Please join us for a UW Data Science Seminar on Thursday, January 11th from 4:30 to 5:20 p.m. PST. The seminar will feature Jae Yeon Kim, a senior data scientist at Safety Net Innovations Lab at Code for America, as well as a research fellow at the SNF Agora Institute and the P3 Lab at Johns Hopkins University.
The seminar will be held in the Electrical & Computer Engineering Building (ECE), Room 105
“The Unequal Landscape of Civic Opportunity in America: Evidence from 1.8 Million Tax Returns”
Abstract: The hollowing of civil society has threatened effective implementation of scientific solutions to pressing public challenges—which often depend on cultivating pro-social orientations commonly studied under the broad umbrella of social capital. Although robust research has studied the constituent components of social capital from the demand side (that is, the orientations people need for collective life in pluralistic societies, such as trust, cohesion and connectedness), the same precision has not been brought to the supply side. Here we define the concept of civic opportunity—opportunities people have to encounter civic experiences necessary for developing such orientations—and harness data science to map it across America. We demonstrate that civic opportunity is more highly correlated with pro-social outcomes such as mutual aid than other measures, but is unequally distributed, and its sources are underrepresented in the public dialogue. Our findings suggest greater attention to this fundamentally uneven landscape of civic opportunity.
Biography: Jae Yeon Kim (Ph.D. in political science, UC Berkeley) is a senior data scientist at the Safety Net Innovations Lab at Code for America and a research fellow at the SNF Agora Institute and P3 Lab at Johns Hopkins University. Kim’s research focuses on identity politics, civic engagement, and policy implementation in the US, Canada, and East Asia.
The UW Data Science Seminar is an annual lecture series at the University of Washington that hosts scholars working across applied areas of data science, such as the sciences, engineering, humanities and arts along with methodological areas in data science, such as computer science, applied math and statistics. Our presenters come from all domain fields and include occasional external speakers from regional partners, governmental agencies and industry.
The 2023-2024 seminars will be held in person, and are free and open to the public.