Staff

This paper examines hate speech and its associated risks for human security, focusing on user-generated content (UGC) targeting Roma and related content moderation standards, tools, processes, and practices. The Romani people have experienced systemic racism, discrimination, and exclusion and faced prejudices, stereotypes, and hostility across countries. These negative attitudes are perpetuated, broadcast, and intensified in online spaces in the form of hateful and racist speech or incitement to violence. The paper outlines cases that illustrate common narratives about Roma and their translation into the online realm while highlighting the individual and community harm for targeted people. The narratives and security risks are further instrumentalized to examine the challenges and tensions that platforms encounter when developing and applying measures for content moderation. It is proposed that AI-powered detection tools are integral to tackling hate speech, but due to the highly contextual nature and differentiated risks connected to this phenomenon, they are unfit for being the exclusive means for decision-making. Policing the online ecosystem is most effective when models of content moderation are applied holistically with each layer extending the security and compensating for the limitations of the other. Social media providers need to follow a victim-sensitive approach to tackle the asymmetric threats that hate speech presents to minority, marginalized and vulnerable communities.
Pavlina Pavlova is Public Policy Advisor at the CyberPeace Institute in Geneva, Switzerland. Prior to joining the Institute, she was an official at the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) working on security assessment and capacity building of Roma human rights defenders in the OSCE area. Pavlina worked with hate crime victims and gained first-hand experience with the impacts and harm that inadequate content moderation presents for Roma in Europe.

From Rohmer’s “Comedies and Proverbs” cycle, THE GREEN RAY follows the independent but insecure Delphine (Marie Rivière), a newly single young Parisian who cannot find a holiday companion for the month of August, as she meets and rejects, glides and stumbles in her longing for connection. Overhearing a discussion of Jules Verne’s THE GREEN RAY, Delphine becomes fascinated with seeing the elusive meteorological event and the promise that comes with it. Rivière, who also cowrote her largely self-created role, delivers one of the most captivating lead performances in any of the filmmaker’s works. A perfect film if you’re young and don’t know what to do with your life, but also can’t explain to others why…

The European & Russian Studies Community features Hiroaki Kuromiya, Emeritus Professor of History, Indiana University, Bloomington
The study of Soviet history is in a critical state, occasioned first by the Covid upheaval and then by Russia’s war against Ukraine. Access to critical sources of research (archives, libraries, organizations, and individuals) is restricted and is unlikely to improve. It may become even more difficult. Furthermore, Moscow sponsors and disseminates disinformation, both historical and contemporary, to muddy the historical waters. How to cope with this deplorable situation?
Topics to be discussed include the following:
1) Whether an “archival revolution” actually took place when the formerly closed archives and archival files began to open up in the-post Soviet era,
2) The current situation of access to the archives in some of the former Soviet republics,
3) The importance of non-Russian archives and the centrality of the archives Russia still holds,
4) Strategies to pursue in case archival access is blocked or restricted.
Lunch at 12:30 pm, seminar with Professor Kuromiya at 12:45 pm
Bio: Japanese-American historian, professor in the Department of History, University of Indiana, studies modern and contemporary Ukraine in a wider context of Eurasian history. He has written on the Donbas, historical and contemporary, the Holodomor, the Great Terror, and other subjects mainly during the Stalin era. His publications include books Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s–1990s, The Voices of the Dead: Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s, and The Eurasian Triangle: Russia, the Caucasus, and Japan, 1904-1945 (with Georges Mamoulia), as well as numerous articles.

Zoom link: http://bit.ly/3uAEJla 

The Yale community is invited to hear the 2022 Yale World Fellows read and discuss the documentary play of Belarusian playwright and civil activist Andrei Kureichik. The play features 14 real monologues of Belarusians chosen from more than 700 stories of victims of Lukashenko’s repressive machine. In the play, politicians, journalists, activists, people of all ages and professions share their experience of political repression. This reading is an invitation to a broad discussion about the problem of political prisoners in the world and ways you can help.

Theodora Patrona teaches literary courses at the School of English of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki as special teaching fellow. She has published extensively on Greek American and Italian American literature and film, and regularly reviews for journals and sites abroad. Dr Patrona is the author of Return Narratives: Ethnic Space in Late Twentieth Century Greek American and Italian American Literature(Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017), and coeditor of Redirecting Ethnic Singularity: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation (Fordham University Press, 2022). Dr Patrona is currently working on two projects, co-editing a volume on the unchartered cultural contribution of Greek American women and another one on the concept of the father in Italian American culture.