Dr. Bill Maurer

Bill Maurer is a cultural anthropologist who conducts research on law, property, money and finance, focusing on the technological infrastructures and social relations of exchange and payment. He has particular expertise in emerging, alternative and experimental forms of money and finance, payment technologies, and their legal implications. He has published on topics ranging from offshore financial services to mobile phone-enabled money transfers, Islamic finance, alternative currencies, blockchain/distributed ledger systems and their implications for money and law, and the future of money. He is founding director of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and was the founding co-director of the Intel Science and Technology Center in Social Computing.

Dr. Mona Lynch

Mona Lynch is Professor and Chancellor’s Fellow in Criminology, Law and Society and, by courtesy, the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine. Trained as a social psychologist, her research focuses on plea bargaining, criminal sentencing, and punishment, and on institutionalized forms of bias within criminal justice settings. She uses multiple methods in her research, ranging from qualitative field methods to experiments, to quantitative modeling. Her current major project, funded by National Science Foundation’s Law and Social Sciences program, uses a mock jury experimental paradigm to examine how racial bias gets activated and elaborated through group-level deliberations.

Her research has been published in a wide range of journals, law reviews, and edited volumes including American Journal of Criminal Law, British Journal of Criminology, Criminology and Public Policy; Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology; Law and Human Behavior; Law & Social Inquiry; Law and Society Review; Law and Policy; Punishment and Society; Miami Law Review; Michigan State Law Review; Studies in Law, Politics, and Society; and Theoretical Criminology. She is also the author of Sunbelt Justice: Arizona and the Transformationof American Punishment (2009), published with Stanford University Press and Hard Bargains: The Power to Punish in Federal Court (2016), with Russell Sage Foundation Press.

Christopher J. Bates

Christopher J. Bates is a fourth-year student in Criminology, Law and Society Department. Chris’ employs novel spatial datasets, such as Google Street View, Twitter, and Socrata, and interdisciplinary methodology, from economics, criminology, & geography, to research the community context of crime. In addition to his research interests, Chris has a passion for using technology to publicly communicate research findings through websites, videos, and interactive applications.

Email: batesc@uci.edu

Business Improvement Districts

The current study employs novel large-scale datasets and methodological advances in geographic information systems to study the interdependence of people, place, and law. The study explores law’s impact on the securitization, resilience, and place-making of quasi-public spaces (e.g., sidewalks) through unique public-private legal entities, Business Improvement Districts (BIDS). The study first collected a census of BIDs throughout Southern California. The BID census was integrated with large-scale geographic datasets, such as business databases, property values databases, open city datasets, Google Street View imagery, & Twitter ambient population to study the regulation of quasi-public spaces across space and time. The impact of BIDs on securitization, resilience, and place-making of space are compared and contrasted to matched clusters of non-BID business. In addition to advancing the field of legal geography with novel methodology, the study demonstrates the vital role technology plays in organizing and communicating the values of community stakeholders.

Evan Conaway

Evan Conaway is a fourth year PhD student in the Department of Anthropology. After getting his BA in Anthropology from the University of Georgia, Evan came to the University of California, Irvine to study gaming cultures. His dissertation work explores how the servers that run online games serve as sites of memory and culture, as new kinds of places of the digital age. This work addresses how online gamers are using servers to preserve, memorialize, and restore virtual worlds and online games, and how servers matter to gamers both as social places and in geopolitical places. He is specifically interested in understanding how virtual space is maintained and reproduced, often through illicit or unauthorized means, in relation to the material technologies that create it, and he seeks to identify the politics embedded in present-day efforts to engage with the pasts of virtual worlds.

 

Read more: https://sites.google.com/a/uci.edu/econaway/
Email: econaway@uci.edu

Gaming Memoryscapes: Private Servers, Piracy, and Nostalgia

In light of recent changes to the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft (WoW), many players are choosing to connect to “private servers” that run older versions of the game. While these servers are typically located in non-US sites and exist outside of corporate data centers, the game code is still corporate property, constrained by intellectual property laws and End User License Agreements. WoW’s development company has begun to make use of rhetorical tactics to demonize private servers (e.g., referring to them as “pirate” servers), and have threatened users and maintainers with legal action. With nostalgia and obsolescence as driving forces and legal frameworks as looming threats, what values and ideologies emerge from everyday player discourse and practices on private servers? How might private servers reshape understandings of relations between intellectual property and geopolitical boundaries?

Tania DoCarmo

Tania DoCarmo is a doctoral student in Sociology, entering her fourth year of study. Her research interests are in sociology of culture, representation, migration, human rights, humanitarian ethics, global inequality, law and society. She is currently working on multiple collaborative projects with faculty and peers on storytelling for advocacy more generally, and the experience of detained migrants in California, in addition to individual projects on the international institutionalization of human trafficking as a contemporary social problem, tensions between international discourses on “crime” and “rights,” and the experiences of trafficking survivors in Cambodia during and after receiving assistance from law enforcement and social service providers. Prior to doctoral studies, she worked ten years for international NGOs in Brazil, Cambodia and the US on projects related to violence, human trafficking and sexual exploitation.

Email: tdocarmo@uci.edu

Human Rights Stories As Technology For Social Change

International human rights activism relies heavily on storytelling. New digital technologies and “image politics” transform how advocacy groups and NGOs make their claims, with many dispersing stories via social media, photography and video. These stories are often utilized as a form of technology for social change in and of themselves, with innate transformative and political potential, posing as democratic discourses of truth and “evidence” of what is real. And yet, storytelling for human rights is not without controversy. Are stories truly democratic? Who are human rights stories for? Few studies focused on storytelling for social change bring together literatures on international human rights in addition to the social construction of the narrative form, or consider how rights stories are crafted by international advocacy groups. Drawing on interview data and actual stories disseminated online, I analyze how and why international human rights stories are produced, and how advocates reconcile ethical and practical challenges in telling them.

Noopur Raval

Noopur Raval is a fourth year PhD student in Informatics. Her research focuses on the role of digital technologies in supporting and transforming the future of work, especially blue-collar work in post-colonial countries. She is advised by Prof. Paul Dourish. Noopur was an affiliate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society in 2016-17 and has worked with the Wikimedia Foundation and the Center for Internet & Society, Bangalore in the past. Beyond academic work, Noopur thinks a lot about diversity and tries to learn new languages.

Read more at http://noopur.xyz

Email:noopur.raval@gmail.com

Gig Economy

Noopur’s project investigates reputation measures (such as 5-star ratings, thumbs, feedback and work profiles) that mediate Gig Economy transactions in platforms such as Uber, Airbnb and TaskRabbit. It looks at the socio-legal materialities of gig-work reputation, how ratings are assembled and, how they shape transactions and interactions in-turn. Further, this project proposes near-future and speculative design recommendations to rework reputation artefacts in order to better support gig workers’ information needs and career decisions, especially in non-Western contexts.