"Unseeing Trauma and Seeing Liberation: An Anthropology of Black Queer Reproductive Justice"

This talk introduces the notion of Black queer reproduction as a framework to address the injustices in Brazil. Based upon ethnographic research in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. I discuss Brazilian Black lesbians’ unseen negative affective, emotional, and corporeal experiences caused by entrenched prejudice, or preconceito, and what is seen by my participants as interlocking social violence within gynecological care. I will show how I center the unseen emotional and social trauma within gynecology and its impact on Black queer women’s strivings for sexual liberatory praxis within these medical spaces. I explore how an anthropology of worth and worth making moves us toward the potentiality of Black queer reproduction as an alternative framework for reproductive justice.

"Earth Observation and Global Causal Inference"

In the developing world, features about local communities may be scarce. In this context, satellite imagery can play an important role, serving as a proxy for the confounding variables otherwise unobserved. In this talk, we discuss confounder adjustment where patterns or objects found in satellite images contribute to the confounder bias. We use the evaluation of anti-poverty aid programs in Africa as a running example. We also discuss edge computing's role in modeling causality in real time.

"Why Do Banks Take Excessive Risks?"

Over the past four decades, we have witnessed a dramatic rise in risky behavior among banks in the United States. This shift has come with important implications for economies and societies, with links to financial crises and rising social inequality. What does research tell us about the causes of these influential changes in bank behavior? And what can we do to address them?

"Reducing Political Polarization Through Fun, Casual Online Games"
The past decade in the US has been one of the most politically polarizing in recent memory. Ordinary Democrats and Republicans fundamentally dislike and distrust each other, even when they agree on policy issues. This increase in hostility towards opposing party supporters, commonly called affective polarization, has important ramifications that threaten democracy. Political science research suggests that at least part of the polarization stems from Democrats' misperceptions about Republicans' political views and vice-versa. In this talk, I will present an online casual game that combines the relaxed, playful nonpartisan norms of casual games with corrective information about party supporters' political views that are often misperceived. Through an experiment, we found that playing the game significantly reduces negative feelings toward out-party supporters among Democrats, but not Republicans. It was also effective in improving willingness to talk politics with out-party supporters. The game versions with political content were rated to be just as fun to play as a game version without any political content suggesting that, contrary to popular belief, people do like to mix politics and play.