The Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy
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. Graduate workshops convene once a month, usually on a Wednesday at lunchtime. Food is provided.
2023-2024 Series
October 2023 – MAKING OF THE SELF: MEMORY, ECONOMY, AND THE MASK OF THE PRIVATE SPHERE
Wed. October 18, 12:00-1:30 pm
133 S. 36th Street, Room 335
Hybrid: In-person and online. Please register here.
Link and papers sent to registered attendees.
A Lesson in Risk: Life Insurance and A New Economic Citizenship in
Late 19th Century United States
Michael Ortiz-Castro (American Studies, Harvard)
FACING EXPLOSIVE GROWTH AND UNPRECEDENTED COMPETITION in the latter decades of the 19th century, life insurance companies across the United States sought to integrate their business into everyday American life. This took the form of a variety of publications — from short stories and poems to ads and holiday gifts for consumers. Looking at these objects, MICHAEL ORTIZ-CASTRO analyzes their work as pedagogical tools, arguing that what the documents reveal are a persistent focus on the question of the proper economic subject and the bonds (pun intended) that bound them to a proper polity. These documents integrated themselves into their customers’ psyche — thus legitimizing the business in human life — by appealing to emergent ideas of the autonomous economic subject. This was a new development, for, as historians have noted, new ideas of entrepreneurial subjectivity became dominant with the rise of financial capitalism. However, rather than simply speak of the autonomous, atomized subject, the documents sought to clarify what the relationship between the insured subject and his larger community was (or, perhaps, should be), in this way introducing new ideas of the “economic community” into everyday American life. Clarifying this tandem approach makes clear that the question of citizenship — the belonging in a polity — is inextricable from the defining of a political public. This cultural studies approach to the history of life insurance, capitalism, and the subject offers a mode of analysis that brings to light the complicated discursive forms through which citizenship and political belonging are contested, and their deep connections to idea of health, wellness, and community.
Alternative Routes to Power & Resistance: Diaspora Tamil Women,
Memory, and Social Reproduction
Mira Philips (School of Social Policy & Practice, Penn)
THE PROCESS OF MEMORY WORK AMONGST DIASPORA COMMUNITIES is intimately connected to the circumstances that surround their displacement. Prior research has focused on how these processes play out in the public and the obstacles that limit them. For diasporas affected by civil conflict, such as the Tamil diaspora in Canada, engaging in memory work to establish collective memories and memorialize their histories is complicated by residual trauma, tensions with individuals, the state in their home country, and non-supportive networks in their new country. From a gender perspective, feminist scholars argue that these activities are doubly difficult for diaspora women due to their relegation to the private sphere, and the privileging of “louder” (often male) voices, who act as the arbiters of collective memory and public acts of memorialization. As their experiences with inequality, violence, migration, and resettlement differ from men's, their absence leaves researchers without important nuances and perspectives when engaging with diaspora memory work. However, while understanding and critiquing public memory work and diaspora women’s exclusion is important, this preoccupation also serves to background the memory work women do in the private sphere via social reproduction, or the activities involved in rearing the family. Using scholarship on gendered space, social reproduction, and diaspora and memory, MIRA PHILIPS engages in a conceptual discussion to 1) understand the connection between the domestic sphere, social reproduction, and memory work; 2) critique the preoccupation with the domestic sphere as a site of oppression, while ignoring opportunities for resistance; 3) interrogate the over-emphasis on collective memory, public memory work and memorialization amongst diaspora communities; and 4) consider the implications of memory work done in the private sphere for diasporas' public memory.
November 2023 – LIMITS TO FREEDOM: LANGUAGE, RELIGION, AND CITIZENSHIP IN POSTCOLONIAL INDIA
Wed. November 15, 12:00-1:30 pm
133 S. 36th Street, Room 335
Hybrid: In-person and online. Link and papers sent to registered attendees..
Conversion, Representation and the Dilemma of Religious Identity: A study of Political Pragmatism Among Dalits in Northern India, c.1932-1991
Amit Kumar (History, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)
The struggle for an autonomous religious identity for members of the ex-untouchable community has a long and chequered past in colonial politics. The Macdonald Award (1932) and the Poona Pact (1932), illustrate two incommensurable paths – while the former recognized separate electorates, the latter shifted the entire claim of autonomous identity to accommodative representation politics. These explosive and publicly debated questions informed the contrapuntal relationship between the rights to religious freedom and reservation provided under Articles 25 and 16 in the favor of Dalits in the Indian Constitution. Yet, as AMIT KUMAR demonstrates, the constitutional provisions would severely circumscribe the Dalit citizen, through liberal notions of choice (between religious and caste identity), as well as legal and political thought that established caste as primary and fundamental only to Hinduism. This dilemma was shaped by B.R. Ambedkar's rethinking of the religious question, and his call for religious conversion of Dalits in 1956. But the contradiction, pre-fixed in the Scheduled Caste Order of 1950 and the Right to Religious Freedom under the Fundamental Rights in the constitution discouraged Dalits calls for conversion. Later amendments included Sikh Dalits and Buddhist Dalits but notably not Muslim and Christian Dalits. Kumar argues that these tensions illustrate the subsumption of the social to the political, and the curtailment of emancipatory politics within the domain of constitutional representational politics. Yet, Dalit political pragmatism continues to be informed by its roots in a long genealogy of social movements and can be evidenced by successive attempts to disturb the nominal meanings of “representation.”English Elitism, Trust Deficit and the Evolution of the Hindi-Speaking Intelligentsia in 1950s India
Click here to register for event
Akhil P. Veetil (South Asia Studies / Comparative Literature, Penn)
AKHIL P. VEETIL focuses on the predicaments of the Hindi-speaking intelligentsia in early postcolonial India, proposing that there was a rhetoric of moral harm that the Hindi intelligentsia perceived and articulated. For instance, at a “Banish English” Conference held in Ahmedabad, India in 1970, Ganesh Mantri, a participant, criticizes the English-speaking Indian elite for perceiving themselves as the carriers of the nation’s intelligence and wisdom. This conference was an extension of a larger social movement to remove colonial English from all domains of India’s new political project. For many Hindi-speaking intellectuals, this was a necessary step towards India’s self-rule. While there is insufficient evidence that this rhetoric gained currency among the Hindi-speaking followers, there was a lack of trust towards this class from speakers of other regional Indian languages. Taking this fraught context into consideration, how do we understand the role of the Hindi intelligentsia in comparison to those of English and other regional languages? How did this position between English and other regional languages shape the political and emotional orientation of the Hindi intelligentsia across the political spectrum? Veetil examines correspondences between Hindi leaders from the Socialist Party and the Indian National Congress roughly between mid 1950s to 1965 when, amidst great political unrest, the Indian government decided to use English and Hindi as two official languages.
Papers for graduate student workshop:
Akhil P. Veetil Paper
Amit Kumar Paper
December 2023 – MANAGING MIGRANTS: VIOLENT CATEGORIES AND THE MAKING OF THE BORDER
REGISTER FOR EVENT HERE
Wed. December 6, 12:00-1:30 pm
133 S. 36th Street, Room 335
Hybrid: In-person and online. Link and papers sent to registered attendees..
Welfare Inclusion vs Exclusion: The Impact of Forced Migrant Categorization on Welfare Access and Integration
(download paper here)
Alexander Bervik (School of Social Policy & Practice, Penn)
Anna Ferris (School of Social Policy & Practice, Penn)
THE 1951 UNITED NATIONS (UN) REFUGEE CONVENTION AND ITS 1967 PROTOCOL define what it means to be a refugee and offer protection for those who fall under that category. The Refugee Act of 1980 formally aligned with the UN Refugee Convention’s definition of a refugee, instituted a comprehensive federal program for refugee resettlement, and standardized legal proceedings for asylum. Since then, however, new legal categorizations have been constructed for forcibly displaced persons, which offer protection that is time-limited with no current pathway to permanent residency or citizenship. The policy categories constructed for forced migrants are not fixed. ALEXANDER BERVIK and ANNA FERRIS explore the impact that the legal categorization of forced migrants has relating to social welfare access in the US. At present, no other study has examined the intersection of forced displacement and the US welfare state. His research focuses on the post-1980 Refugee Act era and the individuals on Temporary Protected Status, Humanitarian Parole, Asylum Seekers (those with pending asylum claims), and Refugees/Asylees. They include the statistics on the size of each group, how different immigrant groups end up in different legal statuses, and its historical context to understand the social, economic, and political drivers associated with categorization and forced migration. Bervik and Ferris conclude that immigration statuses, in intersection with social welfare policy, operates as a tool to either include or exclude desirable and/or undesirable immigrants.
