Week of Events
Alternatives to Incarceration in Latin America and the Caribbean
Alternatives to Incarceration in Latin America and the Caribbean
Drug laws and the region’s untenable prison crisis are at the center of the drug policy debate in Latin America and the Caribbean. The incarceration of low-level drug offenders for exceptionally long sentences has left the region’s prisons bursting at the seams; the impact is not only felt by those incarcerated, but also by their families and communities. Cutting edge research by the Colectivo de Estudios Drogas y Derecho (Research Consortium on Drugs and the Law, CEDD) and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) sheds new light on the problem and efforts to address it through alternatives to incarceration. The latest investigation …
SSRC-IFS Workshop: “The Future of Political Parties”
SSRC-IFS Workshop: “The Future of Political Parties”
This workshop, held at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, was the third in a series of convenings organized as part of a collaboration between the SSRC's Anxieties of Democracy program and our namesake European partner program, Anxieties of Democracy, at the Swedish Institute for Futures Studies. The workshop explored political parties as an institution, seeking to assess their current state and explore their future. Topics included changes in the typical left-right cleavages of parties, the decline of traditional parties, the rise of populist parties, and the institutional and social contexts shaping political parties today, such as personalism, non-majoritarianism, …
Confronting Algorithms of Oppression
Confronting Algorithms of Oppression
Safiya Umoja Noble, Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Southern California, gave a public talk on her new book, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, on Monday, May 14th at the Roosevelt House at Hunter College. Algorithms of Oppression contests the idea that search engines are unbiased marketplaces of ideas. Rather, Noble argues that search engines reflect the underlying power structures of the societies in which they are built, and often weaken the voices of historically underrepresented groups. Following Prof. Noble’s talk, Meredith Broussard, Assistant Professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, New York University and author of Artificial …