Integrated Social Sciences

The INITIATIVE FOR VULNERABLE POPULATIONS conducts research in countries experiencing serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law. Using empirical research methods to give voice to survivors of mass violence, the Initiative aims to ensure that the needs of survivors are recognized and acted on by governments, UN agencies, and non-governmental organizations.

An effective response to humanitarian crises relies on detailed information about the needs of the affected population. Current assessment approaches often require interviewers to convert complex, open-ended responses into simplified quantitative data. More nuanced insights require the use of qualitative methods, but proper transcription and manual coding are hard to conduct rapidly and at scale during a crisis. Natural language processing (NLP), a type of artificial intelligence, may provide potentially important new opportunities to capture qualitative data from voice responses and analyze it for relevant content to better inform more effective and rapid humanitarian assistance operational decisions. This article provides an overview of how NLP can be used to transcribe, translate, and analyze large sets of qualitative responses with a view to improving the quality and effectiveness of humanitarian assistance. We describe the practical and ethical challenges of building on the diffusion of digital data collection platforms and introducing this new technology to the humanitarian context. Finally, we provide an overview of the principles that should be used to anticipate and mitigate risks.

Mobile phones have long surpassed traditional landlines as the most common voice communication technology – particularly due to the marked growth in new mobile phone users in most so-called developing countries (Feldmann, 2003). In South Africa, a country still trying to escape its legacy of dramatic racial inequalities, mobiles have enjoyed spectacular growth over the past decade, with more than 60% of all South Africans above the age of 16 already owning a phone themselves (Research ICT Africa [RIA], 2009; All Media and Product Survey [AMPS], 2008). This rapid growth – up from just 18% in 2000 (International Telecommunications Union [ITU], 2001) – is at least partly due to the immense popularity of prepaid subscriptions and low-cost phones (Hodge, 2005; Esselaar & Stork, 2005), which have made it possible even for many of the country’s youth (most of whom remain in stark poverty) to own or use a phone themselves. But this growth extended beyond the number of young people texting o...

In recent years, there has been an ongoing, worldwide debate about the representation of females in companies. Our study aimed to meta-analytically investigate the controversial relationship between female representation on corporate boards and firm financial performance. Following a systematic literature search, data from 20 studies on 3097 companies published in peer-reviewed academic journals were included in the meta-analysis. On average, the boards consisted of eight members and female participation was low (mean 14%) in all studies. Half of the 20 studies were based on data from developing countries and 62% from higher income countries. According to the random-effects model, the overall mean weighted correlation between percentage of females on corporate boards and firm performance was small and non-significant (r = .01, 95% confidence interval: -.04, .07). Similar small effect sizes were observed when comparing studies based on developing vs. developed countries and higher vs. lower income countries. The mean board size was not related to the effect sizes in studies. These results indicate that the mere representation of females on corporate boards is not related to firm financial performance if other factors are not considered. We conclude our study with a discussion of its implications and limitations.

This article compares the visual representations of the female headscarf in Islamic and secular newspapers in Turkey during the 10-year rule of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP)). This study is based on a content analysis of all visuals from three election periods (November 2002, July 2007 and June 2011) and two neutral time frames outside of the elections (August 2002 and August 2012). It also includes a qualitative analysis of the news articles that showed pictures of successful women wearing headscarves. The results show that the number of women wearing headscarves increased in both Islamic and secular newspapers between 2002 and 2012. The increase is not only more prominent in Islamic newspapers but the valence attached to headscarves and to the women wearing them is also qualitatively different. This article argues that the Islamic newspapers have created an image of a new ideal conservative woman that ignores the worsening conditions for women in general and AKP's increasingly restrictive gender politics specifically.

In political and popular media discourse "Muslim woman" has become the prime example of the oppression of women in the world. In a climate where Islam is constantly associated with extremism, violence and oppression of women, this article aims to give the students tools to critically engage with the category of "Muslim woman" and have a nuanced understanding of how we come to know Muslim women and the complexity of this category.

In this paper, I reflect on the use of the term "Islamic feminism" in Turkey from the 1990s to the present. I discuss how Turkey's Islamic feminists who were once the victims and strong critics of secular authoritarianism have now become advocates of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's populist Islamist authoritarianism which has severely restricted rights and freedoms in the country. I claim that using the term "Islamic feminist" in reference to the Islamist women supporters of Erdoğan is misleading as it puts a progressive spin on their ideas and activism.

Özcan explores the similarities between conservative women’s movements in Turkey and the United States. She argues that the designation of conservative women’s activism as “Islamic feminism” in Turkey has eclipsed the similarities between these women and the conservative women’s movements elsewhere. The chapter focuses on how Turkey’s conservative women, so called “Islamic feminists,” have aligned with the authoritarian policies of the Justice and Development Party, supported the elimination of rights and freedoms, and institutionalized anti-feminism. The author suggests that transnational feminist scholarship pays more attention to how networks of conservative women in different parts of the world ally with misogynist men in power and contribute to the marginalization of feminism.