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0:03
What's up everybody! Welcome back to Time Off With the Prof, we hope you all are liking these videos, don't forget to share them with your friends and classmates! We hope you like the time stamps we've added in the description, you can use them to navigate the questions we ask and find answers to those that you're interested in. With that, this is Time Off with the Prof!
0:26
I am so excited to help introduce the professor we have for you guys today from the international relations department, Dr., would you please share your name, pronouns, and your favorite spot on campus? okay so my name is Beatriz Magaloni and my favorite place in campus is Lagunita so this is a place I often go for a walk or jogging and I really love to watch the birds there, it's very peaceful so I hope when you come you really take a
1:02
time to visit Lagunita. Yeah, I used to live in Roble which is right right by Lagunita and I love going on those walks around the lake, so yeah I love that spot as well and professor would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself and where you're from and what things were like growing up? Great yes I am from Mexico. I was born in Mexico City. I've been living at Stanford for 20 years. I have three kids, one of them also is a student at Stanford. She's going to be a junior next year and
1:38
then I have two boys. One of them graduated this year, the other is 15, so he's going to take a gap year the one who graduated and is going to do film at USC. I grew up in Mexico City and at that time, Mexico was a significantly safer place. We used to travel a lot in road trips with my family and I just love to travel especially to Yucatan which is my favorite place southern mexico, Yucatan, Oaxaca, chapa. So I really, these are some of my favorite places and I still go there a
2:20
lot because I do work in rural communities there. So that's how I grew up in Mexico traveling a lot to these places. I had the honor of going on one of stanford's BOSP trips to Oaxaca with Dr Gabriel Garcia and we were able to, you know, work in hospitals there and it was so wonderful. We were there for Guelaguetza, which is the huge festival they have in July, and and that was so fun so when you say "Oaxaca" my heart started beating like "oh, my favorite place!"
2:52
So it is amazing, yes. Growing up in Mexico and you know like you said traveling a lot how did you get involved or interested in political science and what was your academic path that led you to Stanford and where you're at today? So I actually didn't start as a political scientist I am a lawyer, so I studied law. I became a lawyer. I was always very intrigued by issues of social justice, criminal justice, and really wanted to devote my life to to bring in justice especially to
3:31
underprivileged people, poorer people, but I realized as I was studying law, I still you know lived in, when I was studying, Mexico was an authoritarian regime and I learned that, you know, the laws were really not a way to bring justice. A lot of them had to be changed and challenged, the institutions had to be changed and challenged, so I understood that by being a lawyer I couldn't do that. So I graduated from law school and I wrote a thesis on civil disobedience
4:09
and then I decided I was going to study political science and came to do a Phd at Duke University, that's where I studied and I think it was a really good decision to to leave law and understand more about what causes institutions what what drives behavior, political behaviors so to be able to transform those institutions and now I'm really going back to a lot of the topics that interest me, but now from the perspective of political science. So for example, I work
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a lot on issues of police violence and criminal justice and so having that combination has been very useful, but you know when you start you never know really where life is going to take you. I never really saw myself as an academic by then and I'm really happy that that somehow I was able to uh follow this path of being an academic and really intrigued by the same type of questions that pushed me to study law in the beginning. And we're really happy that you are an
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academic here at Stanford and so besides teaching, what sort of projects, what sort of work are you involved with on campus? So when I got tenure, I decided that I wanted to bring academia to social action and really to be able to use my tools to transform the world in the ways I could so I funded the Poverty, Violence, and Governance lab and the mission of the lab is to work on issues of lawlessness and violence and to, on the one hand understand
6:08
what drives this this social pathology and on the other be able to to design interventions or evaluate policy interventions that work. so I've been working with together with students, both undergraduate and graduate students, for over now 10 years. I think the lab has been going on issues that relate to, as I mentioned at the beginning, criminal justice, police violence, and mostly working on Brazil and Mexico. Latin America is today the most violent region of the world outside of war
6:55
zones so more people die in Latin America than in any other region of the world and as you probably know, a lot of the migrants that are coming and asylum seekers that are coming to the u.s from this region, Central America and Mexico, are really escaping very serious prosecution and violence by criminal groups and the state and so a lot of what we do is really focus on these problems. I also provide expert witness testimonies to asylum
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seekers and that I do as pro bono. So as I mentioned, I came back to the law questions and and I do that as I mentioned pro bono, but I increasingly get more and more people to ask me to do this, lawyers and people who are defending asylum seekers, so I'm bringing more students to help me with these cases and and it's been it's really been great to be able to see that from academia you can really try to transform the world and this is something that i think
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you will find at Stanford because that's an ethos i think in the institution that there is a lot of professors, researchers that are really focused on trying to transform the world that we see. Well thank you so much for doing such beautiful work, getting students, more people involved in such important, impactful, needed work. Quickly, you obviously have a law degree and a political science degree as you said but you represent the department of international relations. Can you tell me how those
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intersect and what other factors intersect to make the IR department what it is and how a student can really shape their degree in IR? great so we are in the, I mean the political science department and in political science we have you can study IR, you can study comparative politics, you can study american politics, you can study issues of social justice or even you know so we have different sorts of specializations within political science but we also have a very significant IR major
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at Stanford and a lot of students are really, who are interested in issues of development, of global justice, of the environment and are really interested in understanding these problems focus on IR so I think it's one of the favorite majors in Stanford. So you will have both professors from the political science department but there is also the Freeman Spogli Institute where my lab is based and it has centers like the Center for Development, um no, Center for, CDDR for
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Development, Democracy and the Rule of Law. it has also CISAC which focuses on security. It has also a really fascinating program that focuses on rural education action program that focuses on education and how to bridge the gap between poor students in China and students who are in the wealthy areas in the coast. Scott Rozelle directs that lab, so there is a lot of options if you are interested in as I say global issues at FSI. Political science and that's where so I am based in both places.
