spotlights

Meet Regina Bateson

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 19:28:11 +0000

Meet Regina Bateson Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/30/2024 - 13:28

Dr. Regina Bateson has always harbored a very keen interest in civil and especially human rights. As an undergrad, she was a history major but took a lot of political science classes, enticed by the human-focused intersectionality between the two fields. Dr. Bateson’s academic journey really took off working as a research assistant for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University, where she sorted through and classified primary sources, documenting the history of the Civil Rights era in America. I sat down with Dr. Bateson, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder political scientist and author of Crime Victimization and Political Participation and the Politics of Vigilantism, to discuss her research and how she landed on the path of being a political science researcher.

Professor Bateson’s early research experience wasn’t limited to the MLK Paper’s Project- she was also a research assistant for Dr. Terry Karl, a professor of political science at Stanford, her alma mater. Together, they worked on researching El Salvador, a country notably afflicted by civil war and human rights violations. “Those two experiences showed me two different views from two different disciplines,” Dr. Bateson says, “like how we can use data and evidence to try to increase awareness of problems related to rights and violations of rights”. These first two research experiences were what got Dr. Bateson interested in research on topics that she is still interested in today. She still loves those aspects of history and the nuances of the past, but her experience working with Dr. Karl made her realize that political science is more in tune with present day problems, stating “[political science is] more engaged with policy and more engaged with finding solutions”. Dr. Bateson appreciated the multi-method approach in political science as well. “You can do qualitative historical research, but there’s also more opportunities for interviewing, for participant observation” she notes, “you can be really creative in putting together a combination of different methods, that you want to use to address an issue”.

After undergrad, Bateson worked as a foreign service officer for the State Department and learned that she enjoyed being a global citizen out in the world. She reflects that her time assigned to the US Embassy in Guatemala City immersed her in a real-world post-conflict society which in turn helped develop her research interest in crime and violence. Dr. Bateson's time in Guatemala inspired her to explore how crime was affecting the consolidation of democracy in Latin America as well as the role of crime in politics, notably in people’s political attitudes and behavior. In the early 2000s, the study of crime was underexplored in political science. Among Latin America researchers, crime and politics was not a research priority at the time and the impact of criminal violence was being left unexplored. Nowadays, organized crime and criminal actors are seen as political actors that have a vast impact on people’s individual political behavior, political culture, civil society, and the overall functioning of democracy.

Lack of research is what Dr. Bateson says motivated her to get her Ph.D. ... well, lack of research and Dr. Karl, who always encouraged her to think about grad school. She still credits Karl for planting the idea in her head. She ultimately earned her Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. Since then, Professor Bateson’s work has been published in the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, The Journal of Politics, the Journal of Peace Research, Comparative Political Studies, and other journals. Her research has won several awards, including the American Political Science Association's Heinz Eulau Award and the Gabriel A. Almond Award for the Best Dissertation in Comparative Politics. She has taught and researched at many universities since then, including MIT and the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.

After so many achievements throughout the years, it’s impressive that she hasn’t changed course; I asked Dr. Bateson about what she enjoys about political science and how she stays passionate. Dr. Bateson explained that it’s very unusual to find a profession where you can have so much creativity and independence, choice over what you are working on and how you work on it, which are things that Dr. Bateson really values. “I feel like in academia, creativity is... under recognized or underappreciated, or maybe just not articulated as something that we should value.” She continues “I tend to value... being able to talk about really interesting topics. I’m fine with ambiguity, and I’m actually fine with the fact that sometimes there isn’t really a common, precise answer to what we’re looking at.” Dr. Bateson enjoys the nuances in reading others' work and debating and values the creativity that everyone brings to the field.

