal of Migration Studies, the Journal of International Migration and Integration, or Research Ethics.