Jeffrey Swindle, Harvard University

About the Presentation

The consequences of powerful actors’ efforts to diffuse specific cultural scripts around the world hinges on how people interpret those scripts. The influence of human rights campaigns to combat men’s violence toward women, in particular, rests on people’s perceptions of individual rights and consent versus relationship duties. Using administrative and historical data sources unique to Malawi, I construct measures of people’s likely exposure to such campaigns via nearby aid projects, education curricula reforms, and mass media programming, which I pair with national surveys. I observe that people’s exposure to campaigns circulating consent-focused scripts is associated with substantial increases in their stated rejection of men’s physical violence toward their partner and support for women’s ability to refuse sex. However, exposure to campaigns that reinforce duty-focused scripts is mostly negatively associated with such moral declarations, contributing to tolerance of men’s sexual control, as declining to have sex with one’s partner is cast as a form of abuse. How actors interpret cultural scripts, including scripts condemning abuse, is highly consequential in processes of global cultural diffusion, and it can help explain why some social interventions have unexpected consequences.

About the Speaker

Jeffrey Swindle is a College Fellow & Lecturer at Harvard University. He researches the cultural diffusion of ideas and their consequences, with a focus on ideas about gender, sexuality, and family. His research on international migration and gender inequalities has appeared in International Migration Review, Demography, World Development, and American Sociological Review, among other journals. He received his demographic training at the University of Michigan for his doctorate and the University of Texas at Austin as a T32 NICHD postdoctoral trainee. 

Seminar Format

Location IN PERSON: 2208 LeFrak Hall. We are requesting advanced registration so that we can track capacity. Please use this link to RSVP.

Location ONLINE VIA ZOOM: Zoom Registration Link. Upon registration, you will receive an automatically generated email with the direct link for the seminar

If accommodations are needed, please send request to meeting organizer (mprc-support@umd.edu) at least 72 hours prior to the event, if possible, to allow time to discuss and implement alternatives.

COVID-19 Information

MPRC public events for Fall 2024 will be a mix of in person and online via Zoom. For in person events, all event attendees must follow current protocols