The Centre for the study of democratic citizenship is happy to present:

The CSDC Conference 2021 – Diversity and the State of Democratic Citizenship

When: April 22-23, 2021, on Zoom.

Registration is now closed. Contact us at cecd-csdc@umontreal.ca if you have questions.

About: Canada and democracies across the globe face a broad array of important norma-tive and empirical questions with regard to diversity. What avenues are available to immigrants, ethnocultural citizens, or other minority groups to be heard by decision-makers? How have both citizens and institutions responded to this growth in diversity? How do these responses vary across democratic contexts? For the second edition of its triennial conference, the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship (CSDC) will present a broad, multidisciplinary range of papers that address these questions. The conference will include a series of panels for the invited papers, as well as a roundtable. Panels are organized around the following subthemes, with an emphasis on diversity:

• Immigration
• Elections
• Representation
• Democratization
• Democratic Politics
• Psychology

Program (conference book available here: 2021 CSDC Conference)

Thursday, April 22

1:30 – 2:30pm Panel 1. Is democracy for women and young people? / La démocratie est-elle pour les femmes et pour les jeunes?

Chair: Jean-François Godbout

• Dietlind Stolle, Elisabeth Gidengil and Olivier Bergeron-Boutin. Are young people more willing to accept democratic deconsolidation?
• Jordan Mansell, Allison Harell, Melanee Thomas and Tania Gosselin. Competition and Gendered Prejudice: Failure and Consequences for Politics.

2:45 – 3:45pm Panel 2. Minority groups, nationalism, and identity / Groupes minoritaires, nationalisme et identité

Chair: Ruth Dassonneville

• Thomas Soehl and Sakeef Karim. How legacies of geo-political loss shape popular nationalism today.
• Antoine Bilodeau, Stephen White, Luc Turgeon et Alisa Henderson. Le sentiment d’appartenance des minorités ethniques dans les états multinationaux. Le rôle des expériences d’exclusion au Québec et dans les autres provinces.

Friday, April 23

1:30 – 2:30pm Panel 3. Prejudice and acceptance of others / Préjugés et acceptation des autres

Chair: Aaron Erlich

• Frédérick Bastien. Les médias d’information et l’opinion publique sur l’immigration.
• Samuel Mérineau, Jean-Marc Lina et Roxane de la Sablonnière. Intégration identitaire et immigration : un modèle dynamique de l’acceptation de l’autre.

3:00 – 4:30pm Roundtable discussion on Diversity and the State of Democratic Citizenship

Moderator: Amen Ben Ahmouda, Public Affairs and Program Officer at Equal Voice

• Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant, Queen’s University
• Kassra Oskooii, University of Delaware
• Erin Tolley, Carleton University

The CSDC, in collaboration with Université Laval and the department of economy at UQAM presents:

QPEWS (Winter 2021) – Caroline Le Pennec (HEC Montreal)

Organizers: Arnaud Dellis (UQAM) and Arthur Silve (ULaval)

When: Monday, April 26, 2021 at 1pm.

About The Quebec Political Economics Webinar Series (QPEWS) is a webinar series that will meet by Zoom on Mondays once every four weeks, from 1 pm to 1.45 pm (EST). The QPEWS will prioritize presentations by emergent scholars.

Calendar:

• February 1: Gani Aldashev (Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management)

• March 1: Hye Young You (NYU)

• March 29: Ian Turner (Yale)

• April 26: Caroline Le Pennec (HEC Montreal)

Past webinars here: QPEWS – The Quebec Political Economics Webinar Series (Fall 2020)

The Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship presents:

Kirk Bansak (UC San Diego)

Conjoint Experiments

You can learn more about Kirk Bansak by clicking here.

Where and When: Thursday, April 29, at 1pm on Zoom.

RSVP: https://semrasevi.com/montreal-methods-workshops/

Abstract: Coming soon. 

See more Montreal Methods Workshops events here.

The Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship presents:

Stuart Soroka (University of Michigan)

You can learn more about Professor Soroka here.

Where and When: Friday, May 7, 2020 at 3pm on Zoom.

Zoom link available soon. 

Important: We inform you that our events are recorded and posted on our website and our social media. For the first part of the event, only the speaker and the CSDC membre presenting the speaker are recorded. For the questions period, all the participants might be visible on the recording. If you do not want to be recorded, you can 1) turn out your camera and use the audio only to ask a question, or 2) ask your question in the chat, and the moderator will ask the question for you.

Abstract:In spite of what appears to be the increasingly negative tone of media coverage, we suggest that the prevalence of positive news is likely to increase, for three reasons: (1) valence-based asymmetries vary over time, (2) valence-based asymmetries vary across individuals, and (3) technology facilitates diverse news platforms catering to diverse preferences. Each of these claims is examined in detail in this talk, based on analyses of prior and/or novel data on media content, psychophysiological responses, and survey-based experiments. Results are considered as they relate to our understanding of media gatekeeping, political communication, and political psychology; and also as actionable findings for producers of media content, communications platforms, and media consumers. This talk is based on a manuscript co-authored with Yanna Krupnikov (SUNY Stony Brook), forthcoming in Cambridge Elements in Politics and Communication.

