Melina Platas
melinaplatas.bsky.social
Melina Platas
@melinaplatas.bsky.social
Political scientist (NYU Abu Dhabi), writer, mom. Current research on education, health, and air quality in Africa. Home is California, Kampala, and Abu Dhabi.
More here: melinaplatas.com
Andy Harris, Peter van der Windt and I are hiring a research assistant, based in Abu Dhabi, for 2025-26. Please feel free to share/circulate with BA or MA students who may be interested. Advanced R/Stata + writing skills required. Happy to answer questions by email
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March 10, 2025 at 1:53 PM
Reposted by Melina Platas
Were you teaching or taking the core graduate course/field seminar in comparative politics in (or around) year 2000? If so, @melinaplatas.bsky.social and I are collecting syllabi from the top 15 US departments that year. Please send what you have! Email golden@ucla.edu or paloma.abrilponcela@eui.eu
March 6, 2025 at 6:46 PM
I feel Reich, Sahami, and Weinstein's book, System Error, came out ahead of its time; we missed the warning or didn't take it seriously enough. It was already obvious the Silicon Valley mindsets and models were shaping governance for the worse, now we are scrambling to catch up systemerrorbook.com
February 21, 2025 at 8:15 PM
There is so much in this poll to note. Among them, that Trump voters perceive (or more accurately, report) greater discrimination against White people than against LGBT or Black people, and more discrimination against Christians than those + Muslims d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/ec...
February 12, 2025 at 5:54 PM
Reposted by Melina Platas
120 million people are displaced worldwide. Advocates try to promote refugee inclusion by providing information that corrects common misperceptions, and by sharing refugee narratives that try to generate empathy; do these work?

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February 11, 2025 at 1:21 PM
The DHS program (dhsprogram.com), funded/managed by USAID, is not accepting new access requests. This data source has been instrumental in research on health and education around the world. It would be a travesty if these household surveys were canceled or existing data removed. See message below:
February 10, 2025 at 6:42 PM
Laughable if not so offensive. If you really want to know, you'll find "The act repeals the apartheid-era Expropriation Act 63 of 1975, and aims to align expropriation law with the constitution." Perfect? No. South Africa's business? 100%. Ours? Not at all. theconversation.com/land-seizure...
February 8, 2025 at 1:01 AM
Very excited about this project and also keen to hear about the process of producing it! I have aspirations to do something adjacent.... we need more documentation of just about everything. But especially interviews with those who were there while they are still here.
Our film on the history of Ugandan cartoonists under Idi Amin (1971-79) is about to be released ! You can have a look at the trailer in the meantime... 1/6 www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh-G...
The Tongue Turns To The Aching Tooth - TRAILER
YouTube video by Michiel van Oosterhout
www.youtube.com
January 10, 2025 at 11:22 PM
One day not too long from now it will seem terribly quaint that all of humanity (hyperbole, obviously, but a large chunk of the population in many if not most countries) was on a single social media platform called Facebook. I'm not sure what it means that the space is fracturing.
November 22, 2024 at 7:51 PM