Hosted by the Political Science Department and the Center for Analytic Political Engagement (CAPE), this series brings scholars from across the country to UC Merced to present on a broad range of issues in the political science field.

April 9th's guest is Dr. Noah Nathan, Associate Professor of Political Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He will be presenting on his paper “Vernacular Architecture and Grassroots Urban Politics: How Politics is Embedded in Residential Design” which is a study of Ghana’s compound houses and how shared living spaces influence political participation through social ties and information access..

Absract:

The physical structures in which urban life occurs are an underappreciated determinant of how grassroots urban politics unfolds. In many rapidly growing cities, housing scarcity forces residents into multifamily buildings that create daily exposures to neighbors. We argue that these exposures affect political behavior by shaping residents’ access to political information and capacity for collective action. We focus on the informal, vernacular architecture of West Africa’s dominant urban housing form – the compound house. Compound house residents in urban Ghana participate more in politics than similar residents of other housing types. Leveraging an original survey, including novel measures of tenants’ spatial network centrality within their residential buildings, we suggest that key mechanisms for this relationship emerge from the effects of architectural design on visibility and social ties among co-tenants. Ultimately, built environments must be studied alongside demographic environments to best understand contextual effects on political behavior.

When: Wednesday April 9, 2025 | 10:30AM-12:00PM

Where: COB2 – 392