In 2019 August, we finished our fieldwork in two rural villages in southeast China. The graph below shows the self-governance organizations weave together through local elites (xiangxian). I wrote a non-academic article introducing our work, which was featured in the Nonprofit Academic Centers Council’s monthly newsletter and IC2’s website. You can read the full article here.
We will solve real-world civic issues by analyzing open government data and building computer programs or models. You can assemble a team with students from or outside of the class. Your team can choose from the following problems:
Depending on the University’s operating procedures, final rewards may be distributed as cash or credits for student loan or course.
The final project is supported by UT Austin Graduate School’s Academic Enrichment Fund and RGK Center Special Funds for Data Science Speaker Series at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. Co-sponsors also include UT Library Research Data Services and Mission Capital.
Friday 5/3, 12:15-13:30, SRH 3.122 (lunch provided)
Investigating Women’s Unmet Need for Contraceptives in Haiti
Emily Acker
Predicting the Number of Crisis Pregnancy Centers by State
Marjorie Crowell
Where is the Relief? The Humanitarian Response to Violence in Syria and Regional Refugee Flows
Marissa Marinello
Dr. Thomas C. is a Lead Scientist in the CIA’s Directorate of Analysis and holds a Ph.D. in Economics. The talk will focus on how the Intelligence Community (IC) manages data, including some of the unique aspects in the IC. How the IC generates insights: typical timelines, customers, and general descriptions of modeling techniques, as well as how the IC integrates social science research.
Date: Friday, April 26, 2019
Time: 12:15 – 1:30pm (lunch provided)
Location: LBJ School of Public Affairs, 1st floor, Room SRH 3.122
Please RSVP closed. Presentation slides here
刚刚参加完2019年的MPSA（美国中西部政治学年会），回忆这些年参加的诸多不同领域的年会，颇有感触，但最深刻的却和学术并无关系，而是参会过程中打过交道的形形色色的人。他们中有学术巨擘，有无名学生，有高傲的聪明人，也有谦卑的实干家。不管哪个学术会议，华人学者的参会人数都在过去几年激增。这篇短文结合我自己这些年的参会经验，总结一些基本礼仪。
值得说明的是，写这篇文章的目的并不是因为华人学者的参会礼仪有问题，而是因为不管来自哪里，普遍都有参会礼仪有问题的学者，也有非常值得我们学习的榜样。作为华人学者的一员，我希望我们不仅能够向世界展示我们一流的研究，也能够像世界展示我们一流的风范。
Continue reading “学术会议参会基本礼仪”RSVP: https://jimalbj.eventbrite.com/
Political elites in a networked society: How Chinese civil society is integrated with the authoritarian regime
Thursday, March 21
6:00pm – 8:00pm
LBJ Washington Center
1100 New York Ave NW
Washington DC
Light refreshments served
Abstract
This paper studies how the Chinese civil society is integrated with the authoritarian regime through a highly educated group of political elites holding critical roles in both polity and civil society. Analysis of individuals presents that, the political elites are meshed in a social structure of two-layer networks: the civil society network and the political network. The leaders of Communist Youth League are widely embedded in civil society network but marginalized in political network. Over half of these political elites are provincial leaders connecting local and central governments. Analysis of formal institutions reveals that, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) forms a dyad with the State Council, resembling the politics–administration tension studied in western democracies. Unlike conventional thoughts about authoritarian regimes, the Chinese civil society and political networks are highly pluralistic, but CCP builds itself as a necessary broker between political groups. In President Hu’s term, intellectuals are a significant power for integrating civil society. In Xi’s term, CCP is over-politicized, widely embedded, and institutionalized, serving as the only and direct channel that connects civil society and polity.
Please enter the building through the New York Ave NW entrance. The Center is located one level up via the stairs or elevator immediately to your right upon entrance.
Metro Access – The LBJ Washington Center is located two blocks from Metro Center (Red, Blue, Orange, and Silver lines) and a 10-minute walk from Gallery Place/Chinatown (Green and Yellow lines)
The RGK Center’s Data Science Speaker Series welcomes Dr. Jesse Lecy, co-founder of the Nonprofit Open Data Collective to present his research paper titled “The Political Economy of Nonprofit Entrepreneurship: Using Open Data to Explore the Geographic and Demographic Dimensions of Nonprofit Open Data Collective”.
I started to work on this project since early 2015, and the first paper is finally accepted in Voluntas today, which is my civil calendar birthday. Although our family tradition is to use the Chinese lunar calendar, still a nice gift.
Sara and I started to work on the first draft at Mo’Joe Coffeehouse, which was permanently closed in June this year. Another coffeehouse, Thirsty Scholar, was also closed around the same time. Lots of memories with friends in both places.
There are at least three versions of this paper. The first draft almost entirely relied on a citation analysis software package named CiteSpace. It was a very simple paper but it helped me get familiar with relevant concepts and methodology and cleaned a part of the dataset used in the final analysis. In the second draft, I started to write Python scripts for processing and analyzing data. In early 2017, while I was waiting for my wife, parents, and parents-in-law at Kuala Lumpur airport to start a wonderful journey in Malaysia, I received the rejection from a journal. Then I tried to rewrite the whole paper to analyze the literature published in the last century. I still remember the classroom in which I crawled the first hundreds of records – it was a classroom on the first floor of Teaching Building 2 in Beijing Normal University, where I also spent many nights for preparing my Ph.D. application. I then had a lunch with a good friend who just returned from UPenn about a year ago. She said she felt her heart was in peace, and she was sure about the direction of her career. That was a day in March, Beijing was snowing heavily.
In late June of this year, I submitted the third draft to Voluntas in the office at IQSS, where Prof. Peter Bol treated me so well. We got “minor revision” in early August, and I had a phone call with Sara on the third day after moving to Austin. Life was pretty hectic.
A paper for me has two meanings: the words and numbers for reviewers and readers, and the memories for myself. All things grow, I’m waiting and watching 万物并作，吾以观复.
Abstract
This empirical study examines knowledge production between 1925 and 2015 in nonprofit and philanthropic studies from quantitative and thematic perspectives. Quantitative results suggest that scholars in this field have been actively generating a considerable amount of literature and a solid intellectual base for developing this field towards a new discipline. Thematic analyses suggest that knowledge production in this field is also growing in cohesion – several main themes have been formed and actively advanced since the 1980s, and the study of volunteering can be identified as a unique core theme of this field. The lack of geographic and cultural diversity is a critical challenge for advancing nonprofit studies. New paradigms are needed for developing this research field and mitigating the tension between academia and practice. Methodological and pedagogical implications, limitations, and future studies are discussed.
Keywords: nonprofit and philanthropic studies; network analysis; knowledge production; paradigm shift; science mapping
Fulltext: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2834121