See all the other Speaker Series Events here.

This series is sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship, which is funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC).

The Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship presents:

Eline De Rooij  (Simon Fraser University)

You can learn more about Professor De Rooij here.

Where and When: Friday, May 21, 2020 at 3pm on Zoom.

Zoom link available soon. 

Important: We inform you that our events are recorded and posted on our website and our social media. For the first part of the event, only the speaker and the CSDC membre presenting the speaker are recorded. For the questions period, all the participants might be visible on the recording. If you do not want to be recorded, you can 1) turn out your camera and use the audio only to ask a question, or 2) ask your question in the chat, and the moderator will ask the question for you.

Abstract: Coming soon.

See all the other Speaker Series Events here.

This series is sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship, which is funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC).

2021 R and Math Summer Camps

Two (p)refresher workshops for graduate students

August 16 to 20, August 23 to 26

Online / via Zoom

Faculty Advisors: Aaron Erlich (Political Science), Peter McMahan, Thomas Soehl (Sociology) & Tim Elrick (GIC)

Quantitative approaches comprise a large and growing part of social science and humanities research. It is increasingly difficult to take graduate level courses and read important papers in your field without an understanding of statistical inference, programming, and mathematical models. McGill offers a wide range of courses to give you competency in these areas, but sometimes graduate students feel inadequately prepared to take advantage of these resources.

To help you make the most of your studies, we offer two week-long workshops before the beginning of fall term. The workshops assume no background! We encourage you to take both workshops, particularly if you are an incoming graduate student, but you can also register for only one workshop. Detailed outlines of each syllabus will be available later in the summer.

The workshops are supported by the Faculty of Science, the Faculty of Arts, the Department of Political Science and Sociology, the Desautels Faculty of Management, the Consortium on Analytics for Data‐Driven Decision‐Making (CAnD3), the Institute for Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health, the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship (CSDC) and the Geographic Information Centre (GIC).

Workshop I: Introduction to data science in R and documenting in RMarkdown

This workshop will introduce you to R, a common statistical programming language used across many courses at McGill as well as RMarkdown (typesetting language useful for producing documents that contain mathematical content and code). These are very useful and powerful tools but they have somewhat of a steep learning curve. So, the goal of this part of the workshop is to get you up a good part of that learning curve.

Day 1: Introduction to the basics of R and the graphical user interface RStudio
Day 2: Working with data (cleaning, pre-processing, dealing with missing values)
Day 3: Visualizing data and producing graphs
Day 4: Statistical prequel and more tips and tricks on working with R
Day 5: Typesetting using RMarkdown and RStudio Add-Ins

The workshop will take place from Monday, August 16 to Friday, August 20 by means of remote teaching between 9:30 am and 4:00 pm. The instructor is Dr. Tim Elrick, Director of the Geographic Information Centre at McGill. He will be supported by teaching assistants who will make sure you won’t get stuck. We also will make sure that the online units will be reasonably long with enough breaks to get away from the screen.

Workshop II: Review of basic mathematical and statistical concepts

This workshop will (re-) introduce you to notation commonly used in statistics, cover functions, basic calculus, probability theory, and linear algebra. Due to the compressed nature of this year’s online version we may not be able to cover all topics but it will likely be a mix/selection of the following:

• Review of basic Algebra, functions, notation (Greek letters)
• Basic Probability and statistical concepts
• Calculus: Functions, derivatives, integrals
• Linear Algebra: Vectors, matrices, matrix multiplication

The workshop will take place from Monday, August 23 to Thursday, August 26 and will be taught by Ann-Marie Helou, a PhD student in the department of sociology with support from TAs. The exact format is to be determined but probably short lecture sessions with time to do problem sets (outside if the weather is good).

Prerequisites: NONE! If you never heard of these topics you should not be scared off. In fact, you are the perfect student for this workshop. The goal is to give you a basic overview of the material as well as the resources and the confidence to learn more. If you already have some background, but have not used this material recently, these workshops will also be useful.

Registration: The workshops are free to attend for all McGill students and members of the CSDC. If demand exceeds capacity, we will give preference to incoming graduate students. We will start forming the courses in early August. To be guaranteed consideration register before July 31 at this link: https://forms.office.com/r/Z7348gjscJ

Format and Policies: Due to the uncertainty around COVID-19 the workshops will be conducted online via zoom (for the last time, we hope!). Refer to the description of the workshops for information on format. Details will be communicated later in the summer. These workshops are not for credit and there are no exams. Still, taking the workshop will require a commitment. The sessions will involve a mix of lecture and hands-on practice. Just like any skill, you can’t learn math and computing by just watching. You have to do it to learn it.

We expect, you attend all sessions, do any readings we assign and participate in all aspects. If you register but your plans change, that’s fine, but we expect that you inform us; simply not showing up you will waste our efforts and resources.

For any questions, e-mail us at gicsupport@mcgill.ca. Please put “summer camp” in the subject line. It will help us to reply to you quicker. Thank you.