讲座简介：As both nation and state, the United States is a puzzle.  How did a sense of shared nationhood develop despite the linguistic, religious, and ethnic differences among its settlers?  How did a global power emerge from an often anti-statist political culture?  One answer to these questions can be found in the unexpected political uses of voluntarism and benevolence, in the power of gifts to create ties among strangers and to mobilize communities.  From the early Republic through the Second World War – with many natural disasters, economic crises, and municipal projects in between – civic benevolence elicited the commitments and the capacities needed to meet public challenges.  This “expansible state” could be contained whenever citizens withdrew their participation in the co-production of public goods or displaced when expectations of the equality of independent democratic citizens were offended by the social etiquette of benevolence.  The legacy of this combinatorial politics is a system of government that is profoundly infrastructural and dependent on partnerships with private actors if no longer on processes of civic mobilization and giving.

主讲人简介：Elisabeth S. Clemens (Ph.D. 1990) is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago as well as a former Master of the Social Sciences Collegiate Division. Her research explores the role of social movements and organizational innovation in political change. Professor Clemens has served terms as chair of both the political sociology and comparative historical sociology sections of the American Sociological Association, as a member of the Social Science Research Council Program on Philanthropy and the Third Sector, and as President of the Social Science History Association for 2012-13.

讲座简介：Population researchers struggle to characterize and explain the distinctiveness of the fertility patterns we observe in sub-Saharan Africa. Building upon research that documents changing fertility preferences across the region and high levels of uncertainty characterizing daily life for most Africans, we argue that our understanding of fertility preferences is enhanced when we focus on the flexibility that accompanies them. Using longitudinal data from the Tsogolo la Thanzi study in southern Malawi, we examine the sensitivity of young women’s fertility preferences to a variety of hypothetical (but common) events that could alter their numeric or timing preferences. We find that flexibility is prevalent (widespread, though not universal), patterned (associated with socioeconomic traits and existential uncertainty), and consequential (positively associated with preference instability, non-use of modern contraceptives, and surprise pregnancy). Within contexts of tremendous uncertainty, a flexible orientation to fertility is both a realistic and strategic response to life’s many contingencies. 

主讲人简介：Jenny Trinitapoli (Ph.D. 2007) is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Her training and background is in two areas: social demography & the sociology of religion. Bridging these two fields, Dr. Trinitapoli’s work features the demographer’s characteristic concern with data and denominators and an insistence on connecting demographic processes to questions of meaning.