“We Do Not Wish To See The Border Formalized:” Administrative Discretion & the Making of Pseudo-Guest Workers
(download paper here)
Nahomi Esquivel (History, University of Chicago)
IN 1927 THE U.S. IMMIGRATION SERVICE CREATED A CATEGORY OF “GREEN CARD COMMUTERS” – workers who were admitted to the U.S. for permanent residence but who maintained their homes in adjacent Mexican cities, opting to regularly cross the border to their place of work – to relieve border traffic congestion. In 1959, agricultural growers began to use the status to circumvent restrictions placed upon the Mexican contract labor system, the Bracero Program. NAHOMI ESQUIVEL argues that agricultural growers insured themselves against the termination of the Bracero Program by enabling former contract workers to join the commuter ranks. She demonstrates that such a feat would have been impossible without the cooperation of state bureaucrats. In order to keep growers from returning to the wholesale employment of undocumented workers, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), as well as consular agents, used their administrative discretion to preserve employers' access to these “non-resident green card holders.” As unions and social advocacy groups protested this “latest form of cheap labor,” the Department of Labor weaponized the program’s ambiguity to create new admissibility requirements and thereby control the flow of agricultural commuters. At the same time, they dangled access to these workers before growers warning they could only be obtained if employers complied with DOL labor standards. Esquivel examines the porous boundaries between administrative discretion, informal governance, and bureaucratic corruption that created an ambiguous legal status which does not fit into any precise category found in the federal immigration statutes.
January 2024 – THE COST OF DEMOCRACY: ECONOMIC INEQUALITY AND POLITICAL POWER
Wed. January 24, 12:00-1:30 pm
Online only: Link and papers sent to registered attendees.
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER
Sufficiency and Capitalism
Mike Gadomski (Philosophy, Penn)
Tyler Re, (Philosophy, Penn)
THE DEBATE BETWEEN SUFFICIENCY AND EQUALITY IN DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE is often assumed to correspond to the right and left of the political spectrum. MIKE GADOMSKI and TYLER RE seek to challenge this assumption, which is rooted in a more general tendency in the literature on distributive justice to separate the question of distribution from the question of socioeconomic systems more broadly. They criticize this tendency. It encourages the idea that there could be a system, like welfare state capitalism, that permits large inequalities yet satisfies the sufficiency condition. Hence sufficientarianism’s appeal for those on the center and right. Gadomski and Re argue that capitalism cannot sustain sufficientarian justice. This is because the goods and services required for sufficiency must be acquired through private markets, and these markets are compatible with many people not meeting the sufficiency threshold. This is not a function of markets per se, but rather private ownership of the means for producing what is needed to meet the sufficiency threshold. When these means are held privately, whether people have access to the goods that constitute the minimum threshold of sufficiency is at the discretion of their private owners, and so without guarantee. One popular response is to advocate for a state-guaranteed basic minimum as a supplement to a capitalist economy (i.e., welfare state capitalism), but Gadomski and Re point to the ways that such systems are self-undermining. The resulting economic inequality consolidates political power among those who would benefit from lowering the sufficiency standards. The tendency to think about distributive ideals divorced from concerns of political economy has allowed classical liberals and their neighbors on the right to claim the mantle of sufficiency. The upshot of their argument, however, is that taking sufficiency seriously must lead one to the left.
Cost-benefit Analysis and the History of Democracy
Charles Troup (History, Yale)
WHEN WE THINK OF THE HISTORY OF REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNING OR DEMOCRACY, we don’t normally include the theory and practice of cost-benefit analysis in modern states. Several influential commentators have indeed identified cost-benefit analysis as a preeminent example of “economic reason” in contemporary governance, antithetical to democracy by virtue of its depoliticizing influence on communities’ processes of collective decision-making. Yet the early architects and advocates of cost-benefit analysis in government, CHARLES TROUP argues, explicitly intended the technique to bring the public authorities closer to the ideals of representative governing. Its calculations of relevant costs and benefits, when compared to available alternatives, and their impacts upon specific members of the political community, allow it, as one pioneering British functionary wrote in 1951, to “fill the hiatus between the authorities who decide and the public.” Troup sketches the history of cost-benefit analysis as a practice of representative decision-making and asks what light this casts on the story of modern democracy and its scholarship. He argues that scholars often neglect the historical tension between things “democratic” and things “political,” which has caused them to omit cost-benefit analysis – the preeminent technocratic form that the aspiration to representative governing took in the 20th century Euro-Atlantic world – from its integral, if puzzling, place in democracy’s modern history.
February 2024 – UNDOING DEMOCRACY IN THEORY AND PRACTICE
Wed. February 21, 12:00-1:30 pm
133 S. 36th Street, Room 335
Hybrid: In-person and online. Link and papers sent to registered attendees.
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER AND ACCESS PAPERS
The Origins of Anti-democratic Discourse: Representation and Mis-representation of Athenian Democracy in Ancient Historical Sources
Odysseas Espanol Androutsopoulos (Classical Studies, Penn)
THE DEMOCRACY OF ANCIENT ATHENS HAS LOOMED IN THE IMAGINARY of much of the world as the Ur-example of a representative political system. The story of Athens, of the “birth of democracy”, of the thwarting of the Persian empire, and of the meteoric rise to and just as rapid fall from power of the Athenian empire, in both cases linked to reasons often implied to be inherent in the very system that made it special, takes on the status of a founding myth. But how much of this narrative is borne out in ancient sources? ODYSSEAS ESPANOL ANDROUTSOPOULOS examines the depiction of mid-5th and 4th century BCE Athenian democracy in our two extant contemporary historiographical sources, the works of Thucydides and Xenophon and asks to what extent these sources themselves were colored by the biases of their cultural milieu. He looks at the way in which figures and events in the narrative are framed, and how responsibility is assigned for perceived success or failure, in a selection of important events across Thucydides’ "History of the Peloponnesian War" and its sequel, Xenophon’s "Hellenica.” He argues that much of our modern discourse on democracy stems from ancient Athenian sources that overwhelmingly represented an aristocratic milieu ambivalent about the system at best. This calls into question especially negative tropes, deployed to this day, about the inherent instability of democracy, the dangers of “mob rule”, and the consequent need for wise and firm leaders to “rein in” the people. Rather than based on historic fact, these tropes very well may have reflected the prejudices, echoed throughout the ages, of an often overtly anti-democratic elite.
Disputing "Democratization": The Problems of Guatemala's Radio Spectrum Regulation
Polly Lauer (History, Yale)
AS GUATEMALA’S 1996 PEACE ACCORDS WERE BEING SIGNED after a 36-year genocidal armed conflict (1960-1996), economists and lobbyists recognized an opportunity to restructure Guatemala’s telecommunications market. Prior to 1996, titles for FM and AM frequencies had been free — save for small administrative fees and under-the-table bribes — for Guatemalan applicants. These economists, however, argued that using Ronald Coase’s auction-based model to allocate frequencies to the highest bidder, Guatemalan or not, would “democratize” and “liberate” Guatemalan media. This neoliberal move functionally privatized the spectrum. POLLY LAUER probes the political economy of Guatemalan radio frequency regulation in order to illustrate the fraught meanings of “democratization” in post-peace Guatemala. She explores the ways this process immediately limited local radio stations, especially Indigenous radio stations, from obtaining legal access to frequencies, as they could not financially compete against multi-national media conglomerates. The exclusion of local media creators in this “liberation” of the radio spectrum reflects that the policy in fact obstructed the democratic promises of radio by creating a frequency market that prevented makers and audiences from engaging the otherwise low-cost, wide-reach medium. This case illustrates the conflicting definitions and uses of “democratization” in Guatemala’s neoliberal context. Lauer shows how the language of “democratization” was deployed to legitimate a tense political project, revealing the ways that policy makers disguised their ultimate economic motivations in the popular language of democracy.
March 2024 – CRISIS, CAPITALISM, AND THE TEMPORALITY OF RESISTANCE
Wed. March 20, 12:00-1:30 pm
133 S. 36th Street, Room 335
Hybrid: In-person and online. Link and papers sent to registered attendees.
