Join us at the USC Korean Studies Institute as Xinru Ma discusses whether nationalism is rising in East and Southeast Asia, and how it impacts maritime disputes. This talk offers full-spectrum comparative studies of nationalism with social media data in Vietnam and the Philippines, and has broader implications for East Asian regional stability, in addition to guidance on U.S. foreign policies in the region.

Ma is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation. She graduated from the Political Science and International Relations program at the University of Southern California in 2019. Originally from China, Ma is interested in combining formal modeling and computational social science with research on nationalist protests and maritime disputes, with a regional focus on East and Southeast Asia. Her research is informed by extensive field research in Vietnam, Philippines and China, during which she interviewed protestors, think tanks, diplomats, government officials, and foreign business owners that were impacted by nationalist protests. In addition to informing her of the complicated strategic interaction between mass mobilization, government repression and foreign policy-making, the field research further motivated her to focus on the methodological challenges for causal inference that stem from strategic conflict behavior. More broadly, Ma is interested in public opinion and new methods of measuring it, foreign policy formation, alliance politics, East Asian security dynamics, and the historical relations of East Asia.

Light refreshments provided. Brown bag optional. Please note that this is a practice job talk, with time reserved for feedback towards the end of the session (optional).

Please RSVP online.