Penn Calendar Penn A-Z School of Arts and Sciences University of Pennsylvania

Graduate Student Workshops

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.


Past Events:

November 2025: Constraints on Democratic Imaginations

This session examines how political thought, education, and discourse shape—and often constrain—the horizons of democratic possibility. Presenters interrogate the historical and intellectual boundaries that define what counts as “democratic” imagination, tracing how systems of knowledge, power, and pedagogy both enable and limit civic agency. Lunch provided.

Speaker bios:

Peter Baron 
I am Peter S. Baron, a JD/MA in Philosophy student at Georgetown University currently in my 2L year at Georgetown University Law Center. I am a published author of a non-fiction book, "If Only We Knew: How Ignorance Creates and Amplifies the Greatest Risks Facing Society," which explores the stranglehold that the elite ultra-wealthy corporate class has on information, politics, and thus, society itself. I graduated from Fairfield University with an individually designed interdisciplinary major that investigated the question "Are socioeconomic inequities inevitable?"

Ariana Zetlin
Ariana Zetlin is a third-year Ph.D. student in Education, Culture, and Society at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research explores how students develop key dispositions for engaging in dialogue across differences—such as empathy, humility, and curiosity—and how educators can foster these dispositions within classrooms. As a 2025-2026 SNF Paideia Graduate Fellow, Ariana is leading a research project studying how Paideia-designated courses at Penn support student dispositional development. 


October 2025: Contesting the Past

 

 

How do societies remember their past, and how do those memories shape the present? This workshop brings together two graduate researchers whose work interrogates struggles over memory, media, and history in democratic and journalistic contexts.

Adam Koehler Brown explores how political actors have struggled over the memory of the January 6th, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. His research forwards a novel theoretical account of memory in democratic societies, born out of four distinct modes of highly partisan January 6th memory with distinct degrees of mediation, style, and form.

Though advertisements for enslaved people have been studied across the field of American history, journalism studies has barely acknowledged the relationship between the nexus of early newspapers, advertising profit models, and the slave trade. Through an empirical content analysis of advertisements in newspapers published from 1704 to 1729 and a critical discourse analysis of the same time period, this analysis by Anjali DasSarma offers a revisitation and re-working of how we understand the origins of advertising in the field of journalism.

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Speaker bios:

Adam Koehler Brown is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the New School for Social Research. He works on politics, culture, and theory, with a specific focus on cultural dimension of American politics in the January 6th, 2021 case. He has previously held fellowships with the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry and the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies. Brown also teaches at CUNY-Hunter College.

Anjali DasSarma is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. Her work examines both the cultural studies and political economy of journalism, centering journalists as actors in the production of knowledge, norms, and history and as well as structures of media power, capitalism, and hegemony.
Her research is focused on journalism histories for the sake of critical and radical journalism futures, with a strong focus on media reparations and decolonial/anti-colonial movements.


September 2025: Institutional Choices and Societal Consequences

 



This workshop brings together two emerging scholars whose work critically examines how institutions shape — and often constrain — social and political life.

  • Julia Cope (Annenberg School of Communications, University of Pennsylvania) explores how the American advertising industry confronts climate change. Her study of AdAge and Adweek reveals the fragile compromises advertising professionals craft between profit-driven market logics and civic or environmental responsibility. By unpacking these discourses, Cope shows how concerns for sustainability are reframed through brand authenticity and reputation, exposing deeper tensions in neoliberal democratic life.

    Presenting: Grappling with Green: How the trade press justifies and critiques climate concern in advertising

  • Kevin Yüh (Rice University / Zhejiang University) analyzes the use of referendums in advancing LGBTQ+ rights, with a focus on Taiwan’s same-sex marriage referendum. Drawing on comparative perspectives across Asia, Yu argues that while direct democracy may appear to empower minority rights, in practice it often undermines them, revealing the complex and sometimes contradictory role of referendums in shaping institutional legitimacy and social change.

    Presenting: Are Referendums a Bad Idea for the LGBTQ+ Community: Comparative Perspectives From Taiwan to Asia

Together, these presentations highlight how institutional choices — from corporate self-regulation to democratic mechanisms — carry profound societal consequences, shaping the possibilities and limitations of accountability, equity, and justice in the contemporary world.Full bios and paper abstracts are available on amc.sas.upenn.edu. Register to receive full papers.

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Speaker Bios:

Julia Cope is a PhD candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication and is working on her dissertation examining the construction of energy imaginaries by the fossil fuel industry and financial journalism. Methodologically, she uses discourse analysis and computational text analysis to investigate how different corporate actors define the problem of and solutions to climate change. She is a part of several research groups including Climate Social Science Network (CSSN), Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media (PCSSM), and PennMAP in the Computational Social Science Lab. 

Kevin Yüh received legal training in different jurisdictions and multiple degrees with honors and top distinctions from Stanford University, the Australian National University, and Zhejiang University.  His research focuses on Chinese law in global contexts and the anthropology of law. He serves as fellows with several LGBTQ+ scholarship and organizations, including the Chinese Rainbow Network, and convenes the only Law and Sexuality research group currently active in China.
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