Sunday July 16 – Saturday July 29, 2023
This summer Notre Dame London hosted Social Capital and the City: a Notre Dame Research Seminar. This interdisciplinary seminar, led by University of Notre Dame political scientist Jaimie Bleck, will explore questions related to social capital—or the interpersonal relationships, institutions, and other social assets that a society or group can leverage—in urban spaces. We will consider questions of infrastructure and connection including:
What dynamics lead to bonds and connections among neighbors and strangers in cities?
How does geography, architecture, public art, or urban planning shape social capital?
In what ways does inequality lead to imbalances in social capital across urban populations?
How does social capital affect public health, religious life, or start-up success in urban areas?
Scholars from universities around the world specializing in fields from poetry to biology will come together to engage in a cross-discipline examination of social capital in the urban sphere. Seminar attendees will discuss both academic and creative works from fellow participants in the sciences, humanities, social sciences, politics, engineering, and the arts.
Participants
- Ricardo Ramírez, University of Notre Dame (USA)
- Korey Garibaldi, University of Notre Dame (USA)
- Peter Jones, Complutense University of Madrid (Spain)
- S.N. Nyeck, University of Colorado Boulder (USA)
- María Estela Rivero Fuentes, Pulte Institute for Global Development, University of Notre Dame (USA)
- Richard Asante, University of Ghana (Ghana)
- Gary Lamberti, University of Notre Dame (USA)
- Fernanda Liberali, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (Brasil)
- Elina Mikkila, Lancaster University (UK)
- Catherine Nnamani, Ebonyi State University Abakaliki (Nigeria)
- Adam Harris, University of College London (UK)
- Cristiano Burmester, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (Brasil)
- Bernard Forjwuor, University of Notre Dame (USA)
- Julie Morrissy, Maynooth University (Ireland)
- Nitesh Chawla, University of Notre Dame (USA)
Feel free to explore our participants presentation abstracts below.
Location
The conference will take place at Notre Dame London, situated in Fischer Hall, 1-4 Suffolk Street, London, UK.
To get there, exit the Charing Cross underground station and walk down the Strand to Suffolk Street. Go North on Suffolk St; Fischer Hall is one block up on the right at the corner of Suffolk Place.
Project Abstracts
Oasis or Mirage? Effects of Descriptive Representation on Political
Trust among Latinos
RICARDO RAMIREZ
Associate Professor of Political Science, The University of Notre Dame
I explore the impact of collective descriptive representation in California city councils on
reported levels of political trust among Latinos and whether there is significant variation across
rural and urban municipalities. Using data from the 2020 Collective Multiracial Post Election
Study, I determine the levels of political trust, a key component of social capital. I then
determine the percent of a governing body's members that are Latina/o using the 2023 Latino
Legislative Database Project. I will be focusing on the conceptual contribution of the linkage
between collective descriptive representation and political trust and will be presenting
preliminary analysis of the data.
Henry James and Others: The Racial History of a Transatlantic Family
KOREY GARIBALDI
Assistant Professor of American Studies, The University of Notre Dame
This study, my second book project, examines the preeminent, transatlantic Irish American
James family. The manuscript documents their various encounters with race and racialization,
starting with England’s early modern colonization of Northern Ireland, up to the death of the
novelist Henry James in 1916.
The Democratic Heavenly City: Paradise & Politics in the Middle Ages
PETER JONES
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
When medieval intellectuals imagined the city of paradise, they often smuggled in political
assumptions of their own. Exploring ideas of the economic, demographic, and gender dynamics
of imagined perfect cities in the period c.1100–1400, this book will uncover the surprising ways
paradise functioned as a democratic alternative to the hierarchical world of the European
Middle Ages.
