Political Science

Amelia McNamara | How Spatial Polygons Shape Our World: Geometry, Data, and Perceptions of Truth

Borders often do not have much to do with the physical world. The edges of voting districts, cities, counties, states, and countries are decided by human processes, always implicitly if not explicitly political. Data are often provided pre­aggregated at a particular spatial polygon level. For example, data on poverty is collected at the block­group level, while data on education is easiest to obtain for school districts. This makes it difficult to combine data, and can lead to problems when data does not make sense at the level it was collected.

Dipesh Chakrabarty | The Nomos of the Earth to Gaia: Land as a Category in Postcolonial and Anthropocene Histories

This lecture will discuss how our understanding of the category "land" shifts as and when we try bring into conversation the concerns of postcolonial histories and those generated by discussions of climate change and the Anthropocene.

This talk presented as a part of the 2018 Sawyer Seminar. It is additionally cosponsored by the departments of History, Political Science, and American Indian Studies.