As part of the Goldfarb Center’s annual theme on freedom of speech, join Colby professors as they guide us in a conversation on free speech with a global lens. How do policy approaches to free speech vary across countries? Is the US approach to free speech exceptional? What kinds of historical and contemporary factors help us understand different countries’ orientations toward free speech? What global and geopolitical forces shape policies on free speech?
The panel will include Jen Yoder, the Robert E. Diamond Professor of Government and Global Studies and a member of the Goldfarb Faculty Advisory Committee, Jun (Philip) Fang, Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology, and Nazli Konya, Visiting Assistant Professor of Government.
Jennifer Yoder holds a joint appointment with the Department of Government and the Global Studies Program and teaches courses on European politics and societies. Her special interests are German politics, remembrance and reckoning after communism, and borderlands in Europe. Her latest project examines the construction of European memory and the role the European Union plays in facilitating discussions of the past, particularly across the old West-East divide. Yoder is the author of two books: From East Germans to Germans? The New Post-Communist Elite (1999) and Crafting Democracy: Regional Politics in Post-Communist Europe (2013). Her articles have appeared in Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, German Politics and Society, German Politics, German Studies Review, East European Politics and Societies, Europe-Asia Studies and Regional and Federal Studies.
Jun (Philip) Fang is a visiting assistant professor of sociology at Colby College. He broadly addresses how the contrasting forces of nationalism and globalization shape processes of cultural production and circulation. His current work explores state censorship in China’s engagement with Hollywood. A former columnist writing on culture and education, he received his Ph.D. in sociology from Northwestern University.
Nazlı Konya is a visiting assistant professor of government at Colby College. Her research interests are in contemporary democratic and critical theory, with a focus on politics of protest and refusal, populist authoritarianism, and public emotions. Her most recent research offers insights into the empowering and transformative qualities of refusal. She teaches courses on these themes, as well as on incarceration/decarceration and politics of identity.
Moderator – Professor Christel Kesler is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology. Her research focuses on cross-national comparisons of social inequality. She is particularly interested in how political-economic institutions and social policies shape the experiences of immigrants and their host societies in North America and Western Europe. She has worked on several projects that consider immigrant socioeconomic incorporation in various countries. Other recent projects examine immigration-driven diversity’s effects on social solidarity and the welfare state and patterns of racial, ethnic, and national belonging among immigrants’ descendants. Professor Kesler’s work has appeared in journals such as the International Migration Review, Social Science Research, and Social Forces. In addition, professor Kesler teaches numerous courses on social inequality, social policy, international migration, methods for social research, and data analysis.
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