EACH YEAR, THE GRADUATE FELLOWS OF THE ANDREA MITCHELL CENTER invite graduate students from universities throughout the region to present their work-in-progress to a critical but supportive audience. The topics are not linked to an annual theme, but each session includes two papers that are thematically linked.  Sessions in the past have been devoted to issues of democracy, constitutionalism, and citizenship, including surveillance, technocracy, migration, race, social rights, empire building, party politics, education, the carceral state, and many more. Faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, and members of the public are encouraged to read the papers and attend the workshops to participate in lively academic discussions.

Archive of Past Workhops here.

2024-2025 Series

Past Events:

March 2025:
Difference and Democracy: New Perspectives on the Politics of Parenthood

Join us for an exploration into evolving notions of parenthood, law, and identity with scholars Akshat Agarwal and Carlo Sariego.

Akshat Agarwal, Visiting Assistant Professor at Boston College School of Law, will present "Constitutional Parents’ Rights and the Transformation of Parenthood." He examines how constitutional parents’ rights shape the recognition of non-traditional families, including LGBTQ+ families and those formed through assisted reproductive technologies. Using comparative insights from English law, Agarwal reveals how changing definitions of parenthood reflect deeper debates about equality and parental authority. 

Carlo Sariego, PhD Candidate in Sociology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale, will share their paper, "Transfeminist Pregnancy: Reproductive Speculation, Genre, and Desire." Sariego explores the intersection of reproductive and transgender politics, arguing for an expansive understanding of pregnancy as a multidimensional experience—political, aesthetic, and existential—that transcends biological determinism and fosters solidarity between trans and cis feminist communities. Sariego's paper is under consideration for a journal and cannot be made public before the talk.

February 2025:
Affect and Politics Colloquium

Join us for a colloquium exploring how affect—emotions, obligations, and social bonds—shapes political life, state power, and personal identity across diverse contexts. This event will feature: 

Zainab Khalid (Queen’s University) – Monsters, Lesbians, Mothers: The Ontological Void
Examining love, respectability, and queer kinship in Pakistani Muslim middle-class households, Khalid explores how social fictions shape belonging, rejection, and alternative forms of care. 

Rashmi Banerjee (University of Virginia) – Mercy for Murder: Illegitimacy, Infanticide, and Criminal Justice in Colonial India 
Tracing colonial India's paradoxical views on infanticide, Banerjee reveals how the British state oscillated between criminalizing and sympathizing with women accused of transgressing rigid patriarchal norms. 

Jowel Choufani (George Washington University) – Scripting Obligation Amidst Chronic State Abandonment: An Analysis of Everyday Speech in Lebanon 
Through an ethnographic study of café begging encounters and community kitchens, Choufani examines how language practices shape social obligations and care networks in Lebanon’s ongoing economic collapse. This colloquium will offer critical insights into the entanglements of affect, power, and political life, fostering a discussion on how emotions and social structures coalesce in shaping governance, survival, and resistance.

Othering the Other: Historical and Contemporary Approaches to Migration

Migration has always been a site of political contestation, raising fundamental questions about identity, belonging, and political rights. This event brings together scholars from political science and ancient history to examine how migration has been conceptualized across time and how these frameworks shape contemporary debates.

Joseph Cloward (Stanford University) will explore how traditional state-centered approaches to political rights often exclude migrants, particularly stateless persons and political refugees. By shifting the lens to both the individual and the international system, he argues for a broader framework that accounts for migrants’ rights to political participation beyond conventional notions of state-based inclusion.

Maddalena Scarperi (University of Pennsylvania) will examine ancient Greek migration to Metapontum in southern Italy, challenging the binary distinction between colonizers and refugees. Through textual and archaeological evidence, she uncovers how Greek migrants simultaneously occupied marginalized spaces while legitimizing their claims through narratives of exile and divine destiny—offering a historical perspective on the constructed nature of modern migration rhetoric.

By bridging historical and contemporary perspectives, this discussion seeks to complicate dominant narratives about migration and political belonging.