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR EVENT.
Architects of Decine: Decay & Creation in the more-than-human World
Jessie Croteau (Political Science, Johns Hopkins)
AS SHORELINES ARE ERODED, HABITATS DESTROYED, SPECIES EXTINGUISHED, and peoples left in abjection, the media, climate activists, and academic ecological literature all seem to agree – our world is in a state of decline. JESSIE CROTEAU takes seriously the sorrows of death and destruction during our time of climate wreckage, but also insists that decline, disintegration, and decay are not mere indicators of devastation. They are worthy of political and theoretical attention in their own right. To do so, first, she demonstrates that a positive politics need not only, cannot only, be a politics of growth and creation. Not declining, refusing to disintegrate, and being recalcitrant in material persistence is the stuff of a conservative politics of preservation. Instead, new life, new bodies, and new worlds all require dissolution. Second, she suggests that because plastics refuse to degrade or break down like other materials, these petro-materials might be the closest anthropogenic thing we know to immortality. However, rather than inspiring hope for eternal life, their persistent presence produces a catastrophic here and now, polluting lands, waters, and bodies with their refusal to decay. Croteau concludes by making a case for an ecological ethos that affirms dissolutions and insists a politics of declination is necessary in our time of cancerous capitalistic growth.Click here to download paper.
Humor and Politics: Dispatches from the Lebanese Crisis
Yara Damaj (Political Science, Penn)
HUMOR HAS BEEN A SUBJECT OF INTEREST FOR POLITICAL THEORISTS since before the Greeks. It has functioned as both a tool for public enjoyment and an indirect challenge to sovereign power for centuries. YARA DAMAJ examines the emergence of humor as a “governing logic” in reaction to political events that have taken place in recent Middle Eastern history. By drawing on stand-up comedy skits, memes, and jokes that circulate on social media, she shows why and how humor is one of the dominant affects of our present moment and how laughter has become the opium of the people. She borrows from the particular experience of the Lebanese people to study humor in times of crisis and to demonstrate how humor is not only a tool for psychic release or a coping mechanism amid increased uncertainty. Instead, she proposes that humor presents itself as a political tool that both signals what is important to us and ridicules that which holds power over us. She considers the ways that humor seeks to disrupt the status quo by appearing harmless, yet creates such anxiety among sovereign powers that it results in its censorship. Damaj takes humor seriously and claims it as a political phenomenon—one that is at once reflective of our present moment but also potentially creative and productive.
Click here to download paper.
Special Event – The Andrea Mitchell Center Graduate Panel on Environmental Studies
RESOURCES, RESISTANCE, AND THE RIGHTS OF NATURE
Wed. April 10, 5:00-6:30 pm
133 S. 36th Street, Room 250 (Forum)
Hybrid: In-person and online. Link and papers sent to registered attendees.
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER
Recycling Bodies: Plastics and Social Mobility in Mumbai, India
Adwaita Banerjee (Anthropology, Penn)
PLASTIC WASTE HAS BECOME A PERVASIVE ENVIRONMENTAL and social challenge, with detrimental impacts on ecosystems and public health. Simultaneously, Mumbai's lower caste communities face numerous socio-economic hurdles, including social stigmatization, and limited access to formal employment opportunities. ADWAITA BANERJEE presents an ethnographic study that investigates the multifaceted question of plastic recycling, registers of citizenship and degrees of social mobility amongst lower caste communities in Mumbai. Drawing on a qualitative approach rooted in participant observation and in-depth interviews in Mumbai’s Deonar Dumping Ground, his research delves into the lived experiences, perspectives, and strategies of lower caste individuals engaged in the plastic waste recovery and recycling sector. By exploring their involvement in this informal industry, he asks what is the extent to which plastic recycling can provide mobility to lower caste communities economically, politically, socially, and environmentally? The findings of his research aim to understand the futures and opportunities for lower caste communities in Mumbai connected to plastic waste, while acknowledging several challenges faced by lower caste individuals in the plastic recycling sector. These include limited access to resources, inadequate infrastructure, exploitative labor practices, and stigmatization due to the association with waste management.Click here to download paper
Spirituality and Protest in New Environmental Movements
Rebecca Marwege (Political Science, Columbia)
REBECCA MARWEGE EXPLORES THE POLITICAL ROLE OF SPIRITUAL REFERENCES by new environmental movements such as Extinction Rebellion and the Sunrise Movement. She demonstrates that these movements refer to spirituality in a plethora of different ways, but that references to spirituality, broadly defined, help to exceed scientific references and emphasize a transcendental value of nature in relation to humans, connect individual grief with collective action, and contribute to coalition building and countering movements on the right side of the political spectrum. Marwege discusses some normative pitfalls such as the political appropriation of complex belief systems into a protest-oriented idea of spirituality. While these questions have been explored to some extent in the context of Christian evangelicals and their highly varied commitment to environmental protection (see Veldman 2019, Veldman et al. 2021, Hempel and Smith 2020 for example), Marwege contributes a critical assessment of how new environmental movements that are situated mostly on the left utilize spiritual references.
Click here to download paper
The Nuclear Option: Politics of the Past, West German Energy Policy, and the Quest for Energy Independence, 1973-1986
Nicholas Misukanis (History, University of Maryland)
CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE NECESSITY TO REDUCE CARBON EMISSIONS has dominated political conversations, but activists continue to remain divided on one question: What role should nuclear energy play? Different countries have pursued different policies. France relies on nuclear energy for almost 70% of its domestic need. In contrast, Germany has shut down its last reactor this past April. In the 1980’s, nuclear energy provided almost 35% of West Germany’s energy needs, but after an arduous anti-nuclear campaign, political party leaders and voters eventually came to oppose nuclear energy. The question of why support for nuclear energy faded to such a degree that by 1986, all the major German political parties abandoned nuclear energy has not yet been answered. NICHOLAS MISUKANIS explores the role nuclear energy played in the politics of West Germany from the first OPEC oil crisis in 1973 to the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. At the core of his analysis lie two questions: Why did West German political leaders seek to develop nuclear energy during this time? Second, why did arguments against nuclear energy successfully overwhelm pro-nuclear messaging? The nuclear energy debate during Helmut Schmidt’s chancellorship reveals insight into the complexities liberal democracies face in promoting experts’ opinions and communicating to the public while also allowing public debate on these policies among the voting base.Click here to download paper
Oil, Land, and State Building in Iran
Bita Mousavi (History / Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, NYU)
OIL HAS MIRACULOUS POWERS. As revenue, it has lifted nations across the Middle East into unprecedented prosperity. As gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, it moves commodities and labor at a world scale to realize utopic dreams of ease and connectivity. But our global dependence on fossil fuels also causes unmitigated environmental damage and feeds despotic regimes. That oil emancipates as much as it devastates is one of its central paradoxes. BITA MOUSAVI focuses on the antimonies of one particular oil state: Iran. Whereas the Qajar empire (1789-1925) was characterized by administrative devolution and a fiscal system that lacked a “conscious or targeted policy to bring about economic growth,” the first Pahlavi state, following the 1908 discovery of oil in southwestern Iran, sought to regularize the collection of oil royalties, agricultural taxes, and other ground rents. This meant challenging the validity of the contracts that the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) secured for oil exploration from tribal authorities in southwestern Iran. Thus, before a discourse of resource sovereignty could take hold in Iran, it was necessary that the nascent Pahlavi state validate and have validated by others, not least of all APOC, its territorial sovereignty. The anti-democratic tendencies ascribed to oil states, Mousavi argues, thus derive not from the abstract quality of economic rents but, in part, from the historical abolition of the customary rights of tribes to oil-bearing land. Moreover, the oil industry cemented land reform as a central nexus of political reform and economic action, and with it, a dialectic of specialization and dependence that animated much of Iran’s subsequent history. The state continued to assume the role of managing the nation’s natural wealth, but in doing so abetted its dependence on oil revenues and stifled democratic approaches to the question of land reform.Moving Toward Ecocentric Constitutionalism: Buen Vivir and the Rights of Nature
Joseph Rodriguez (Political Science, Duke)
IN 2008, THE COUNTRY OF ECUADOR UPDATED ITS CONSTITUTION and became the first country to enshrine the rights of nature. Inspired by the indigenous Andean cosmovision of sumak kawsay (the equivalent legal term in Spanish is buen vivir), the Ecuadorian preamble posits nature as belonging to the nation’s identity and entitled to constitutional protection. What, normatively, is at stake when a state chooses to grant rights to nature in its constitution? And how does that transform traditional understandings of constitutional design that center and privilege the human being? JOSEPH RODRIGUEZ argues that the Ecuadorian Constitution reveals a conceptual shift in our thinking on constitutional design, from anthropocentric to ecocentric. While constitutions have typically been thought of as enshrining a human “people,” the Ecuadorian Constitution provides a case study for considering the inclusion of nonhuman life into a political community, modifying our conception of a “people.” He interprets the principle of buen vivir that animates the Constitution as justifying this inclusion. An ecocentric constitution, as opposed to an anthropocentric constitution, includes nonhuman life into its political community because it recognizes that all life is equally valuable and therefore should be treated as such. This is not to say that nonhuman life should take priority over human life, or that nonhuman interests are superior to human interests, but rather to expand our imaginative capacities to include more for the sake of “good living.” By looking at Ecuador, we learn that one of the primary and structural purposes of a constitution is to define who counts as a political member—not just humans but animals, rivers, and trees.
