Dear Hot Politics Lab friends,

 

I am very happy to invite you to a workshop organized as part of my NWO XS project called ‘ANTHROPOL: What do anthropological records tell us about democratic checks and balances? A pilot study of hunter-gatherer politics’. It is embedded within the Hot Politics Lab and will take place on Friday, 15 December 10:00-16:00 in the REC Common Room B9.22.

 

Please let me know by the end of the week if you would like to join the workshop by emailing h.mazepus@uva.nl (we will order lunch).

 

This interdisciplinary workshop will focus on the discussion of the early results of the project based on the coding of ethnographic records of hunter-gatherer societies. Guests with expertise in different disciplines will join us to reflect on several main themes:

 

-             Can anthropological records help us study the evolved psychologies?

-             What are anthropological records good for? What would be the best next steps to build on this type of analyses of hunter gatherers?

-             How to test hypotheses about the human political mind in contemporary political information environment?

-             What is missing in current explanations of democratic/authoritarian preferences of citizens and explanations of democratic backsliding?

-             How could we take the research agenda studying human minds and preferences for empowering and constraining political authorities further?

 

The schedule for the workshop:

10:00-10:30 Walk in, coffee/tea 

10:30-12:00 Session 1

12:00-13:00 Lunch 

13:00-14:30 Session 2 

14:30-15:00 Coffee break 

15:00-16:00 Hot Politics Lab talk by Pascal Boyer (cognitive anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, the author of Minds Make Societies and Religion Explained; see http://www.pascalboyer.net/)

 

All the best,

Honorata

 

 

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Dr. Honorata Mazepus

University of Amsterdam | Department of Political Science

Research group: Challenges to Democratic Representation

Co-director Hot Politics Lab

 

Recent publications: 

Mazepus, H., Osmundsen, M., Petersen, M.B., Toshkov, D., & Dimitrova, A. (2023). Information battleground: Conflict perceptions motivate the belief in and sharing of misinformation about the adversary. Plos one, 18(3), e0282308.https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282308  

Mazepus, H. & Toshkov, D. (2022) Standing up for Democracy? Explaining Citizens’ Support for Democratic Checks and Balances, Comparative Political Studies 55(8): 1271-1297 https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140211060285  

Rimkutė, D., & Mazepus, H. (2023). A widening authority–legitimacy gap in EU regulatory governance? An experimental study of the European Medicines Agency’s legitimacy in health security regulation. Journal of European Public Policy, 1-25. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/bj4vn