As a professor, Dr. Bateson has had some memorable teaching moments, and of course wishes the best for her students as they move further on their academic journey. Dr. Bateson enjoys seeing students’ creative and unexpected projects, such as a presentation on Oprah’s interviewing skills, and a Monopoly-like game to explain high incarceration rates among Indigenous youth in Canada (spoiler: its rigged). She values her role in helping students reach their academic goals, noting that writing letters of recommendation for students and seeing their success in various fields, including law school, and Ph.D. programs is a fulfilling reward. As far as what Bateson hopes students take away from her class, she wants to provide a space for students to meet each other and form new relationships, which was especially challenging and equally important during online classes. She encourages students to think in nuanced and complicated ways about the world, emphasizing the complexity of people and organizations. She hopes to demystify big global issues by connecting them to local challenges and opportunities for involvement in their communities.

Moving forward, Bateson has several projects and publications she is working on, including a recently published article on the role of victims in politics, based on a long-term ethnographic project with victims of traffic crashes in New York City (see Finding Meaning in Politics: When Victims Become Activists). She is also working on a book chapter on the role of victims in politics, exploring their agency and political importance, and lastly, she is beginning to conduct new research on crime, policing, human rights and democracy in Central America, as well as a book on vigilantism, and its motivations. Bateson has been a part of groundbreaking work, and I know I am not alone when I say I am excited to see what is to come!

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Meet Alexandra Siegel

Anonymous — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 18:17:24 +0000

Meet Alexandra Siegel Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/11/2020 - 12:17

Letizia Imbrogno

Dr. Siegel’s work uses original datasets of hundreds of millions of social media posts, text and network analysis, machine learning methods, and experiments to study mass and elite political behavior in the Arab World and other comparative contexts. Her research explores drivers and mitigators of intergroup conflict and intolerance, consequences of repression, and digital dimensions of conflict—including the spread of online hate speech, extremism, and disinformation. Her work has been published in the American Political Science Review. She is a Research Associate at NYU’s Social Media and Political Participation Lab and a member of Evidence in Government in Politics (EGAP).

Dr. Siegel is a former Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former CASA Fellow at the American University in Cairo. She completed her PhD in Political Science at New York University in 2018 and holds a Bachelor’s in International Relations and Arabic from Tufts University. She is currently a Postdoctoral fellow at the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University.

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Meet Jaroslav Tir

Anonymous — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 16:19:02 +0000

Meet Jaroslav Tir Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 02/07/2019 - 09:19

Jeffrey Nonnemacher

Professor of Political Science

For Jaroslav Tir, coming to the University of Colorado has been a long-term goal. Graduating from the University of Illinois and spending an early part of his career at the University of Georgia, Tir jumped at the opportunity to come to �鶹��Ѱ��in 2011.

“Professionally, the quality of the department is really strong. Personally, I love Colorado and have been coming here for a long time.” According to Tir, Colorado reminds him of home.

“I grew up on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia in Makarska, which is warmer than here and there is a sea, but it is a dry climate and there are a ton of mountains,” Tir explained, “The geographic similarities between Colorado and Croatia are something I really enjoy about Colorado.”

In 1990, Tir came to the United States as a high school exchange student and “the plan was to go back to Croatia after nine months.” However, the unexpected happened.

“In the 1990s, there was very brutal and surprising war” which ravaged Croatia and the surrounding countries. Instead of returning after high school, Tir stayed in the United States and attended college and graduate school wanting to understand what happened back home.

“I am very interested in what can be done to deal with civil wars, wars in general, and how those can be managed more proactively and avoided,” he explained. “I have this very personal motivation because of what I experienced, what my homeland experienced, and what people I know experienced.”

This research and personal motivation have resulted in a new book, Incentivizing Peace (Oxford University Press 2018), which is about “how to prevent civil wars”.

“We looked at the unusual suspects like international financial institutions to see if their involvement in the early stages of violent conflicts could prevent full-blown civil wars,” Tir summarized. “The idea was to see if there was a different way that civil wars could be prevented since a lot of civil war management techniques are employed only once the fighting has escalated to a full-blown civil war.”

“We found that the more of these organizations (e.g. the World Bank, IMF, regional development banks) a given country belongs to, the higher the likelihood that the escalation of small conflicts can be avoided. Participating in these institutions decreased the likelihood of civil war by over 50%.”