April 2024 – PRACTICES OF BELONGING: SPEECH, CITIZENSHIP, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SOVEREIGN SELF
Wed. April 17, 12:00-1:30 pm
133 S. 36th Street, Room 335
Hybrid: In-person and online. Link and papers sent to registered attendees.
Refusing to Listen: Receptive Audiences & the Political Authority of Speech in Hobbes, Locke, and Mill
Hank Owings (Political Science, Penn)
THE POPULARITY OF THE TERM “CANCEL CULTURE” gestures toward the popularity of free speech culture in the United States. And yet, “to cancel” refers only to a certain subset of speech: the pejorative invocation of “cancel” is meant to identify and constrain attempts to impute harm to speech. In other words, attacking “cancel culture” is a defense of one’s ability to say anything with impudence, burdening the consequences of speech exclusively on the listener. HANK OWINGS returns to early modern political theory and canonical liberal texts in order to demonstrate that this understanding of speech is present from the very beginnings of Western liberalism. Working through the ways Hobbes, Locke, and Mill understand both freedom and speech, he identifies how “freedom of speech” is always a unidirectional freedom from speakers to listeners. For Hobbes and Locke, those without or with less political authority or obligated to passively listen to speech from those with authority. For Mill, every member of society bears a heavier burden of actively listening to most speech, even that which might be construed as harmful. Absent in this account and lacking in canonical political theory is a robust tradition of refusing to listen. “Cancel culture,” then, is simply confirming this assumption inherent in the liberal tradition: that those with traditional authority are entitled to an audience, and that audience is not allowed to stifle speech or refuse to listen.
“Authentic” Transgender Citizenship: Legality and Diagnostic Practices of Gender Dysphoria in Pakistan
Uzma Sher Zafar (Anthropology, University of Virginia)
SINCE THE INTRODUCTION OF THE TRANSGENDER PERSONS (PROTECTION OF RIGHTS) ACT 2018, trans people in Pakistan can access citizenship under the category of khwaja sira (transwoman), khwaja sira (transman) and khunsa-i-mushkil (intersex or hermaphrodite persons). In this context, UZMA SHER ZAFAR explores emergent meanings of gender dysphoria in medical consultations between transgender people and medical practitioners. An inclusive definition of gender variant citizenship has initiated narratives around “authentic” trans bodies and who is genuinely khwaja sira. The deployment of biomedical models to investigate the authenticity of trans experience has orchestrated complexities of care at the intersection of dysphoric experience, citizenship and gender affirming psychiatric care as the gateway to gender affirming surgical care. Under the new law, doctors have become accessories of state bureaucracy as assessors of legitimate citizenship claims. This includes Sunni Muslim psychiatrists with strong beliefs in “Nature” and the “natural” body as unalterably Allah-given. Zafar analyzes medical encounters between doctors and those seeking psychiatric certifications of gender dysphoria in the pursuit of eligibility for citizenship documents and explores the ethical negotiations that make gender affirming medical care possible for their trans patients. In the process, Zafar traces a socially conscious reconfiguration of Sunni Muslim ideas on gender dysphoria and the “natural” body. What are the questions asked of dysphoric patients to medically “prove” their dysphoria? How is gender dysphoric experience visibilized in a psychiatric setting to qualify the trans body for citizenship? How does the sociality of the medical encounter make space for proving or denying gender dysphoria as genuine psychic suffering? Zafar looks at the varied ways in which doctor-patient interactions become a place of evidence production to satisfy state legislative demands of citizen psychology.
2022-23 Archive
Technologies and Democracies: Transforming Citizenship and Participation
Rabani Garg (GSE, Penn)
(Embodied) Performance of Resistance on Social Media Platforms
Terrence Chen (Sociology, NYU)
When Does Digital Activism Work? Examining Government Responses to Online Petitions in Taiwan
Between Control and Abuse: Questioning the Legitimacy of State Power
Kierstan Kaushal-Carter (African and African American Studies, Harvard)
Association and the Ethical Foundations of Policing
The Shrinking State, Democracy, and Public Administration
Nora Reikosky (GSE and Political Science, Penn)
Plutocratic Actors in Education: Philanthropists, Corporations, and Liberal Democracy
Casey Eilbert (History, Princeton)
Bureaucracy, Democracy, and the Realignment of American Politics: 1945-1968
Communal Liberals and Religious Fascists: Coptic Christians & Illiberalism in 1940s Egypt
Weston Bland (Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Penn)
Communal Liberals and Religious Fascists: Coptic Christians Confront Illiberal Politics in 1940s Egypt
The Contours of Citizenship: Exclusion, Policing, and Control Over Minorities
Ethan Plaue (English, Penn)
The Patent Form: Black Romanticism and the Production of Means in the Atlantic World
Erica Lally (History, Georgetown)
One Hundred Percent Americans: The American Protective League, Citizenship, and Social Policing During the First World War
Targeting the Monumental: Race and the Democratic Aesthetics of Memory Activism
Matt Frierdich (Politics, UVA)
Targeting the Monumental: Race and the Democratic Aesthetics of Memory Activism
Science and Politics: How Is Public Discourse Shaped?
Vanessa Schipani (Philosophy, Penn)
When Science Communicators Speak: Reconciling Public Reason and the Administrative State
Jeffery Berryhill (History, Rutgers)
Condoms, Curriculum, and Crisis: How the Battles over HIV/AIDS Prevention Strategies and a Multicultural Curriculum in Public Schools Shaped New York Politics in the 1990s and Beyond
Borders and Belonging: What Makes Democratic Citizenship Possible?