January 2025:
Against Democracy? On the Uses and Abuses of Technology

Paper titles:

"Redundant? Questioning Epistemic Justifications for Democracy"
-- Yifan Wang, PhD Student in Ethics and Legal Studies, University of Pennsylvania

"Governing the Encrypted World: National Security, Surveillance, and Hacker Politics in Modern America"
-- Jacob Bruggeman, PhD Candidate, Johns Hopkins University

Presenter Bios:

Yifan Wang: "Yifan Wang is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Ethics and Legal Studies program at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She is also pursuing a joint Ph.D. degree in Philosophy at Penn. She has two major strands of research interests, one in moral emotions and one in democracy. Her current interest in emotions focuses on the moral costs to individuals and the epistemic costs to organizations that arise from workspace emotion regulation. Her current interest in democracy lies in epistemic justifications for democracy. She is also interested in the relationship between democracy and corporations."

Jacob Bruggeman: "Jacob Bruggeman is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Johns Hopkins University, where he studies modern political economy and intellectual history with a focus on technology and policy in the twentieth century United States. His dissertation, “Securing the System,” explores how regulation, professionalization, and technological change reshaped the practice and significance of “hacking” in the 20th century U.S. and world. His work is forthcoming in Modern American History, the Journal of Policy History, and Interfaces, and it has been supported by the Association of Computer Machinery, the Hagley Museum and Library, the Charles Babbage Institute, and the Briscoe Center for American History. Jacob received an M.A. in history from Hopkins in 2022, an M.Phil in Economic and Social History from Cambridge University, Darwin College, in 2020, and an M.A. in political science and a B.A. in history and political science, summa cum laude, from Miami University of Ohio in 2019."

December 2024:
Barriers to Protection: Child Welfare and the Carceral State

Protecting Indigenous Children: A Critical Analysis of the Child Welfare System
By Abram J. Lyons

Indigenous children have disproportionately experienced family separation through the child welfare system since the early 20th century. State-sanctioned child removals occur within a history of Indigenous-US policy developed to erase Indigenous people (e.g., Indian Wars, Indian Removal Act, and Boarding Schools), physically and culturally, and acquire raw resources from Indigenous-occupied land to expand the nation-state’s political power. Although the child welfare system was not explicitly designed for this purpose, its outcomes reflect racial hierarchies within settler society that sustain erasure by reproducing Euro-American norms through foster care and adoption. This study engages with child welfare abolition projects that underscore the need for an Indigenous-centered intellectual historical analysis of the child welfare system and builds on conceptual work within the legal academic literature. It concludes that racist settler colonial policies persist within child welfare outcomes, and emphasizes the importance of Tribal Sovereignty in policy development.

Children Behind Bars: Deconstructing the Prison Nursery Model in India’s Carceral System
By Stuti Shah

This article examines the impact of carcerality on children who stay with their mothers in prison from a historical and socio-legal standpoint. Though this may appear to be a compassionate policy that empowers maternal choice, it ignores the fact that prisons are inherently harmful environments, and that this arrangement compromises children's constitutional rights and well-being. Furthermore, the "choice" given to mothers to bring their children with them to prison is illusory, as it is deeply shaped by socio-economic disparities.The article also critically analyzes the prison nursery model in India, questioning whether it truly addresses the needs of incarcerated mothers and their children, or whether it perpetuates deeper systemic harms. It argues that reformist solutions, such as the prison nursery model, have been adapted by low-resource countries such as India without adequately considering their unique socio-economic contexts. It also highlights the current system's reliance on NGOs for the implementation and operation of prison nurseries, which makes the model unsustainable and geographically inequitable.The article concludes by advocating for a shift away from reformation models toward abolitionist frameworks that prioritize the dignity and rights of both mothers and children. The existing prison nursery model fails to address the broader harms of incarceration and exacerbates deep-rooted structural inequalities. A radical rethinking of carceral systems is necessary to ensure that both mothers and children are freed from the cycles of harm and injustice perpetuated by the state.

November 2024:
Paradoxical Media: Freedom of Speech and Electoral Politics

The Broken Promise of Free Expression: How Social Media Undermines Public Support for Freedom of Expression
By B. Tyler Leigh

Social media has democratized expression by giving anyone with an account the ability to
express nearly any idea into the public sphere. One might expect that Americans would become more supportive of democratic expression as they gain experience and familiarity with it through social media. Using an observational study and two experiments, I show the opposite is occurring. Social media democratized expression but does not deliver on the promised outcomes that free expression is supposed to provide. As a result, conspiracy theories, misinformation, and hate speech seem more influential than ever before. I show that, as a result, people are less willing to allow the exact same expressive acts on social media than in-person. Further, people are less supportive of free expression overall when primed to think about the democratization of expression social media represents. These findings indicate that social media is undermining public support for freedom of expression.