Broadly, Tir “studies why wars happen, their consequences, and what can be done to prevent them” and enjoys being a professor because of the flexibility to answer these questions from many angles. “For example, I was not really interested in climate change as a graduate student, but now that it has become a more notable issue, I am interested in how it impacts patterns of violence.”

Other than his research, Tir enjoys the Colorado things. “I love hiking and skiing is a passion of mine. I love going off-roading, exploring Colorado and am an avid cyclist.”

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Meet Krister Andersson

Anonymous — Thu, 29 Nov 2018 21:37:13 +0000

Meet Krister Andersson Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 11/29/2018 - 14:37

Madeline Chandler

Krister Andersson became a professor in the �鶹��Ѱ��Political Science Department in 2005 after a career with the United Nations. Andersson worked for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, focusing on issues of forest conservation.

“During my time at the UN, we were asked by member governments to provide advice for how they could develop policies that were more supportive of local people using and protecting forest resources.”

Andersson’s career with the UN and his exposure to the problems within public policy is what ultimately pushed him into Graduate school.

“I became more interested in trying to contribute to the scientific knowledge of what actually works in forest protection and what allows certain communities to be really good at using the forest sustainably, while other communities do not seem to care about the long-term sustainability of forest resources.”

Professor Andersson attended Indiana University to examine this topic of interest. “I became a research assistant during Graduate school and ended up working with Professor Elinor Ostrom who had already done a lot of work on the local governance of natural resources. I learned how to do research on my topic of interest with her and other colleagues at the university.”

Andersson’s interest in forest sustainability has brought him around the world – specifically to countries in Latin America, where his primary research is focused. “I really enjoy working in Latin America and with Latin American colleagues. Also, it helps that my wife is from Chile and that we speak Spanish at home.”

“Travelling has been integral to my research because so much of my work is about issues where there are no readily available databases. To test new theories and ideas I am required to go out and collect the data.”

As the Director of the Center for the Governance of Natural Resources at CU’s Institute for Behavioral Sciences, Andersson conducts research with other faculty members and students from various departments on campus. Andersson funds this research with grants from the National Science Foundation and other organizations.

“The research we do all has one thing in common and that is we are interested in how policy interventions affect decision making on the ground. We have looked at rural-development interventions in Brazil, groundwater taxes in Colorado, Payments for Environmental Services in Tanzania, and Decentralization policies in Bolivia, to mention a few.”

In another project, Andersson and students from �鶹��Ѱ��studied a decentralization reform in Honduras and its effect on the quality of healthcare that citizens were receiving. “We interviewed 9,500 households in Honduras about how they perceived this reform and we measured the degree of malnourishment among kids in all households. Our analysis, which is still underway, is showing that the reform made a difference in improving public health services, especially when it comes to providing improved access to women and children.”

This project was conducted over the course of five years, indicating the time and dedication that these research projects take.

Andersson is also working on a research project with Nathan Cook, a political science graduate student. “With funding from the National Science Foundation, we are going to look at issues of inequality in community managed forests in India and Nepal.”

“The idea of community managed forests is becoming a really popular strategy for forest conservation and it has some substantial benefits to local communities, but often the richest members of the community are benefiting the most and we will investigate this problem and together with colleagues in Nepal and India, identify and test possible solutions.”

Outside of his research, Andersson teaches public policy classes and encourages students to get involved in research.

“In my Introduction to Environmental Policy class, students do term projects that are linked to specific problems and issues here on �鶹��Ѱ��campus. For example, one group is looking at the cost and benefits of the �鶹��Ѱ��recycling program. The students in my class work on practical issues where they do original research on local problems and at the end of the course they present a report to stakeholders on campus.”

Andersson provides opportunities for students to learn how to research and apply it in a practical way that will inform a good response to a public problem.

Andersson is also applying these concepts to graduate level courses. Next semester, Andersson is teaching a graduate level seminar called Behavior Science Public Policy Analysis.

“The idea with this course is to explore how we can make public policies better and more effective by incorporating findings from the behavioral sciences.”