Anat Dan (Comparative Literature, Penn)
The Ocean Swimmers: Experimental Documentary and the Humanitarian Logic
Joseph Warren and Kristin Zuhone (Political Science, Berkeley)
Democracy Without Borders
2021-22 Archive
Negotiating Democracy and Race in Africa
Rehana Odendaal (Penn Sociology and GSE)
21st Century African Leaders: Youth Leadership for Development Participants' Views on Current and Future Leaders
Difference and Democracy: Promises and Pitfalls of the Welfare State
Kim Fernandes (Penn Anthropology and GSE)
Infrastructuring Exclusion: Disability, Certification and Citizenship in India
Kwelina Thompson (Cornell History)
Promises to Keep: The Development of the Family Medical Leave Act in an Age of Backlash
Making a House, Making a Home: Digital Democratic Power and Shifting Ground
Meghna Chandra (Penn School of Social Policy & Practice)
The Political and Ideological Displacement of the Black Worker: New Progressive Urbanism
Stephanie Chan (Princeton Political Science)
Connected Citizenship: Social Networks and Interracial Differences in Immigrants’ Political Participation
Contestation and Control: Making Sense of Hegemonic Shifts
Rachel Hulvey (Penn Political Science)
Authoritarian World Orders: How China's Persuasive Use of Ideology Shapes Order in Cyberspace
Woojeong Jang (Georgetown Dept. of International Relations)
Networked Hegemonic Shocks: A Hegemonic Transition and Post-Cold War Democratization
Coming Together, Pulling Apart: Contrasting the Contours of Group Consciousness
Jacob Kripp (Johns Hopkins Political Science)
The Logistics of Race War in the Global Red Summers
Media Diets and Democratric Discourse
Helene Langlamet (Annenberg School for Communication)
Industry Fingerprints on Local Ideology: How the “Growth Ethic” Structures Consent to the
Fossil Fuel Industry in Pennsylvania
Irina Kalinka (Brown Dept. of Modern Culture and Media)
User Democracy and Digital Citizenship Initiatives
Crossing Borders and Being Crossed by Borders: Building States and Conferring Rights
Griffin Creech (Penn History)
South to Mongolia, East to Manchuria: Buriat Transborder Migration during the Russian Civil Wars
Anna Milioni (King’s College Dept. of Philosophy)
Rights to Democratic Participation in Times of Transnational Mobility
Dynamics of Elite Self-Preservation
Doron Shiffer-Sebba (Penn Sociology)
Trust Fund Families: Family Bureaucratization and Elite Social Reproduction
Joy Wang (Yale Political Science)
Colonial Genealogies of Consociation: Pluralism, Leadership, and the Price of Peace in
Contemporary Democratic Theory
2020-21 Archive
Negotiating Urban Space: Development, Exclusion, and Exchange
Indivar Jonnalagadda (Penn Anthropology / South Asian Studies)
“Useless” Land Titles and Subaltern Citizenship in Hyderabad, India
Nick Robinson (Temple University, Dept. of Political Science)
Who Participates in Community Benefits Agreements? The Problem of Elite Planning in American Cities
Controlling Mobility through Narrative and Law: Vagrancy Laws and Immigration Courts in Europe and the U.S.
Dylan Farrell-Bryan (Penn Sociology)
Relief or Removal: Relational Masculinity, Immigration Judges, and State Logics of Deservingness for Immigrant Men in Removal Proceedings
Jasper Theodor Kauth (University of Oxford, Politics and International Relations)
Controlling the Marginalized: Internal Mobility Control in Germany, The United States, and the United Kingdom
Appropriating Rhetoric: Racial and Religious Conservatism in America
Elizabeth Catchmark (University of Maryland, English)
In Search of Another Party: White Rage, Obamacare and Modern Conservatism
Gabriel Raeburn (Penn, History and Religious Studies)
"Let’s Give Equal Rights to the Christians”: Religious Discrimination, Anti-Government Politics and the Rise of Televangelism, 1975 – 1987
Claiming Citizenship: Race and Caste in the U.S. and India
Brian T. Cannon (Penn, History and South Asia Studies)
Privileges of Inferiority? Caste, Community, & Socio-Political Mobilization in Twentieth Century India
Emily Yankowitz (Yale University, History)
Documenting Citizenship: How African Americans Used Passports to Claim Citizenship, 1834-1849
Breakdown and Rupture in Projects of the Nation
Meghan Garrity (Penn Political Science)
Toward an Empirical Theory of Mass Expulsions: Identifying and Measuring Cases, 1912-2012
Diego Hurtado-Torres (University of Maryland Dept. of History)
A Crisis of Words: Democracy and Political Languages in Chile During the Popular Unity Government (1970-1973)
Reconstruction and Reconciliation in the Liberal Imaginary
Arielle Xena Alterwaite (Penn History)
Chains of Debt: Haiti and History in French Liberal Thought
Nile Davies (Columbia University Dept. of Anthropology)
Materiel Conditions: Civil Reconstruction in Sierra Leone
Constructing the Other
Derek Black (University of Chicago Dept. of History)
The Sons of Noah: The Formation of Racist Ideas in Antiquity, the Carolingian Court, and Early Modern North America
Archana Kaku (Penn Political Science)
Blood Panics: A Material History of Fear, Citizenship, and Belonging
Regulating Citizens: Race, Labor, Violence, and Surveillance
Micah Khater (Yale, African American Studies and History)
“Unable to Do This Heavy Work”: (Dis)Ability, Carceral Punishment, and Searches for Freedom
Tali Ziv (Penn Anthropology)
Finessing the System: On the Racialization of U.S. Urban Informality
2019-20
Enfranchisement and Exclusion: Race, Settler-Colonialism, and Representative Politics
Fatih Umit Cetin (UMass Amherst Dept. of Political Science)
Racial Enfranchisement as a Distinct Act of Democratization: Comparative Historical Analysis of The United States, Germany, and Austria
Zachary Smith (Penn Political Science)
“How Treacherous the Gift”: Settler Motivations for Self-Government in Natal, the Cape Colony, and Palestine
Creating Community: Youth Theater in Liberia and Socialists in Reading, PA
Jasmine Blanks Jones (Penn Africana Studies)
Public Performance as Global Citizenship Education: You Will Know What You’re Getting by How It Comes Up (PDF)
Ian Gavigan (Rutgers Dept. of History)
Municipal Socialists Against the New Deal: Struggles Over the City, 1927-1937 (PDF)
On the Margins of the Democratic State
Hajer Al-Faham (Penn Political Science)
The Politics of Surveillance in American Muslim Communities (PDF)
Mo Torres (Harvard Dept. of Sociology)
What "Emergency" Does: Democratic Decline and the Politics of Inevitability (PDF)
Disappearing Acts: (Self)-Censorship and the Freedom of Information
Muira McCammon (Annenberg School for Communication)
Tweeting and Deleting: Strategic Narratives and Impression Management by U.S. Federal Agencies
Ayesha Mulla (University of Chicago Dept. of Anthropology)
Marwa Na Dena/Don’t Get Us Killed: Reporting Between the Marginal and the Military in Pakistan
Political Horizons and the Fruits of Frustration
Katherine Culver (UPenn Dept. of Anthropology)
Transnational Rule-of-Law Talk and Democratic Devolution in Contemporary Cambodia
Irina Soboleva (Columbia Dept. of Political Science)
Straight to Action: The Effect of Individual Empowerment on Democratic Consolidation
Dutiful Citizens and Responsible States
Raven Brown (New School Public and Urban Policy)
Inequality During the Era of Democracy: Institutional and Economic Conflicts in the Post-Apartheid State
Francis Russo (Penn History)
Rights vs. Duties: The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina
Contesting Democratic Equality through Material (Re)construction
Hala Habib (New School Dept. of Anthropology)
Between States of Matter: Kabul and Its Concrete Problem
Angus McLeod (Penn Dept. of History)
Redeeming Schools: Public Education in Post Civil-War Texas
Taken for Granted? Challenging the Foundations of Nationhood
Matthew Graham (Yale Political Science)
Democracy in America? Partisanship, Polarization, and the Robustness of Support for Democracy in the U.S.