The Future Unhinged: A Perspective on Diasporic Womanist Ethics and ‘Mediated Racism’ in the United States
S.N. NYECK
Associate Professor of Political Economy, African, Queer, and Gender Studies, The University of Colorado, Boulder
Leveraging a womanist framework as epistemology and as an integrated inter-structured
analysis, this project examines the material life of “mediated racism” as an intra community
experience of Black people in the United States. Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020,
I organized a series of zoom conversations with participants who identified as African
Americans, Black immigrants from the Caribbean region and Africa to discuss this tragedy and
to reflect on why solidarity between different Black communities tends to be crisis-bound in the
United States? I wanted to know what prevented different black communities from coming
together in the absence of highly mediatized murder cases, I asked. I am building on these first
preliminary conversations with the greater black community in the U.S., to develop a womanist
perspective on the intra community dialogues needed to unhinge the future of a more inclusive
and thriving American society where blackness meets and greets itself. Answering these
questions might reveal the inner workings of what I call ‘mediated racism,” and missed
opportunities for social capital accumulation for Black communities in the United States.
Friendship Models among Urban Honduran Youth and Its Correlation
with Antisocial Behaviors
MARIA ESTELA RIVERO FUENTES
Senior Research Associate, The Pulte Institute for Global Development, the University of Notre Dame
In the paper I use data from a baseline survey among 6,000 in-school youth aged 14 to 17
conducted as part of the evaluation of the Gang Resistance Education and Training (GREAT) to
identify clusters of friendship patterns among middle school students in communities with gang
presence in Honduras. I also explore how different friendship models correlate with antisocial
behaviors (such as alcohol and drug use, bullying perpetration and self-declared delinquency).
The survey instrument includes, among others, questions about the time of unstructured
socialization with friends, the individual and its friends ́ antisocial behavior.
Leveraging Social Capital to Improve Security in the City of Accra, Ghana
RICHARD ASANTE
Associate Professor of Political Science, The Institute for African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon
Long-term and emerging security threats and associated violence in urban settings, particularly
the city of Accra, is one of Ghana’s most pressing challenges and an aberration to the country’s
image as a stable democracy in the turbulent West African sub-region. Recent scholarship has
emphasized the importance of social capital in building a safer and more productive state and
communities. Yet, despite the vibrant associational life and culture in urban settings, there
appear to be few scholarly studies that examine the relationship between social capital and
security in urban settings. This paper explores how Ghana can leverage social capital to improve
security in the city of Accra.
Water for LIFE: Life Intersects with Freshwater Ecosystems
GARY LAMBERTI
Nieuwland Professor of Aquatic Science, Department of Biological Sciences, The University of Notre Dame
As freshwater resources on the planet change in distribution due to climate warming and come
under increasing human pressure, a comprehensive and integrative approach to water science
and management will be needed to inform and balance human and natural needs for freshwater
in the 21st century. To fully understand the past, present, and future of fresh water and humanity
will require research coordination among many branches of science and the humanities including
biology, chemistry, geology, engineering, economics, and the social sciences. In addition, the
translation of water science to meet human needs will engage all sectors of society to ensure the
equitable and just distribution and access to clean water.
COLINA: Research and Action Collective” to Work with Social Vulnerabilities
FERNANDA LIBERALI
Professor, Department of Language Sciences and Philosophy, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, Brazil
This presentation aims at discussing the COLINA - a project that involves the development of
engaged and transformative research for the development of a more just, equitable and
ecologically sustainable society.
Exclusion and Empowerment in the City
ELINA MIKKILA
Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Creative-Critical Writing, Lancaster University, United Kingdom
I am interested in the concept of ‘social capital’ in the sense that the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
defines the term, i.e. how it is used – in combination with economic, cultural and symbolic capital – to
maintain inequality through social connections. While the homonym ‘capital’ suggests a connection
between the meanings ‘city with the seat of the government’ and ‘funds/assets’, urban contexts – as
multicultural spaces with a heterogeneous population – cha(lle)nge the rigidity of Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’.
Using the embodied and plurilingual modes of my ‘creatical’ research methodology, I look forward to
delving into questions of interpersonal experience in urban transnational settings, the related interplay
of connection and exclusion as well as the growing influence of marginal groups linked to social media –
not least in the form of a role-playing exercise with the other seminar participants.