10:42
Great and what classes do you teach and are any of them frosh friendly? I used to teach a freshman seminar on dictatorships and democracies and I really I think I will start offering it again. Right now I'm not teaching freshmen but I do teach for undergraduates, so I teach a course on poverty and governance it's called, the seminar that I teach, and it's on the issues that we've been talking about, about global development, so how how do you understand and fight poverty, combat poverty,
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how do you understand and control violence and how do you fix institutions. So for example, how do you control corruption so that you can have states that actually function and work to bring the poor out of poverty. So that's the focus of that course. I also teach another course on violence and I focus on issues like civil wars, terrorism and also criminal violence which is a lot of the work that I do in Brazil and Mexico and also violence by the state as we mentioned police violence which
12:01
which is a very significant component of my research and then I also teach for graduate students. One of the core classes in comparative politics that is our first course seminar, this is I'm going to be teaching that next year and I also teach another class on authoritarian politics and let me see, what else, and another class on Latin American politics. Yes well it's so wonderful that students throughout their career can have so many opportunities to work with you, to learn from you, and
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and stuff like that, so you know as we as, we've been, you know, we mentioned to you earlier before this interview, the frosh are currently you know grappling with a lot in life and you know whatever that is. In the three books program, they have the opportunity to learn about this year it is grit, it's about you know perseverance, and stuff like that, so you know from your background what does grit really mean to you and from there who are some of the grittiest
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people or grittiest person that you know? Oh this is such a great question so grit for me means resiliency and I think it means to a perspective in life in which you don't see yourself as a victim obviously in life we we have, you know, we all suffer we all suffer different situations that are very challenging and I think that gritty people don't see themselves as victims but really want to more experience themselves as warriors
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so that's a little bit of what I see. It's really resiliency, courage, and in a way this optimism in terms of difficult situations in life can be an opportunity and I think a greedy person can see that can just because of the perspective can transform challenges into opportunities and in terms of the grittiest person, so I want to mention a student of mine who grew up in Brazil. She grew up in very poor neighborhood near Rio in Rio de Janeiro which is one of the most violent places in the world
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a lot of my research focuses there, she grew up in a very poor neighborhood surrounded by this very challenging, violent environment, and from there she became a Stanford student, then she also was my program manager in my lab for for almost eight years and now she's studying her Phd in anthropology at UCLA. She took care of her sister, little sister, and she started working because her family was poor when she was around 12 years old
15:03
and I think she's very gritty because exactly because of the things that I told you. She has never complained, she's very joyful, she has been taking the challenges in her life as opportunity and all the way that you know she arrived to Stanford and now she's doing a Phd so she's someone I really admire a lot. yes wow it's Vanessa Melo. Honestly wow what an awesome story, what an awesome example, and so like Victoria said, you know, these frosh they're dealing with a lot
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of uncertainty and a lot of things that are going on the world that are causing them to kind of have this anxiety about coming to Stanford, about their futures, and so do you have any further advice or any further counsel for these frosh that are coming into this uncertain environment? Yes first I want to tell you that I actually sympathize a lot with what you are going through I have as I mentioned at the beginning kids that are your age
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so my my daughter who is she's studying at Stanford and my son who is taking a gap year but starting to study next, you know, the year after and so first of all I, through them, I can really sense what this young generation is going through and so I do have a lot of empathy for that but I want to say that this is a very challenging time for so many people around the world. So many people are suffering, so many people have not, you know, lost families, so lost loved ones but also Lost their jobs
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and and really are in a very, very hard situation so we are privileged we have the privilege to be able to you know get educated, access to a university like Stanford, to its resources and I think that this generation looking at the question of grit have the opportunity because of how much this pandemic is really changing the way we we are conceiving ourselves as humanity in this planet the role that we have so I think it's going to be on you really to to initiate the big change that we
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require and the pandemic has really is pushing us to really think about this so in a way. I see this as an opportunity, it's obviously a challenge to study through zoom and social distance and especially young people really the social aspect is so essential so it must be so much harder for you than for us you know like older people, but I think that you are going to be really the leaders of the change that we need and and so that's an opportunity and I
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am excited for what can happen really optimistic in a way despite the fact that you know obviously these are going to be very challenging years. Absolutely and of course you know frosh are asking us and Kasen and I can very much relate to you know everything you've said that your children are going through. So quickly, a last question that we have is you you know in the spring we're able to teach online, we'll probably be teaching online
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for the foreseeable future. Do you have any, you know, concrete advice on how to maximize online learning, connect with professors especially as freshmen? So yeah so it was a challenge I taught two classes through Zoom, you know, two of my favorite classes on violence and on development. I always love these classes and I realized that it's more it's very tiring to be to be in zoom you know taking classes it's really, really tiring so
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I hope that you know professors are learning so classes have to be shorter and you know a three hour seminar through zoom is something that doesn't, it's not really pedagogy, I don't know how to pronounce the word correctly, but what I can really advise is I mean the social aspect of learning is something that you are going to be missing so I am now experimenting this with my lab so I still meet with the students and we meet in groups we meet one-on-one and I think that this is something I
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would advise you to do to be able to connect with the students do working groups together smaller groups than in the big classes because that's something that you are going to be really missing by studying through soon so that's that that's an advice I can give you it's been really improving the more we do this the you know sort of the better we are getting that. Yeah thank you so much for that advice and thank you again, that was all the
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questions we had, so thank you so much for meeting with us and stay on the line Dr Magaloni and we'll talk a little bit afterward but we're so grateful that you were able to come and we'll see you later. I want to welcome everyone in this year. I'm looking forward to seeing you at Stanford. Take care!
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