Computational Creativity, Political AI and Artistic Activism in Pakistan: Reflections on the Limits and Possibilities of Generative AI for Contemporary Electoral Politics
By Bizaa Zeynab Ali

This research will highlight the ways in which Generative AI tools facilitated political mobilization during the 2024 elections in Pakistan. I analyze the paradoxical ways in which generative AI was used to propagate disinformation, while presenting digital citizens with an opportunity to counter and subvert state led narratives in innovative ways, by visibilizing violence against women, fact-checking fake news and deliberate disinformation campaigns, invoking civic dissent through political satire and developing an extensive electoral campaign with AI tools. The research showcases examples of computational creativity and artistic activism during recent political unrest in Pakistan, broadly organized in three categories to underline public engagement with AI technology regarding concerns about disinformation, electoral manipulation and state violence. I highlight the creative use of AI tools like chatbots, generative art and voice generators for digital dissent and large-scale political marketing in short periods of time, under the threat of state censorship, internet shutdowns and social media crackdowns.

October 2024:
Constructing Representation: Approaches to Migration and Race

Does Political Equality Demand That You Move?
By Ezekiel Vergara

Some representative schemes are population-sensitive. How much representation a group gets depends on the size of the represented population. Other representative schemes are population-insensitive. In these schemes, how much representation a group gets does not turn on the size of the represented population.In this paper, I am interested in population-insensitive schemes. I maintain that population-insensitive schemes lead to an unjustifiable inequality in political influence. Those who live in less populous areas are afforded more political influence than those in more populous areas. Like other causes of unequal political influence, I think that we have an obligation to mitigate it.

While there are different ways to mitigate this inequality, I focus on Rearrangement. Such a policy encourages the redistribution of population, such that each representative subunit has roughly the same population. To argue for Rearrangement, I proceed as follows. In Section I, I clarify my focus on political influence. In Section II, I discuss cases in which we think that we ought to intervene to address unequal political influence. In Section III, I suggest that we have the same reasons to address the unequal political influence that results from population-insensitive schemes. In Section IV, I provide a sketch of what Rearrangement would require. Such a policy encourages the redistribution of population, such that each representative subunit has roughly the same population. I maintain that such a program is not only practically plausible, but also that it holds philosophical merits. In Sections V and VI, I argue that it is not too demanding, and it respects the value that liberals accord to culture. It also promotes the independent value of diversity.

Homeland (In)Security and the racialisation of the Arab in America
By Maryam Nahhal

The study of racial formation in the United States has generally ignored the role of Islam and Islamophobia in the construction of racial categories. This became exponentially more apparent after 9/11 with the substantial increase in surveillance, unlawful detentions, hate crimes, and media rhetoric targeting Muslims and those perceived to be so, as well as military interventions in sovereign countries in the Middle East. This paper seeks to understand the racialisation of a category of people that had hitherto been mostly absent from racial politics literature. I argue that predominantly Christian Arab immigrants enjoyed a relatively benign position within the US racial system in the first half of the twentieth century. While this position was not uncontested, both by the courts and by the nativist backlash of the early 20th century, the Christian Arab was granted legal status as white on the basis of a shared Christian heritage. It was not until the 1960s that the Arab, while still officially white in legal instruments such as the Census, lost the invisibility and protections that such whiteness had granted them. This shift is linked to the increased immigration of Muslim Arabs following the 1965 Immigration Act, as well as the US’s increased interests and involvement in the Middle East during the Cold War, which shaped its relationship with its own Arab population. I will show how the coincidence of a series of international conjunctures, from the establishment of the state of Israel, Johnson’s 1965’s Immigration Act, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the Iranian Revolution, the 1970 oil embargo and other international crises drastically changed American perceptions about Arabs, highlighting the impact of American foreign policy on Arab diasporas in the U.S. While significant, 9/11 intensified and systematised existing patterns but it by no means instigated them.

September 2024:
Occupying the Narrative Space: Activism and Political Change

Celia Eckert: "Shifting Grounds: Protest Occupations as Worldmaking"

Kalahan Brown: "Watermelon Fights: Narrative Wars in the US over the Palestine Conflict"