CIS-Dec-9-2019_ConfProgram 112119 draft 1

USCDornsife

Center for International Studies

International Women’s Activism:
A Symposium on Social Movements

and Political Leadership
in the Era of #MeToo

University of Southern California
December 9, 2019



WELCOME FROM THE DIRECTOR

It is my privilege to welcome you to “Text Analysis for Asia and Beyond,” the first conference
of 2019 from the Center for International Studies (CIS). I began organizing this event prior to
becoming director of CIS in the fall of 2018, thus I feel especially fortunate to serve as both
co-convener of this conference and as the new director of this dynamic center.

As with so much of our programming, this event benefits from the rich collaboration and
support of others. Thank you to Nan Jia, Associate Professor at the USC Marshall School
of Business, for her invaluable role as co-convener. Thanks also to USC’s East Asian Studies
Center and the Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture for their funding and
critical support as well.

As you will see in our presentations, our understanding can be enriched by comparing and
exploring techniques and cautionary tales of text analysis from multiple perspectives, including
those in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. The diverse areas of expertise of our
presenters extend to the worlds of business, politics, and diplomacy. It is our hope that this
gathering of international scholars will expand our understandings of existing methodology
and influence your current and future research not only in text analysis but also in the use of
artificial intelligence and machine learning in social sciences more broadly.

Thank you for being part of this important intellectual community, both within and beyond USC.

Saori N. Katada, PhD

Director, Center for International Studies

Associate Professor, USC School of International Relations



CONFERENCE AGENDA

Friday, December 9, 2019
The Scriptorium
Amy King Dundon-Berchtold University Club of USC

9:30 a.m. Registration and Light Breakfast
10:00 a.m.
Welcome
10:15 a.m.
Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro
Noon Dean’s Professor of Gender Studies and
1:15 p.m. Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies

2:00 p.m. Jane Junn
3:15 p.m. USC Associates Chair in Social Sciences and
4:00 p.m. Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies

Women Activists in Global Social Movements

Panel Chairs: Jane Junn and Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro
Discussant: Eliz Sanasarian, professor of political science
at USC

The Urgency of Feminist Activism in these Times
Sylvanna Falcon, University of California, Santa Cruz

Layered Violence: Central American Women and
Migration
Linda Alvarez. California State University, Northridge

Lunch & Keynote Address

Gendered Citizenship: Understanding Gendered
Violence in Democratic India
Natasha Behl, Arizona State University

Women Elected Officials

Panel Chair: Carol Wise, associate professor of international
relations at USC
Discussant: Christian Diyogi Phillips, assistant professor of
political science at USC

Candidates Who Break the Silence: #MeToo and
Political Engagement in Japan
Mari Miura, Sophia University

Women in Legislatures: Barriers and Opportunities
Diana O’Brien, Rice University

Coffee Break

Roundtable Discussion
Moderated by Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro and Jane Junn

Concluding Remarks

PARTICIPANT BIOGRAPHIES

Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro is a Dean’s Professor and chair of gender studies and
professor of political science at the University of Southern California and a globally
recognized scholar of intersectionality theory, the world’s leading analytical framework for
analyzing and resolving inequality. She has written numerous articles and three books on
the intersections of categories of difference and their policy impact: The Politics of Disgust
and the Public Identity of the “Welfare Queen” (2004), Solidarity Politics for Millennials: A
Guide to Ending the Oppression Olympics (2011), and Intersectionality: An Intellectual History
(2016). Her current research is on asylum requests for survivors of domestic violence,
empirical applications of intersectionality, and the free speech-hate speech debate. She also
currently sits on four boards: the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California
(ACLU SoCal), Community Partners, Los Angeles African American Women’s Public
Policy Institute, and Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Political Empowerment
(SCOPE-LA).

Linda Alvarez is an assistant professor at California State University, Northridge. She
received her PhD in Political Science and a master’s degree in International Relations
from Claremont Graduate University. She also holds a master’s degree in Latin American
Studies from California State University, Los Angeles. Her scholarly interests revolve
around exploring the ways in which underrepresented and marginalized groups interact,
challenge, and resist dominant structures of power. As a political scientist, she works within
the frameworks of transnational migration, comparative political behavior, political
psychology, social movements, race and ethnic politics, food politics and the study of
violence and trauma among underrepresented and marginalized populations. 
 
Natasha Behl is assistant professor in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at
Arizona State University. She completed her doctorate in political science at University
of California, Los Angeles, where her training focused on race, ethnicity, politics, and
comparative politics. She explains why the promise of democratic equality remains
unrealized and identifies potential ways to create more egalitarian relations in liberal
democracies and the discipline of political science. She is author  Gendered Citizenship:
Understanding Gendered Violence in Democratic India, published  with Oxford University
Press (2019). Her research is also published in Feminist Formations, Space & Polity, Politics,
Groups, and Identities, Journal of Narrative Politics, and Journal of Punjab Studies. In 2018,
she was awarded the Outstanding Teaching Award at Arizona State University.

