Armed conflict has a lasting impact on its survivors.  In this talk, Michelle O’Brien will discuss her recent fieldwork in Tajikistan.  She will preset the preliminary results of her article titled, “The Long-Term Consequences of Armed Conflict on Migration: The Case of Tajiki­stan,” and show how her qualitative work in-country has framed the interpretation of these results.

Michelle O’Brien is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology, and an affiliate with CSDE and the Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies.

This workshare features three research projects recently funded by the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies. Three graduate students will share their projects in progress with their research questions and preliminary findings.

We distribute the selected working papers only to RSVP’d participants one week ahead of the event.

RSVP: hbcls@uw.edu

Please visit our new website for more information and the full abstracts.

“A Taste of Freedom: the meaning and experience of work for formerly incarcerated Asian Pacific Islander individuals”
By Jamie Wong, Occupational Health (Martha H. Duggan Fellowship in Caring Labor 2017)
This is a qualitative research in the realm of occupational health, investigating the encounters that formerly incarcerated API individuals have with work. Faced with the stigma of having a prison record, hidden under the model minority myth, and criminalized as perpetual foreigners with deportation orders sending many formerly incarcerated Southeast Asian American refugees back to their countries of origin, the successful transition of formerly incarcerated individuals are nonetheless measured through their engagement with commodified labor upon release. I hope to understand how individuals navigate these violent institutional barriers and what kinds of contradictory meanings and values they create and experience through work.

“Recognizing Hazardous Working conditions in Nonstandard Work Arrangements”
By Allyson O’Connor, Health Service (Washington State Labor Research Grant 2016)
This is a In the decades since the passage of the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OSH Act) of 1970, the evolving nature of work organization and the shift away from standard employment relationships are profoundly affecting the health and safety of workers. As nonstandard work arrangements grow in the labor market, there is need for greater understanding of hazardous working conditions beyond the traditional occupational hygiene health and safety context. In this paper, I identify three key employment conditions which may clarify the adverse health outcomes associated with nonstandard work arrangements: the breakdown in full-time work, permanent contracts, and direct employer-employment relationships.

“Becoming a Cannabis Connoisseur: Moralizing Labor as a Moral Project of the Self”
By Michele Cadigan, Sociology (Washington State Labor Research Grant 2017) Economic sociologists have moved towards an understanding of the market as a moral project where moral values inform market activities and markets reshape moral values. Despite this growing literature, how moralizing labor? the labor workers engage in to bring moral value to market activities? shapes workers? own sense of morality has been undertheorized. This study attempts to address this gap by examining moralizing labor as a moral project of the self, using Seattle? s legal recreational cannabis industry as a case study. This study contributes to our understandings of markets attempting to gain legitimacy by specifying the potential for moralizing labor to have a reciprocal effect on workers and how these effects are moderated by gender.

Description:
For statistical agencies, the Big Bang event in disclosure avoidance occurred in 2003 when Irit Dinur and Kobbi Nissim, two well-known cryptographers, turned their attention to properties of safe systems for data publication from confidential sources. And the paradigm-shifting message was a very strong result showing that most of the confidentiality protection systems used by statistical agencies around the world, collectively known as statistical disclosure limitation, were not designed to defend against a database reconstruction attack. Such an attack recreates increasingly accurate record-level images of the confidential data as an agency publishes more and more accurate statistics from the same database. Why are we still talking about this theorem fifteen years later? What is required to modernize our disclosure limitation systems? The answer is recognizing that the database reconstruction theorem identified a real constraint on agency publication systems—there is only a finite amount of information in any confidential database. We can’t repeal that constraint. But it doesn’t help with the public-good mission of statistical agencies to publish data that are suitable for their intended uses. The hard work is incorporating the required privacy-loss budget constraint into the decision-making processes of statistical agencies. This means balancing the interests of data accuracy and privacy loss. A leading example of this process is the need for accurate redistricting data, to enforce the Voting Rights Act, and the protection of sensitive racial and ethnic information in the detailed data required for this activity. Wrestling with this tradeoff stares-down the database reconstruction theorem, and uses the formal privacy results that it inspired to specify the technologies. Specifying the decision framework for selecting a point on that technology has proven much more challenging. We still have a lot of work to do.

Dr Abowd leads a directorate of research centers at the Census Bureau, each devoted to domains of investigation important to the future of social and economic statistics. During the past two years he has led critical work to modernize the Census Bureau’s operations and products.

Registration Fees:
This webinar is free to anyone who would like to attend. However, registration is limited so you must register to receive the access information. The access information will be emailed to everyone who has registered the afternoon of Tuesday, January 30.

Each registration is allowed one web connection and one audio connection. Multiple persons are encouraged to view each registered connection (for example, by projecting the webinar in a conference room).

