Seminar offered by Dondena Research Center (Spring 2025 seminar series) ----- June 16th 2025 12:45-2:00pm (UTC+1) ------ CIVICA ESR can attend ONLINE only. Zoom meetings link will be available upon registration. ------ SEMINAR DESCRIPTION: Modernization is a central force of social change in the contemporary era, yet the character of that change remains widely debated in the social sciences. On one hand, modernization is associated with the rise of national identity, but on the other hand, attendant processes such as religious change and urbanization it can increase the salience of primordial identity categories like race, ethnicity, and religion. Leveraging over 240m observations from the 2010 Indonesian census, we develop a semi-supervised method for characterizing the social categories encoded in individual names. We document that the spread of national schools led to a spread in national-style naming practices, and that the spread of religious institutions caused a rise in Islamic naming practices. ----- BIO: Thomas Pepinsky is the Walter F. LaFeber Professor in the Department of Government and Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell University, and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He specializes in comparative politics and international political economy, with a focus on emerging markets and a special interest in Southeast Asia.
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