Co-authored with Milan W. Svolik
Sushmita Sircar (NYU Dept. of English)
Military Cosmopolitanism and Romantic Indigeneity: Crafting Claims to Statehood in India’s North-Eastern Frontier
2018-19
Rights and Citizenship at America's Edge
Camille Saurez (Penn History)
Contesting California: Race, Law, and Resistance in California, 1850 - 1860
Ximena Benavides (Yale Law)
The Painful Rationing: Austerity, Inequality, and Health in Puerto Rico
Politics-Making of Diasporas and Immigrants
Filip Savatic and Shubha Kamala Prasad (Political Science, Georgetown University)
To Be or Not to Be: Diasporic Foreign Policy Interest Group Formation in the United States
Tanika Raychaudhuri (Department of Politics, Princeton University)
The College Experience and Asian American Political Socialization
Anti-Racist Political Mobilization & the Formation of Collective Identity
Katie Rader (Penn Political Science)
Reframing the Ideology of Civil Rights: Early Twentieth Century Debates over Employment Policy
Jaime Sanchez (Princeton University Department of History)
“What are We?”: Latino Politics, Identity, and Memory in the 1983 Chicago Mayoral Election
Executive Power and Democracy
Tim Lundy (Columbia University, English and Comparative Literature)
Ordinary Subjects of Tyranny: Practical Constitutionalism and Public Judgment in the Political Thought of George Buchanan
Shany Winder (Fordham University Law School)
Policymaking Powers of the U.S. Executive Branch
Technology and Institutional Access
Chelsea Chamberlain (Penn Department of History)
The Myth of Human Equality: Intelligence Testing and Exceptional Children, 1900-1930
Ana Klimchynskaya (Penn Comparative Literature)
Fictions of Equality: Science Fiction and the Technological Challenge to Democracy
Surveillance and Public Identity
Kristen Collins (Georgetown University Political Science)
Eager to Look: Anxiety of Being Seen Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments
Kelsey Norris (Penn Department of History)
The Humanitarian Dimensions of Soviet Propaganda and State Surveillance: Reuniting War-torn Soviet Families in the War-Devastated USSR
Gender and Law
Talia Shalev (CUNY Graduate Center)
Imagining Equality without Protection in the Era of the ERA
Dylan Yaeger (Fordham Law School)
The Difference Dilemma in Masculinity Studies: The Creation of Gender Categories in Antidiscrimination Law
Citizens and Non-citizens in Democratic Regimes
Arturo Castellanos (Cornell Law School)
Shosics: Their Right to Vote and to Hold Office in the United States
Alexander Kustov (Princeton University, Department of Politics)
The Borders of Compassion: Immigration and the Politics of Parochial Altruism
2017-18
Between Past and Future
Aaron Shapiro (Annenberg School for Communications)
Performance and Performativity in Predictive Policin"
Hao Jun Tam (Penn Dept. of English)
Diasporic South Vietnam: Pacifist Nationalism and Its Militant Shadow in Ly Tho Ho’s Novel Sequence
Politics and Identity
Sarah Khan (Columbia University, Political Science)
Personal is Political: Prospects for Women’s Substantive Representation in Pakistan
Joseph Wuest (University of Pennsylvania, Political Science)
“Why is My Child Gay?”: PFLAG and the Origins of the ‘Born This Way’ Gay Political Identity”
Dramatic Politics
Rob Goodman (Columbia University, Political Science)
Say Everything: Frank Speech and the Characters of Style in Demosthenes
Brian Palmiter (Harvard University, Government)
The Architecture of Impeachment: Making Impeachment “Political in the Right Way”
Democracy, Corporations, and Communities
Katharine Jackson, Columbia University Political Science
Excavating the Corporate Person: The Autonomy Rights of Big Business
Averill Leslie, University of Chicago Dept. of Anthropology
Town Meetings Are Not Direct Democracy: Representative Democracy as Participatory Democracy
Strategies of Progressivism
John Remensperger (University of Pennsylvania, Communication)
From Democratic Practice to Protest: The California Bernie Sanders Delegation
Tom Waters (City University of New York, Political Science)
Grassroots Expertise at a New York City Community Board
Democracy and Citizenship
Lillian Frost (George Washington University, Political Science)
Unequal Citizens: State Resistance to Removing Discrimination toward Women from Nationality Laws
Will Levine (University of Chicago, Political Science)
Heinrich Heine and The Young Hegelians on Popular Agency, Social Transformation, and “The Beautiful Error of an Ideal Future”
Colonialism and Settlement
Dalaina Heiberg (University of Chicago, Political Science)
Canadian Liberal Sovereignty through Territorial Federalism: Illustrations from Francophone and Doukhobor History
The Politics of Jurisprudence
Rajgopal Saikumar (New York University, English)
Jurisdictional Crisis in the Kashmir Novel
Zachary Smith (Penn Political Science)
Electoral Reform in the Middle East: Rising Parties and Elite Action in Israel and Jordan
Legacies of Violent Orders
Shom Mazumder (Harvard University, Government)
The Slave Order in American Political Development: Evidence from the New Deal Era
Nick Millman (University of Pennsylvania, English)
Fitful Transitions: Memory Museums and Transitional Justice in Peru
2016-17
Local and International Courts
Guillermo Garcia (Harvard Law)
The Political Effects of Centralizing the Defense of the State in One Branch"
Aniruddha Jairam (Penn Political Science)
“The Law May Not Be Real, But the Lathi [Big Stick] Is”: Dispute Resolution and State Capacity in an Indian District Court
The Politics of Economic Transformation
Yakov Feygin (Penn History)
From Economic Reform to A Crisis of Power: Institutional Change, Inflation, and the Collapse of the Soviet Fiscal State, 1986-1991
Roberto Saba (Penn History)
The Spirit of Enterprise: American Entrepreneurs in Brazil of the 1860s
Consent, Liberty, and the Defense of Democracy
Beth Henzel (Rutgers University Philosophy)
Constructive “Consent”: A Dangerous Fiction
Tom Leavitt (Columbia University Political Science)
Rational Decision Theory and Its Implications for Normative Defenses of Democracy
Political Language and Social Movements: Claiming Power on the Left and Right
Hadas Aron (Columbia University Political Science)
Intimate Rivals or Enemies of the State: Responses to the Populist Far Right in Hungary
James Morone (Penn Political Science)
Community-Based Organizations, and the Reconstruction of Policy Frameworks During Political Crises
Race-making, Labor, and Capitalism in Modern America
Minju Bae (History, Temple University)
“No More Phoney Contracts”: Organizing Chinese-Restaurant Labor in 1980s New York
Carly Regina (Political Science, University of Pennsylvania)
Labor Market Segmentation and the Production of Ethnicity and Race Ideologies in Arizona Copper: Ethnic and Racial Group-Making and the Construction of Tractable Workforces
Drawing National Boundaries: Citizenship on the Margins
Dannah Dennis (Anthropology, University of Virginia)
In the Name of the Mother: Gendered and Regional Exclusions in Nepali Citizenship
Beth Wellman (Political Science, Yale University)
Does Citizenship Travel? Diaspora Voting Rights in Africa
Social Protections and the State
Daniel Platt (American Studies, Brown University)
From Contract to Status: Property Exemption in Nineteenth-Century American Law
Tesalia Rizzo (Political Science, MIT)
How the Experience of a Programmatic State Discourages Clientelism
2015-16
Constitution Making and Un-Making: Democratic Reform, Past and Present
Robinson Woodward-Burns (Political Science, UPenn)
Experience Must Be Our Only Guide: Constitutional Decentralization and Instability at the American Founding
Jan Smolenski (Politics, The New School)
Semi-Federalism, Multi-Stage Constituent Process, and Diffused Popular Sovereignty: The Principles and Implications of the Making of 1780 Constitution in Massachusetts
Saving Democracy? Economic and Technological Answers to Political Problems
Alexander Arnold (History, NYU)
Democratic Economic Governance in an Era of Crisis: The Limits and Possibilities of the Economic Thought of the French New Left
Ashley Gorham (Political Science, UPenn)
The Well-Informed Citizen: A Critique
States of Surveillance
Tali Ziv (Anthropology, UPenn)
“It be hard just existing”: Affective Precarity and Institutional Surveillance in Philadelphia's Inner-city
Alex Hazanov (History, UPenn)
Foreign Visitors in the Late Soviet Union, the KGB and the Limits of Surveillance
Beyond Borders: Citizenship, National Belonging and the Law
Allison Powers Useche (History, Columbia University)
The Standard of Civilization on Trial at the US Mexico Claims Commission, 1923-1937
Elspeth Wilson (Political Science, UPenn)
Islands of Civic Exclusion: Puerto Rico, U.S.Global Imperialism, and the Insular Cases”
Immigration: Economics, Policy, and Politics
Sarah Coleman (History, Princeton)
“To reward the wrong way is not the American way”: Welfare, Immigrants’ Rights and the Battle over Benefits 1990 -1997
Alberto Ciancio (Economics, UPenn)
The Economics of Local Immigration Enforcement in the United States
Experts, Ideas, and Policy
Negar Razavi (Anthro, UPenn)
“Off the Record and in the Loop”: An Ethnography of the Washington Foreign Policy Establishment
Kristian Taketomo (History, UPenn)
Urbanization as Development: Modernization and “The City” in Postwar America
Political Economies and the State
Emma Teitelman (History, UPenn)
Mining for Sovereignty in the Civil-War West
Sid Rothstein (Political Science, UPenn)
The Constitution of Employer Discretion
Ideologies of Race and Slavery
Westenley Alcenat (History, Columbia University)
Between Slaves and Citizens: Free Blacks and the Transformation of Citizenship in the Age of Revolutions, 1776-1840
Dani Holtz (History, UPenn)
Who are the True Conservatives?