Social Capital and Orphan Crops: Connecting the Disconnect for Sustainable and Resilient Food and Nutrient Security in Urbanizing
Cities in Nigeria
CATHERINE NNAMANI
Associate Professor, Department of Applied Biology, Ebonyi State University, Nigeria
Orphan crops are domesticated and wild plants species which have been used for centuries as
sources of food, nutrient and medicine, but have been abandoned, unharnessed, replaced with
exotic foods, and unexploited by the scientific community, despite their robust nutritional
potentials, African yam bean is an orphan crop with edible pulse and tuber with significant
promises for food, nutrition, and health security, (Padulosi 2017, Nnamani et al., 2017,
Adewaleand Nnamani 2022). Agricultural Development Project (ADP) an agent of social capital
could be utilized to train influential women who will target their friends in churches, markets
places and social clubs to create awareness on the nutritional values of African yam bean, by
networking to reintroduce/reconnect, promote and enhance its selection in the food systems of
low- income urban dwellers in three states in South-east, Nigeria.
Party Brokers, Informality, Information Networks, and Electoral Participation in Zimbabwe's 2023 Elections
ADAM HARRIS
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy, University College London
A large literature studies how and when parties use clientelism and violence to reach their
political goals; less is known (and results largely mixed) regarding who is targeted with which
type of inducement and how effective these inducements are. Further, the role of informality
and vulnerability while key in this space needs to be directly theorised rather than considered a
background characteristic or a control variable. We seek to investigate this question using focus
groups, panel survey data, and survey experiments in the context of Zimbabwe's 2023 national
elections.
Communication for Social Environmental Projects
CRISTIANO BURMESTER
Associate Professor, Department of Journalism, Design, and Advertising, Pontifícia Universidade Católica
de São Paulo, Brazil
The issue of sustainability is one of the most urgent on the international agenda of the
contemporary world. The major environmental and climate issues pose challenges of different
orders. But one of the most relevant, certainly concerns social inequality, which goes hand in
hand with environmental destruction. At the same time, in a digital world, interconnected by a
web of social networks, communication plays an important role on how information is
reproduced and represented through different media outlets. In today’s saturated image culture,
being able to translate knowledge and fieldwork data into a concrete visual product is key
towards reaching a project’s positive outcome. This proposal aims to debate and evaluate how
a structured documentary image approach to a report, project or policy document can help
generate understanding and increase compromise regarding objectives and positive outcomes
for projects addressing inequality, community relations and social capital in cities and urban
areas.
Colonial Spatial Fix
BERNARD FORJWUOR
Assistant Professor of Africana Studies, The University of Notre Dame
This project seeks to explore how the enduring colonial design of space in urban Ghana (Accra)
still facilitates, consolidates, hastens, and elaborates the formation and accumulation of social
capital. This colonial design of urban spaces has intensified resource extraction, exploitation of
cheap labor, and the decomposition of the democratic will, thus impacting social and economic
inequalities in Accra. This project mobilises and deploys David Harvey’s concept of “spatial fix”
as conceptual embarkation into the investigation of the imbrication of the colonial,
capitalism/globalization, and spatial production of social capital in Accra.
Radical Women, Commemoration and Public Art
JULIE MORRISSY
Postdoctoral Researcher, Maynooth University, Ireland
As the first Poet-in-Residence at the National Library of Ireland in the Decade of Centenaries
programme, my work explored women's activism in the Irish revolutionary period using poetry,
photography, and podcasting. This new phase of the project will examine the ways in which
social capital circulates through public memorials, sculpture and artwork, with particular
attention to the marginalisation of women in the history of the Irish State.
Social Capital as a Derivative of Intersection of Digital and Physical Ethology
NITESH CHAWLA
Founding Director, Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society and Frank M. Freimann Professor of Computer
Science and Engineering, College of Engineering, The University of Notre Dame
I would like to work on deepening the understanding of the emergence of social capital in
urban spaces where the boundaries of physical and digital spaces are blurred. The notion of
neighborhood is no longer constrained by the "built spaces". The social capital creation can be
accelerated through the digital world and that may parlay into the real physical spaces. How do
we develop a union or intersection of interactions between the virtual and physical
environments that collectively build the social environment leading to the social capital?