“A lot of our public policies are based on old-fashioned understandings of human behavior, so the course will examine the assumptions behind policies and discuss alternative policy approaches based on a better understanding of human behavior.”

When asked what advice he would give to students wanting to become involved in research, Andersson said: “Take public policy courses in the Political Science Department because in these classes you will learn how research can help make a difference in local and national decision making and activism.”

You can read more about Professor Anderson and his research here

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Meet Josh Strayhorn

Anonymous — Thu, 23 Aug 2018 20:15:53 +0000

Meet Josh Strayhorn Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/23/2018 - 14:15

Emma Piller

Assistant Professor

“I think college is an opportunity for people to become broad-minded citizens; students should get an exposure to all kinds of ways of thinking and disciplines and learn how they fit together. I think it’s very important to have a sense of perspective of our world of knowledge,” Professor Strayhorn says.

After growing up in Arlington, Texas, Strayhorn felt it was natural to pursue his Ph.D. upon earning his bachelor's. “The biggest thing that helped me succeed was having good advisors tell me what I was doing wrong. I’d say it was a combination of that as well as having peers who I could talk about things with. I think it’s important to have an environment among grad students where they can support each other and spitball stuff. All those things combined, it’s hard to do these things alone, so it’s nice to lean on people and get advice and support where you can.”

After graduating from Emory University in 2013, he came straight to �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder. “It’s very lucky it worked out to be such a nice place. Usually in academia you don’t have a lot of control where you’re placed on the job market. I was very fortunate.”

When asked about upcoming research projects, Professor Strayhorn said: “The one I’m most excited to work on is looking at sentiment analysis: a method of finding emotion or positivity or negativity in a text using automated text methods.”

“There’s been a lot of text analysis on the Supreme Court. The problem it’s run into though is that a Supreme Court opinion is a very complicated document that serves a lot of purposes. It’s not like a speech where it’s making one argument and has a tone to it; it has a lot of things that are jumbled together sort of Frankenstein-style,” Strayhorn says. “Our goal is to pick the text apart to see what different sections of the document are doing…and then using the sentiment on top of that to see if the court behaves more positive or negative towards certain actors.”

“I’m hoping to look at how the court’s language addressed towards Congress varies every time. We can see if the relationship with congress is good or bad if the language is more positive or negative...Another relationship we look at is patterns between the majority and dissenters when they talk to each other and if their addresses change over time. To me, the theoretically interesting thing is the way the court deals with certain kinds of audiences. We want to particularly focus on Congress or the President and how [those interactions] change overtime or how the degree of divergence between the institutions has changed,” he says.

As for the advice Professor Strayhorn has for his students, he gives key tips. “Especially for undergrads, take advantage of opportunities outside the classroom whether it’s internships, �鶹��Ѱ��in DC, or other experiences that can help you get new exposure. It’s very easy to show up, get your grades, and go home. You have to be the one to take the initiative, but once you get your foot in the door, faculty want to be there to give you those experiences. It’s a matter of taking the first steps.”

“For grad students, support each other and listen to advice you get. If you’re getting consistent criticism from faculty you need to take that seriously. Try to grow as a person and go through your time thinking what you do and don’t do well. It’s about learning how to navigate complicated environments and gaining life experiences to help you be a better person at what you’re doing.”

“I’m gratified to have been chosen for [the faculty mentor award]. I’m happy that they think I’m doing a good job. I try to be positive and supportive, even when I give criticism. I think you need that environment where you have someone to tell you when you’re doing something wrong, but you trust that’s meant well. We’re trying to guide you to a better outcome--we aren’t just being mean. Having that environment of trust and mutual respect is important.”

Professor Strayhorn was awarded the 2018 Faculty Mentorship Award by the department’s graduate students. The department thanks him for his contribution and feels lucky to have his support at our university.

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Meet Janet Donavan

Anonymous — Wed, 27 Jun 2018 17:33:49 +0000

Meet Janet Donavan Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 06/27/2018 - 11:33

Jeffrey Nonnemacher

Senior Instructor

Since she was a little girl, politics has always fascinated Dr. Janet Donavan. “In Kindergarten, I was really interested in the 1980 presidential election”, she explained, “and when I was in 3^rd grade, I got a subscription to NewsWeek for my birthday.”