Health Care and Civic Belonging
Matthew Kavanagh (Poli Sci, UPenn)
Constitutionalizing Health: Rights, Democracy & Public Policy in South Africa
Ashley Tallevi (Poli Sci, UPenn)
Out of Sight, Out of Mind? Measuring the Effects of Privatization on Medicaid Self-Reporting
2014-15
Punishment and the State
Sarah Cate (Political Science, UPenn)
Possibilities for Decarceration: Juvenile Justice Reform in California
Robert Hoffman (Philosophy, UPenn)
A History of Violence: Distinguishing War and Punishment in Liberal States
Empire and State Building on the North American Frontier
Lori Daggar (Penn History)
Beyond Paternalism: Native Nations, Missionaries, and the Making of American Empire in Indian Country
Brendan Gillis (Indiana University, Dept. of History)
Policing Beyond Law: Local Jurisdiction and Imperial Expansion in British America, 1740-1765
Popular Expression and Political Parties
James Ryan (History, Penn)
The Anatomy of a Riot: Political Violence, the Birth of Multiparty Politics and the Destruction of Tan Press, December 4, 1945
Mark Schneider (Political Science, Columbia)
Does Clientalism Work? A Test of Guessability in India
Educating the Citizen
Chad D. Frazier (History, Georgetown University)
A School for Citizens, Not Just Civil Servants: The U.S. Colonial State and the Early Years of the University of Puerto Rico, 1903-1917
Daniel Moak (Political Science, University of Pennsylvania)
The Liberal Roots of the Punitive Education State
Reconstruction and the Limits of Freedom
Samuel Davis (Temple University History)
Martial Manhood Citizenship, Suffrage, and the Un-Reconstructed North in Pennsylvania, 1862-1870
Kevin Waite (Penn History)
California Redeemed: The Retreat from Reconstruction in the Far West
Defining Citizenship in Consolidating Regimes
Thomas Brinkerhoff (History, University of Pennsylvania)
Creating Future Peronists Through Sports: The Campeonatos Evita and the Political Socialization of Children
Alexandra Wiktorek Sarlo (Political Science, University of Pennsylvania)
Identity, Integration,and Citizenship in Post-Communist Ethnic Kin Policies
Reforming the Carceral State
Ellen Donnelly (Penn Political Science)
The Political Emergence of Racial Disparity Reforms in the U.S.
Melanie Newport (Temple University History)
"Nobody Ever Wins in a Jail”: The Master Plan and Outcomes of Federal Funding for Jail Construction in the 1970s
Authoritarianism
Meir Walters (Georgetown, Dept. of Government)
Censorship as a Populist Project: The Case of Post-Mubarak Egypt
Basak Taraktas (Penn Political Science)
Building Societal Support in Post-Revolutionary Regimes
(Dis)Integrating Migration
Smita Ghosh (Penn History)
Losing Control of Our Borders: Immigration Detention in the 1970s and 1980s
Osman Balkan (Penn Political Science)
The Graves of Berlin
2013-14
Memories of Wars Past: Constructing Identities in and through Conflict
Omar Al-Ghazzi (Penn Anenberg School):
“Time to Move Forward”: The Memory of Omar al-Mukhtar in the 2011 Libyan Uprising
Steven White (Political Science, Columbia):
For Democracy and a Caste System? World War II, Race, and Democratic Inclusion in the United States
Laboring for the American Government While Being Denied Basic Rights
James Jones (Sociology, Columbia):
Black Capitol: A History of Racial Stratification and Segregation in the U.S. Congressional Workforce
A. Hope McGrath (Penn History):
"A Slave in Uncle Sam’s Service”: The Army and the Problem of Labor in the Gilded Age
Colonial Legacies and the (Non) Transformation of Coercive State Institutions
Emma Hayward (Penn Political Science):
Customary Law and Group Rights: The Incomplete Centralization of Tanzania's Post-Colonial Judiciary
Radha Kumar (History, Princeton):
The Many Lives of Custodial Violence: Madras Presidency, c. 1860-1960
Engaging the State: Revolt in the MIddle East and Protest in China
Ian M. Hartshorn (Penn Political Science):
Worker's Revolutions and Worker's Constitutions: Egypt and Tunisia in Comparison
Yao Li (Sociology, Johns Hopkins):
Informal Norms and Protest Space in China
Theoretical Approaches to Injustice
Robert Hoffman (Penn Philosophy):
Kant on Constitutional Rebellion and Conscientious Objection
Mark William Westmoreland (Philosophy; Theology and Religious Studies, Villanova):
Feminist Transversal Politics and Political Solidarity
Governable Bodies? Children and the Mentally Ill As Objects of Citizenship and Criminality
Jessica Cooper (Anthropology, Princeton)
Defending Dignity: The Shift from Legal to Moral Authorizations of Power in the San Francisco Behavioral Health Court
Laura Soderberg (English, UPenn)
Vicious Infants: Child Citizenship and the Rise of Incorrigible Criminality in the Antebellum U.S.
(De)Commodifying Politics: Voting and Money in India and the U.S.
Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer (Political Science, CUNY)
The Boss’s “Brains”: Political Capital, Democratic Commerce and the New York Tweed Ring, 1868-1871
Emmerich Davies (Political Science, UPenn)
The Competing State: Using a Downstream Experiment to Understand the Effects of Service Privatization on Citizen Engagement in South India
Uncovering Women's Stories in Healthcare and in the Military
Beth Hallowell (Anthropology, UPenn)
From Co-Payments to Rent Payments: Value and Vulnerability in the Grey Economy of U.S. Healthcare
Natalie Shibley (Africana Studies & History, UPenn)
Black Print Media and Representations of Women in the Military, 1941-1993
2012-13
National Identity and Citizenship: The Formation and contestation of Civic Allegiance in the early U.S. and Korea
Jonathan W. Wilson (History, Syracuse):
How to Make an American in the Early Republic: Some Notes on the Limits of State, Structure, and Strife
Yumi Lee (Penn English):
Detention, Repatriation, Humanitarianism: On the Korean War POW in Ha Jin’s War Trash
Testing the Parameters of Democracy: Nationalism, Discord, and the Role of Political Speech
Joanna Kenty (Classical Studies, Penn):
Freedom and Speech: Oratory and Democracy in Ancient Rome
Alison Novak (Culture and Communications, Drexel):
How [Not] to Caffeinate a Political Group: Parent Post Influence on Conversational Network Structure
The Suffering Subject: Violence, Citizenship, and the Law
Thomas Dichter (Penn English):
Civil Whiteness: Legitimate Violence and the Literature of Lynching
Tina Shrestha (Anthropology, Cornell):
Asylum Narrations: Documentation, Imagination, and the Ethnography of Citizenship
Equality for all Subjects: Deconstructing Gendered Barriers to Civic Participation"
Samah Elhajibrahim (Penn Political Science):
Citizenship in the Absence of a State and Republican Motherhood in the Absence of a Republic
Chelsea Szendi-Schieder (History, Columbia):
Ruination of the Nation by Co-Eds: Women in Higher Education in the High Growth Period in Japan
Constitutional Development and Inequality The Role of Judges and the Paradox of Sovereignty
Stephan Stohler (Penn Political Science & Law):
Judicial Behavior and the Politics of Equal Rights: Evidence from South Africa”
Christina McElderry (Politics, New School):
Space, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Paradoxes of American Constitutionalism
Crime and Insecurity: The Role of Violence and the Construction of Marginal Citizenship
Zain Lakhani (Penn History):
“Why Don't You Just Ask?”: Date Rape Debates and the Meaning of ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ in the Antioch College Sexual Offense Prevention Policy, 1985-1994
Yanilda Gonzalez (Politics and Social Policy, Princeton):
Citizenship in an Era of Insecurity: Crime, Violence, and the Implications of Democracy
Redefining and Rethinking Democratic Participation
David Bateman (Penn Political Science):
Redefining the People: Understandings of Political Community and the Politics of the Right to Vote in 19th Century France and the United Kingdom
Jingchao Ma (Philosophy, Villanova):
Rethinking Democracy of Participation and the Desire Not to Appear
Education and Reform
Nick Juravich (History, Columbia)
Opportunity of a Lifetime: Paraprofessionals and the UFT in New York City, 1966-1978
Leya Mathew (Penn GSE)
Negotiating Public Good in 'Zones of Awkward Engagement': Education Reforms in Kerala
2011-12
“Surface Mining, Public Health, and Human Suffering in Central Appalachia (1960-1990)”
Merlin Chowkwanyun (History & Public Health, UPenn)
“One Vision: Latino Political Identity and Spanish Language Television News”
Mara Cecilia Ostfeld (Political Science, UPenn)
“Democratic Authority and the Obligation to Obey the Law”
Doug Weck (Philosophy & Law, UPenn)
“Communities of Practice and Cultural Historical Activity Theory as Theoretical Frameworks for the Analysis of Service Learning and Civic Engagement”
Christopher Pupik-Dean (Education, UPenn)
“Financing the Korean War: How the Fear of Inflation and Support for the War Created an Anomaly in United States’ History”
Rosella Capella (Political Science, UPenn)
“Overturning the White Male Republic: The Early Republican Party and the Equal Suffrage Movement”
David Bateman (Political Science, UPenn)
“When I Get My Ax"’: Visions of Community in Civil War Refugee Camps”
Abby Cooper (History, UPenn)
“The Equitable Role Explanation of Political Obligation”
Chris Melenovsky (Philosophy, UPenn)
“Cohen’s Interpersonal Test and Managers’ Political Imperative to Provide Public Goods”
Gaston de los Reyes (Ethics and Legal Studies, UPenn)
“With One Definition, Two Groups: Tracing the Inception of Hindu Nationalism and Its Inflexible Exclusion of Muslims in India”
Aliya Rao (Sociology, Upenn)
“Today's Youth, Tomorrow's Leaders?: Changes in Civic and Political Engagement Attitudes across Immigrant Generations”
Radha Modi (Sociology, Upenn)
“Populist Democracy and the Problems of Indian Subjects in the Seventeenth Century English Empire”
Matthew Kruer (History, UPenn)
“Republican Deliberation: Debate and Democracy in the Republican Visions of Skinner and Pettit”
Noah Rosenblum (History, Columbia)
“The Art of Invisible Governance in Progressive Banking Reform: Paul Warburg and the Origins of the Federal Reserve”
Eric Phillips (History, Temple)
“Polecats in the Lion's Den? Rethinking Hobbes on Democracy”
Jay Mikelman (Philosophy, Boston University)
“What Kind of Nation?: Deportation in U.S. History and Policy.”