Ann Huff Stevens, University of California – Davis 

Abstract: The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) has become one of the primary components of the U.S safety net for poor families, but very little is known about the dynamics and persistence of EITC eligibility. This paper uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to measure persistence of eligibility for the EITC, paying particular attention to persistence across multiple spells of eligibility. We find that single-female headed households have extremely persistent eligibility for the EITC, with 62 to 71 percent of these families becoming eligible for the credit maintaining their eligibility for five or more years over the subsequent decade. When considering all household types just beginning a spell of eligibility, we find that half are eligible for more than five years in the next decade. These results point to substantially more persistence in EITC eligibility than prior work based in IRS administrative data. This is due to both our consideration of multiple spells of eligibility and to the ability to follow single parents across transitions in marriage and household structure in the PSID.

CSDE is willing to provide a letter of support for any CSDE affiliate who plans a submission to the Royalty Research Fund grant program.  We would provide a promise of ‘in-kind’ matching support for those applications that are successfully funded under this mechanism.

If you are interested in a letter of support or a more detailed description of provided services, please send an email to: jmkemner@uw.edu and scurran@uw.edu.

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This is to announce the Spring 2018 round of the Royalty Research Fund (RRF) grant program. The RRF proposal submission and review process is electronic – all proposals are submitted using SAGE (System to Administer Grants Electronically). Proposals are due Monday, March 5, by 5:00 PM.  Awards will be announced by June 15, 2018.

Unlike agency-funded grants, RRF grants are not awarded to supplement or continue existing successful research programs.  The purpose of the RRF is to advance new directions in research, particularly:

1. in disciplines for which external funding opportunities are minimal, and/or
2. for faculty who are junior in rank, and/or
3. in cases where funding may provide unique opportunities to increase applicants’ competitiveness for subsequent funding.

Proposals must demonstrate a high probability of generating important new creative activities or scholarly understandings, new scholarly materials or resources, significant data or information, or essential instrumentation resources that are likely to significantly advance the reputation of the university, lead to external funding, or lead to developing a new technology. Proposals from all disciplines are welcome, with well-justified budgets up to $40,000.

All proposals will be peer reviewed through one of the three RRF Review Committees. The evaluators are faculty colleagues and therefore will not necessarily be specialists in the applicant’s subfield. Thought should be given, therefore, to crafting the proposal so that a wider audience may understand it. Although technical field-specific information will be expected, the major features of the proposal should also be accessible to non-specialists.

The RRF application instructions, including specific directions for completing the eGC1, are currently available at the Office of Research website.

As a reminder, Deans, Directors, and Chairs should only approve RRF applications for faculty and professional staff with PI status who are eligible for the program. Faculty with acting, affiliate, or visiting appointments are not eligible. In addition, if a UW faculty member holds an eligible rank but is based at another institution (e.g. Seattle Children’s or Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center), all of his/her extramural grants must be run through the UW in order to be eligible for an RRF award.

Should you elect to apply, please note the following additional details:

1. Carefully read and follow all instructions. Applications that do not adhere to program rules will be returned for immediate correction and resubmission if time permits; otherwise they will not be considered for funding.
2. Find out how much lead time is required by each unit which needs to approve your proposal and monitor it throughout the approval process. (For example, the College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s office requires that proposals reach them via SAGE by 5:00 pm on the Thursday prior to the RRF deadline.) Applications not fully approved by the deadline will not be accepted – NO EXCEPTIONS.
3. On the Details page of the eGC1, please make sure that you choose the Research Area that is most appropriate for your specific project. This will not necessarily match your official departmental affiliation, so you should review the membership of the three RRF committees (each of which covers two Research Areas) to confirm that you are making the best choice. Your proposal has a better chance of being successful if it is appropriately aligned with the expertise on the committee.
4. Use the sample budget template on our website as a guide when preparing your proposal budget, making sure that a) you round all figures to whole dollars, b) you group items by object code, and c) you provide a subtotal for each object code.

Don’t hesitate to contact the RRF administrative staff if you have questions about the program; new applicants should contact Peter Wilsnack, doogieh@uw.edu, (685-9316) and existing awardees should contact Barbara Thompson, bthompso@uw.edu, (616-9089). Questions about SAGE and the eGC1 should be directed to oris@uw.edu, (685-8335).

 

China has recently emerged as one of Africa’s top business partners, aggressively pursuing its raw materials and establishing a mighty presence in the continent’s booming construction market. Among major foreign investors in Africa, China has stirred the most fear, hope, and controversy. This book talk analyzes the peculiarity of outbound Chinese state capital by comparing it with global private capital in copper and construction in Zambia. Refuting the rhetorical narratives of “Chinese colonialism” and “south-south cooperation”, I draw on ethnographic data collected over a six-year period to chronicle the multi-faceted struggles that confront and differentiate these two varieties of capital, and discuss their uneven potentials for post-colonial African development.

Ching Kwan Lee is a professor of sociology at UCLA. Her research interests include labor, political sociology, development, China, global south and comparative ethnography. She is author of Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (1998), Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (2007), and The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor and Foreign Investment in Africa (2017).