“I don’t know why. My parents weren’t interested in politics,” she joked. “I did learn to read from reading the newspaper, so the first thing I read was politics.”

“My first thing that I wanted to be was an astronaut, but I had bad eyes, so I couldn’t be an astronaut. Then I wanted to be a senator, and don’t know why I changed my mind. Then I wanted to be a travel agent, and I guess it is a good thing I changed my mind because there aren’t really travel agents anymore,” she recalled, “Then I wanted to be a journalist for a long time and I was always really interested in political news.”

“When I was in school, and still today, there’s this huge change going on with journalism and information, newspapers, and how we get our information,” she explained. “I really wanted to study that and study how people get their political information instead of being the one who writes it.”

As a result, one of her favorite classes to teach in PSCI 4341: Media & Politics and her research focuses on political communication. “I am really interested in the role of journalism and the dissemination of information in the political process, so how people get their information about politics, how people make decisions, the quality of that information.”

She also is interested in studying pre-Revolutionary War American political thought. From teaching it, she "realized that nobody focused on this era in American political thought and political development.”

She was interested in addressing the gap in literature on the era because “it shaped the state governments which already existed when we started the revolution.” She argues that the ideas that formed the National government and US Constitution came from the colonial governments and experiences at the colonial level.

However, most her job here at �鶹��Ѱ��is teaching, so some of her research is focused on “teaching and learning” in Political Science, and the ways to better the curriculum for students.

When she isn’t working, she can be found hiking, camping, and travelling around Colorado. “I am from Ohio, I went to grad school in Wisconsin, had a job in Washington and had a job in Minnesota and now here,” she listed. “I just love the weather and outdoor lifestyle” of Colorado.

In 2018, Dr. Donavan was awarded the 2018 Mentor of the Year Award, a new honor from the Department of Political Science meant to recognize professors that go above and beyond the role of classroom instructor.

“I was excited, I think it is a great idea that we have it, and I was really honored by it. I try really hard to mentor students because I think it is an important aspect of what we do.”

"I am really lucky”, she said. “It is hard, but it is something that I enjoy and can get up and do every day.”

“Find something you are care about,” she advised, “study it, understand it, and work for it. It is just a good way to enjoy your life.

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Meet Sven Steinmo

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 14:32:44 +0000

Meet Sven Steinmo Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/19/2018 - 08:32

Jeffrey Nonnemacher

Professor Steinmo recently returned to the University of Colorado after working in Florence, Italy since 2007. We asked him how this international experience influenced him as a teacher and a scholar. “I have been lucky to have lived in several countries over my lifetime,” Steinmo told us. “I honestly believe that every one of those experiences, whether in Japan, Norway, Sweden, Britain, or Italy, has helped me better understand other societies, and also my own country, the United States. In many ways it was living abroad that made me want to study politics in the first place.”

After receiving his undergrad degree at University of California Santa Cruz in 1976, Steinmo moved to Norway to work as a carpenter on an oil platform in the North Sea. While working offshore, he kept hearing complaints from company execs and managers that it was much harder to work in Norwegian waters than in Britain. “I began to wonder why.”

His curiosity about the politics of North Sea oil led him to apply to graduate programs in the US. He was offered a position in the PhD program at the University of California-Berkeley with a scholarship grant which he describes as “a one-year contract at Berkeley” to study the political economy of North Sea oil. At the end of that year, he was invited to apply to the PhD program.

While working on his PhD, he saw a position advertised at the University of Colorado and he jumped on the chance to move to Colorado. “I wasn’t even close to finishing my doctorate at that time. But my wife and I always wanted to live in this amazing state,” he said. “I never regretted it. Despite the fact that I’ve lived in lot of different places since then. Colorado has always been, Home.”

Professor Steinmo’s academic work has ranged quite broadly over the years. He’s studied health policy, education policy, taxation, evolutionary theory and political economy more generally. His most recent book, The Evolution of Modern States: Sweden, Japan, and the United States, explores the way globalization has affected different types of democratic capitalist countries.

