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Win raffle prizes! Dessert refreshments provided.

Please join us for a Colloquium entitled "Counting the Costs of the War in Syria" with Professor Thomas W Smith.

12:15pm - 2:00pm, Humanities Institute, 4th floor Homer Babbidge Library.

**Lunch will be provided

Thomas W. Smith is a Professor of Political Science and Director of the University Honors program at University of South Florida St. Petersburg.

This event is co-sponsored by the Human Rights Institute, Humanities Institute, UConn Department of Political Science and the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center

Public Lecture: “Human Rights and War Through Civilian Eyes”

Wednesday, September 27, 2017
4:30pm - 6:00pm

Storrs Campus
Konover Auditorium

Public Lecture by Professor Thomas Smith, Professor of Political Science and Director of the University Honors Program, University of South Florida St. Petersburg

"Human Rights and War Through Civilian Eyes"

International lawyers and ethicists have long judged wars from the perspective of the state and its actions, asking whether belligerents are justified in entering the conflict or how they should conduct themselves during the war’s execution.

Human Rights and War Through Civilian Eyes reimagines the ethics of war from the standpoint of its collateral victims, focusing on the effects of war on those who are terrorized, or killed, or whose lives are violently upended.

The book show that even combatants who profess to follow the laws of war often engage in appalling violence and brutality, cutting short civilian lives, ruining economies, rending social fabrics, and collapsing public infrastructure.

At a moment when liberal states are rethinking the ethics of war as they seek to extricate themselves from unjust or unwise conflicts and taking on the responsibility to intervene to protect vulnerable people from slaughter, Human Rights and War helps us see with bracing clarity the devastating impact of war on whole societies.


Co-Sponsored by Humanities Institute, The Human Rights Institute, The Thomas J.Dodd Research Center, and the Department of Political Science.

To request reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities and for any other questions regarding this event, please contact Lyndsay.Nalbandian@uconn.edu

Geographic Conceptualization for GIS Representation and Analysis

Our conceptualization of geography affects how we represent and analyze geography digitally. Spatial data analysis methods operate on predefined spatial units to seek distribution patterns or spatial relationships among these spatial units. Most, if not all, predefined spatial units are set by observations (such as sample locations), survey grids, or enumeration areas (such as census blocks). However, observations, surveys, or enumerations may not reflect ways in which we conceptualize geographic phenomena or processes. In this talk, I would like to advocate for geographic conceptualization as the driver to innovate GIS representation and analysis. Instead of constraining ourselves to GIS data in current forms, I would share three research projects that seek novel ways of thinking about geographic problems and then develop methods to transform and analyze space-time data for new insights and solutions. Specifically, the first project uses crime incident data. Instead of looking for hot spots of crime occurrences, we reveal criminology of places. The second project, instead of mapping changes in temperature as projected by General Climate Models (GCM), searches for spatial patterns of warming and cooling as well as their converging and diverging patterns. Finally, the third project evaluates international trade. Instead of gravity or other spatial interaction models, we investigate the changing international-trade patterns of individual countries to probe global trade dynamics. The three projects provide examples of how geographic conceptualization can push for new thinking of geographic problems and consequently new GIS representation and analysis that can lead to new findings and interpretations.

May Yuan received all her degrees in Geography: B.S. 1987 from National Taiwan University and M.S. 1992 and Ph.D. 1994 from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is the Ashbel Smith Professor of Geospatial Information Sciences in the School of Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas. Before she joined UT-Dallas in August 2014, she was Brandt Professor and Edith Kinney Gaylord Presidential Professor and Director of Center for Spatial Analysis at the University of Oklahoma (1994-2014). Her research interest expands upon temporal GIS and its applications to understanding geographic dynamics. Over the years, she has been working to develop new approaches to represent geographic processes and events in GIS databases to support space-time query, analytics and knowledge discovery. Her research has been supported by NSF, NASA, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, United States Geological Survey, and Oklahoma state government agencies in the U.S.A.

Tuesday, October 3, 2017
11:00 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.

Student Union 304A
Storrs Campus

"Reproductive Rights and Development in the Global South"

Dr. Harper-Shipman received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Connecticut. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University.


Co-Sponsored by the Research Program on Global Health & Human Rights of the Human Rights Institute, the "Ethnographic Research Colloquium" of the Department of Anthropology, Department of Political Science and the Economic and Social Rights Group of the Human Rights Institute.

Spring registration review session for Political Science students

Spring registration review session for Political Science students

Spring registration review session for Political Science students