Lecture organized by the Institute of International Affairs, Institute of Administrative Studies and Politics, Department of Political Science.

Lecturer: Anne-Kathrin Kreft.

Media reports, policy discourses but also academic studies frequently depict sexual violations as an exceptional form of political violence. In particular in global efforts to “stop rape in war,” sexual violence is portrayed in ways that suggests it stands out from other violence in its egregiousness.

Indeed, prior research has shown that both international actors and western publics are more likely to support intervention in armed conflicts in response to sexual violence, regardless of overall conflict intensity. What role perceptions of violence itself play in such processes, and whether people indeed attribute exceptionalism to sexual violence within a typology of violence remain unanswered questions, however.

Loss-framed incentives have received a lot of attention in behavioral economics. In contrast to traditional gain-framed incentive schemes where employees receive a reward upon achieving a pre-specified target, loss-framed incentive schemes entail an upfront payment to employees, which they lose if they fail to reach the target. Several experiments have shown that loss-framed incentives lead to greater effort provision than their gain-framed equivalents both in the lab and in the field – so why don't we see them used more often in real organizations? We explore this puzzle in a laboratory experiment where participants can respond to incentives along three dimensions: effort provision, theft and voluntary provision of help.

Title of Exhibition: Spoiler Alert: What Cybersecurity Might Look, Feel, and Smell Like in 2032

Take a walk around Reykjavik ten years from now, and interact with the everyday objects you might find there. Explore what "cybersecurity" may mean for a world in which these objects exist.

Will you encounter something that surprises you? Alarms you? Will you find something you wish was available today?

There are no easy answers, just many different versions of the kind of future we might build. With an exhibit on the ground floor of Gróska, we invite you to consider which of these worlds you would want to make more likely to happen, and which less.

The exhibit was created by the students of the University of Iceland course "Ethnographic Approaches to Cybersecurity", taught by Meghan McGrath as part of the Fulbright-NSF Grant in Cyber-Security and Critical Infrastructure.