“Back in the late 1990s it was widely argued that globalization was supposed to create a “race to the bottom” he explained, “but if you looked at what was actually going on in different countries, you quickly saw that the so called ‘race’ was simply not happening.”

He decided to investigate why and learned that globalization was causing pressures and change, but it had different implications and consequences for different countries. “The argument that globalization will cause the same outcome in every country is absurd. But that was the argument I and other scholars were making at the time.” Instead of seeing countries and their systems as inanimate objects that responded to pressures as in physics, Steinmo came to see political and economic systems in evolutionary terms. “Politics is not like Newtonian physics,” he argues. “Choices made today shape the choices that are available tomorrow. Political and economic systems are dynamic - and in my view, they evolve.”

While in Europe, he grew increasingly interested in the relationship between political institutions and political cultures over time. This led him to delve into experimental research and what is sometimes called ‘behavioral economics.’ “Through the experiments we conducted across Europe and the US, I came to better understand how our institutions shape and structure not only the choices citizens face, but also their beliefs and expectations about their governments and politics generally,” he said. His most recent book The Leap of Faith, (Oxford University Press, 2018) elaborates this argument and explores why people in some countries are more trusting and supportive of their government than people in other countries.

While Italy was fabulous, Colorado was too great of a place for Steinmo to stay away permanently. “I came back because I just love this area. The mountains, climate, and ease of living make Colorado an amazing place and it is a privilege to live here.”

Now that he is back at CU, he is focusing his research and energies on the next generation.

“I am writing a book now called The Greediest Generation: Why the Boomers are Screwing Themselves, Their Children, and The Planet.”“I started studying tax and social welfare policy and I realized that my generation is squeezing the welfare state so that we get all the benefits and the younger generations pay the taxes. I wanted to know why.”

The book argues that redistribution today is less about economic class and more a conflict between the generations. “Simply put, young people are paying more in than they will ever receive back… even while their parents and grandparents are cutting their taxes and increasing their social benefits. It’s just not fair.” He argues. “I want young people to be as angry as I am about how my generation is pulling the rug out from underneath their own children.”

Currently Steinmo’s favorite class to teach is PSCI 4173: Alternative World Futures. The course explores how technology is shaping the world today and how Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and Genetic Engineering are determining the future.

“I wanted to teach students about the job market that they are about to enter which is completely different from the job market I entered,” he said, observing that the United States and world are undergoing a new Industrial Revolution.

“Be open minded, don’t just take classes in your major. Learn about coding, computers and Artificial Intelligence as well. These things will likely affect your world more than political science theories.”

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Meet Michaele Ferguson

Anonymous — Fri, 23 Mar 2018 15:55:33 +0000

Meet Michaele Ferguson Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 03/23/2018 - 09:55

Emma Piller

Associate Professor

“I am an army brat. I actually spent most of my childhood living in Western Europe,” Professor Ferguson says. Between the ages of three and 13, she lived in West Germany and the Netherlands. “I was living outside the United States but reading news about it. We would get the Armed Forces’ newspaper, the Stars and Stripes, and my dad and I would argue over the kitchen table about the Iran Contra Affair, and whether Reagan was a good president or not. That was really fun.”

Ferguson attributes her interest in politics to her early education. She grew up around people with many different nationalities and learned to speak French in her time abroad. “It encouraged me to think about how societies could run completely differently than ours does in the US, and it gave me exposure to a lot of different ways of viewing the world and history.”

It wasn’t until her father left the military that she moved to Colorado with her family. “I hated it,” she says. “We moved to a suburban neighborhood where you had to be able to drive to get anywhere. When we lived in Holland, we lived in a small town and I could get on my bike as a kid and if my parents needed something for dinner, they could send one of us out. We didn’t need a driver's license or car.”