Sylvanna M. Falcón  is an associate professor in the department of Latin American
and Latino studies, director of the  Research Center  for the Americas,  and founder of
the Human Rights Investigations Lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She
is the author of Power Interrupted: Antiracist and Feminist Activists inside the United Nations
(University of Washington Press, 2016), which was winner of the National Women’s Studies
Association’s Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Award. She is co-editor of Precarity and Belonging:
Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (forthcoming, Rutgers  University Press) and  New
Directions in Feminism and Human Rights (Routledge, 2011). She is also the producer and
host of a weekly public affairs radio program called Voces Críticas/ Critical Voices. 

AUTHOR AND DISCUSSANT BIOGRAPHIES

Jane Junn is a professor of political science and gender studies at the University of Southern
California. She has authored five books on political participation and public opinion in the
United States. Her research articles on political behavior, public opinion, racial and ethnic
politics,the politics of immigration,gender and politics,and political identity have appeared
in Perspectives on Politics, Du Bois Review, Politics & Gender, American Politics Research,
and American Behavioral Scientist. She has been vice president of the American Political
Science Association, a Fulbright Senior Scholar, and the recipient of an Outstanding
Teacher Award from Columbia University Teachers College. She was also the director of
the USC–Los Angeles Times Poll during the 2010 California election. She is currently
working on a new book on the “gender gap” and voting in the United States.

Mari Miura is a professor of political science, Faculty of Law, at Sophia University. She
received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. She is co-founder of the
Academy for Gender Parity, which provides training programs for young women to run
for office. Author of Welfare Through Work: Conservative Ideas, Partisan Dynamics, and Social
Protection in Japan (Cornell University Press, 2012), “Persistence of Women’s Under-
representation” (in Japan Decides 2017, Palgrave Macmillan 2018), Making Our Voices
Heard—Revival of Representative Democracy (in Japanese, Iwanami Shoten, 2015), editor
of Japan’s Women Representatives (in Japanese, Asahi Shimbun Shuppansha, 2016). She
received the Wilma Rule Award (IPSA Award for the Best Research on Gender and
Politics) in 2018 and was involved as Academic Advisor at the Diet in the Legislative
Process for the enactment of the Gender Parity Law.

Diana Z. O’Brien is the Albert Thomas Associate Professor of Political Science at Rice
University. Her research and teaching focuses on the causes and consequences of women’s
political representation in established democracies and across the globe. In particular, she
studies gender and political parties, executive branch politics, citizens’responses to women’s
presence in politics, and research methods. She has published articles on these topics
in journals including the  American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political
Science, Journal of Politics, Politics & Gender, and Comparative Politics. News coverage of her
work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, Newsweek, MSNBC, and multiple
international outlets. 

Christian Dyogi Phillips is an assistant professor of political science at the University of
Southern California. Her research in American politics addresses voter behavior; electoral
institutions; the politics of public policy; and political incorporation, with an emphasis
on race, gender, and immigrant communities. Her current book project, Nowhere to Run:
How Race and Gender Shape American Elections, is a national study of changing patterns
of descriptive representation in American state legislatures. She received a Master’s in
political science from UC Berkeley, an MPA from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public
and International Affairs at Princeton University, and a BA from Hampshire College. She
was previously a member of the faculty at The Ohio State University.

AUTHOR AND DISCUSSANT BIOGRAPHIES

Eliz Sanasarian is a professor of political science at the University of Southern California,
where she is also a research associate at the Center for Religion & Civic Culture and a
faculty associate in the gender studies program. She is the author of Religious Minorities in
Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and The Women’s Rights Movement in Iran: Mutiny,
Appeasement, and Repression in Iran (Praeger, 1982). The edited Persian translation of that
book won the first prize as the Best Research Book on Women in Iran from the Sedigheh
Dovlatabadi Library in Tehran. Her publications on a variety of topics have appeared in
book chapters and academic journals such as the Journal of International Affairs, Holocaust
and Genocide Studies, Diaspora, Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, and Natural
Resources Journal.

Carol Wise is an associate professor of international relations at the University of Southern
California, where she specializes in international political economy and development,
with an emphasis on Latin America and Pacific Asia. She has written widely on trade
integration, exchange rate crises, institutional reform, and the political economy of market
restructuring in the region. She recently completed a book-length project, Dragonomics:
How Latin America is Maximizing (or Missing Out) on China’s International Development
Strategy (Yale University Press, 2020), which analyzes the rapid and remarkable ties that
have developed between China and Latin America since the 1990s. She held the Fulbright-
Masaryk University Distinguished Chair, Czech Republic, in 2019.

ABOUT THE CENTER FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

The Center for International Studies (CIS) was established in 1986 to promote
advanced research and critical debate of theoretical and policy issues in world
affairs. The center supports the research of faculty and students; hosts scholars
from the United States and abroad; organizes public seminars, workshops, and
conferences; promotes collaborative research projects; and contributes to public
understanding of international affairs.

FUNDING SUPPORT

This conference is made possible by support from the Center for International
Studies, the Department of Political Science, and the Department of Gender and
Sexuality Studies at USC.

CONTACT INFORMATION

Center for International Studies
University of Southern California
Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
3454 Trousdale Parkway
CAS 101, Mail Code 0155
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0155

Tel. (213) 740-0800
Fax (213) 740-1070

[email protected]
dornsife.usc.edu/cis
facebook.com/usccis
twitter.com/usccis
instagram.com/usc.cis

NOTES



USCDornsife

Dana and David Dornsife

College of Letters,Arts and Sciences

Center for International Studies