The professor’s two older sisters eventually wen

t to CU, but not wanting to follow them, Ferguson pursued Bryn Mawr for her undergraduate. She later went to graduate school at Harvard. After working at the University of Washington, Professor Ferguson received an offer to come to Boulder. A year after Ferguson started, her sister became a professor in Mechanical Engineering at CU. Their other sister works as a software developer and program manager at Google, so her whole family settled back in Colorado.

“We were all here in the 80s, we all moved away, and now we’re all back. I would not have predicted that this is how my life would be at this point.” 15 years later, Ferguson is still at the �鶹��Ѱ��, inspiring her students to engage in greater conversations.

“How do you start to see yourself as a political agent?” The ultimate question Professor Michaele Ferguson asks her students. “I want students to be prepared for a life of engaged citizenship.” Ferguson creates opportunities for her students to hold civil debates, organize political action, and learn how to apply timeless ideologies to relevant issues today.

Students in Ferguson’s Sex, Power, and Politics class design and implement their own political activism projects. She keeps her students’ visuals as examples for future classes she’ll teach. Her show-and-tells include a #MeToo project students created: “They had a couple of cardboard boxes that they painted white and then wrote the hashtag MeToo on it. They had people in the UMC come and write their stories or just write MeToo on it if they weren’t comfortable sharing their experiences,” Ferguson says, as she points to the different stories people shared on the poster. “This is a very powerful way to raise people’s awareness of how pervasive sexual harassment and sexual assault are. But where does this take us beyond that?”

“I want [students] to learn that they as ordinary citizens can actually start to create change through things they can do here on campus.”

Professor Ferguson also teaches PSCI 2004 in political theory, but she adds a twist to it. She covers traditional ideologies including the big five: liberalism, conservatism, fascism, socialism, and anarchism. After spring break, however, Ferguson introduces feminism, white nationalism, anitfascism, Black Lives Matter and radical black thought into her course. “I can’t just teach the traditional ideologies, as if there aren’t other ideas popping up in our political world. I have to teach what is happening right now, too, to prepare my students to understand the world we live in.”

With passion and thoughtfulness, Professor Ferguson makes a difference in her students’ lives in her engaging and dynamic courses. Her outlook on teaching prepares students for more than just their careers; she is committed to creating spaces where students can think critically and apply their knowledge to political action.

“Politics means you have a vision of what the world should look like and you take a stand on something you want to change. If someone criticizes you, it doesn’t mean you have to be dug in about it, you just have to dig deeper.”

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Meet Sarah Wilson Sokhey

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Feb 2018 21:27:37 +0000

Meet Sarah Wilson Sokhey Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/05/2018 - 14:27

Jeffrey Nonnemacher

Assistant Professor

Dr. Sarah Wilson Sokhey’s life in academia is a tale of two worlds. Not only has she been a part of the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder faculty since 2009, she is affiliated with the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia.

“I have been going to Russia nearly every year since 2002” she said. “A lot of my research is done in Russian about Russia.”

Without hesitation, her favorite part of Russia is “easily Moscow. I love all of Russia, but Moscow is definitely my favorite.”

“I remember the news footage of Yeltsin standing on top of the tanks shaking his fists” she recalled, reminiscing about the fall of the Soviet Union. “My first big political memory is the fall of the Soviet Union and even as a kid, I was really enamored by all these seemingly new countries.”

“My family wasn’t very political, and even they were talking about the fall of the Soviet Union” she quipped, “and that really left an impression.”

While Russia is a big focus of her research, she also spends a lot of time studying the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

She just published a book titled The Political Economy of Pension Policy Reversal in Post-Communist Countries, “a title so good”, she joked, “that it requires an acronym - PEPPER-Comm!”.

“The book is about pensions,” she said. “Russia was among about 30 countries around the world that adopted social security and pension reform, and then after the financial crisis, a third of them got rid of it.”

The goal was to understand “why you would adopt this fundamental reform to restructure social security and then a decade or so later scrap it?”

The book hits at a large part of Dr. Sokhey’s research which focuses on “how politics and economics are connected to each other,” she explained. “A lot of the social problems that exist in the world can be explained by the economy” she said, “if you don’t have a functioning state and a functioning state economy, then things go badly.” She argues that “if you can figure out how to reform the economy in the best way, then you can solve a lot of those social problems.”

Not only is Dr. Sokhey an active researcher on campus and around the world, she is also an active professor. “My favorite classes to teach are PSCI 3022: Russian Politics and PSCI 4062: East European Politics.”

“I really love teaching about Russia and Eastern Europe because there are so many misconceptions, and these countries, especially Russia, are worth getting to know.”

Dr. Sokhey loves teaching and loves being able to interact with students and discuss what she is reading, writing, and researching. “I always liked reading and writing. Academia gives me the opportunity to do both of those things and then talk about it.”

She also loves the students on campus, “It is a lovely place to work. The undergrad students are great, the graduate students are great, it is just a great intellectual environment to be in.”

Her favorite part, though, of being a professor at �鶹��Ѱ��is being a mentor and advisor to students. “Working with students on their own research, hearing their ideas and watching them explore and answer their own questions is such a rewarding experience.”

“It is so important to reach out and get to know your professors and faculty,” she said. “Approach them about your ideas for research, apply for UROP.” Even if academia isn’t the goal, “faculty can be a great resource to learn about other opportunities.”

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Meet David Bearce

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Dec 2017 15:43:48 +0000

Meet David Bearce Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 12/04/2017 - 08:43

Emma Piller

Professor in Political Science and International Affairs

David Bearce, both a Political Science and International Affairs professor, says his earliest memories were of his time spent in Kenya when his father joined the Peace Corps.

“The Kenyan government wanted professors to train Kenyans to teach, so you can’t just take college kids,” Bearce says. “If you want professors, you have to be willing to take the professor’s partner and children. So the whole family went to Kenya for two years, and that’s where I started school.” Because Kenya had only gained its independence less than a decade earlier, Bearce remembers a strong British post-colonial presence. “I came back to the US with a British accent,” he says.

Growing up, he had always been exposed to worldly events. “I’ve been interested in politics from the beginning, I just wasn’t sure if I would make it my career.” Bearce earned his undergraduate degree at Davidson College during which time he studied abroad in the South of France. Upon his return to the US, he had no intention of becoming a professor.

Bearce began working at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington D.C. after earning his undergraduate. “I wanted to advance in Brookings but would need a PhD. I also came from an academic family so I started to think more about teaching--if I did that, I would need a PhD.” Either way, he would need to go back to school.

After earning his doctorate at Ohio State, he began working at the University of Pittsburgh. It wasn’t until ten years later that he was offered a position at the University of Colorado and chose to move out to Boulder. He now holds a unique position of teaching in both the political science and international affairs departments.

Within the Political Science Department, Bearce has been conducting research on voter attitudes surrounding both immigration and trade policy. “Voters--and this isn’t just true in the United States, but voters in general--do not like immigrants,” he says. “This creates an unfortunate tradeoff between democracy and immigration. If you let voters decide what they want, the median voter wants a closed border and does not want anyone else to come in.” Despite this realization, however, Bearce and his team have gradually seen immigration policies become more open.

“This is an awkward thing because it isn’t what voters want. So the question is why is this happening?” If voters aren’t pushing legislators to open borders, then Bearce suggests it is a result of special interest pressure. “These are big businesses in declining industries who need low skill but cheap labor. Alternatively, you have some high skill firms that are complaining they don’t have enough high-tech engineers and programmers.”

“Oddly enough, if you are in favor of immigration policy, then your ally is American big business.” Free trade and less restrictive immigration policies generally lower domestic prices, but Bearce’s research finds voters are more concerned with the fear of losing jobs. Because the public thinks more like a producer than a consumer in this regard, special interests are stronger advocates for open borders. “So if you block the special interests,” he says, “all we would get are more restrictive immigration policies.”

To read more on Professor Bearce’s work in open trade policy and voter trends, click: International Labor Mobility and the Variety of Democratic Political Institutions

Professor Bearce and several other �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder educators recently attended the International Political Economy Society Conference where he and three others presented their research.

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