Adam Goodman (History, UPenn)
“Seeking Asylum, Finding Chaos: The Refugee Act and the Crisis of 1980”
Carly Goodman (History, Temple)
“From Pulpit to Party: The Evolution of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers' Strategy.”
Sarah Salwen (Political Science, UPenn)
“States and Women's Rights in Central Asia”
Danielle Kane (Duke) and Ksenia Gorbenko (Sociology, UPenn)
2010-2011
"Slavery and the Politics of the 5th Amendment's Takings Clause"
Stephan Stohler (Political Science, UPenn)
"The Significance of Jeremiah Evarts on John Marshall's Federal Indian Law Decisions, Cherokee Nation (1831) and Worcester (1832)"
Nancy Morgan (History, Temple)
"The Role of Official History in the Construction of Citizenship and National Identity in Turkey
Meral Ugur Cinar (Political Science, UPenn)
"Dangers to Democratization: Military Responses to Constitutional Changes of Leadership in Africa"
Kristen Harkness (Political Science, Princeton)
"'It Sticks Like a Shadow': Relations of Comity in Aves v Commonwealth and Benito Cereno"
Rachel Banner (English, UPenn)
"Monochrome Lexicality and 'Islam is (not) Peace'“
Murad Idris (Political Science, UPenn)
"American Social Movements and the Nonprofit Sector: Trends in Institutionalization from 1989-2008”
Matt Mongiello (Political Science, UPenn)
"In Search of an Absolute Majority: Richard Nixon, Desegregation, the Southern Strategy, and the Path to Equal Citizenship”
Dov Grohsgal (History, Princeton)
"You Can't Control Me!: Cultivating Authority in a Struggling Urban High School”
Erika Kitzmiller (Education, UPenn)
"Citizenship and Democracy as Membership and Participation”
Elizabeth M. Lee (Sociology, UPenn)
"American Democracy and the Peacetime Military Establishment in the United States: 1815-1848”
John L. Dwiggins (History, UPenn)
"Exile, Ancient and Modern?”
Briana McGinnis (Government, Georgetown)
"Writing their own History of the Present: The Role of Contentious Political Discourse in the Internet Public Sphere during the 2008 Candelight Protests in South Korea”
Kyung Chloe Lee (Communication, UPenn)
"Government, Newspapers, and Crime: The Perception of Crime in Phoenix, Arizona, 1970-1980”
Anthony Pratcher, II (History, UPenn)
"Explaining the Emergence of Modern Incorporation”
Alexander Jerneck (Sociology, UPenn)
"Staff and Coherence in a Social Service Contractor”
Greg Harris (Sociology, UPenn)
"Synthesizing the Republic: Political Culture in France 1876-1880”
Heather Bennett (History, UPenn)
"'A Republic Without a Pub is a Relic': Litigating Prohibition in Nehru's India”
Rohit De (History, Princeton)
2009-2010
Racial Codes of the City
Charles Davis (Art History, UNC Chapel Hill):
The Postwar Postscripts of Collage City: Exploring the rhetorical integrations of race and geometry in “Contextualism,” 1963-1978
Khadijah White (Penn Communications):
BANGCLASH: Belongingness and the Harlem Drummers
Beloging Everywhere and Nowhere: Contested Citizenships in South Asia and North America
Eranda Jayawickreme (Psychology):
The War’s Over, but the Troubles Remain: Psychological Constraints on Prospects for Reconciliation in A Post-LTTE Sri Lanka
Sarah Dowling (English):
“And if O Cidadán is a girl / O girls my countries / It is citizenship’s acts I dream of”: The Citizen of Erin Mouré's O Cidadán
Debating International Development: Discourse and Ethics
Rosalyn Daitch (Intercultural Communication):
Framing International Development Discourse: Embedded and Imbibed Difference
Andrew Hao (Anthropology):
Ethical Exceptions in China and Singapore: Emerging Shifts in Territoriality and Citizenship through Business Ethics
Genealogies of Citizenship: Early Modern Constructions of Political Belonging
Cristina Pangilinan (English, UPenn):
Re-inventing London Citizenship in Thomas Usk's The Testament of Love
Murad Idris (Political Science, UPenn):
Erasmus on Christian Peace: Counting, Miscounting, and Discounting the Turk
Contentious Constitutions
Vanessa Mongey (History, UPenn):
“Chimera of the Wildest Nature”: Failed Revolutions and Stillborn Constitutions in Early America
N. Turkuler Isiksel (Political Science, Yale University):
The Constitution as “Mere Machinery”: A Theory of Europe's Supranational Constitutionalism
Civic Forms and Civic Acts
Julia Bloch (English, UPenn):
Voices of the Immense: Lorine Niedecker's Polyphonic Poetics of Belonging
Adam Goodman (History, UPenn)
Defining and Inculcating “The Soul of America”: The Bureau of Naturalization and the Americanization Movement, 1914-1919
Education and Citizenship in Liberal-Democratic States
Dana Dawson (Social and Political Thought, York University, and Adjunct Faculty, Temple):
Democratization and Aboriginal Education in 19th-century Upper Canada
Jeehyun Lim (English, UPenn)
Re-imagining Citizenship Through Bilingualism: The Migrant Bilingual Child in Helen María Viramontes’s Under the Feet
E pluribus unum? The Many Voices of the Media
Daniel Ryan Morse (English, Temple):
Only Connecting?: E. M. Forster and Empire Broadcasting”
Piotr Szpunar (Communication, UPenn):
Let Me Interrupt! or, Ethics after Ethical Violence: Rethinking Levinas, Ethics and News Media
2008-2009
Information, Deliberation, and Oversight
C. Daniel Myers (Political Science, Princeton)
Information Sharing and Democratic Deliberation
Meredith Wooten (Political Science, UPenn)
Overlooked or Out of Sight? Congressional Oversight of Intelligence, 1945-2000
"Schools of Citizenship: Allegiance, Obligation and State Formation in the Confederate Army, 1861-65”
Erik Mathisen (History, UPenn)
“Locating a Short Lived Authoritarian State in Postcolonial India”
Sourabh Singh (Sociology, Rutgers)
"Love Stops at the Border: Marriage, Citizenship, and the Mail-Order Bride Industry”
Anne-Marie D’Aoust (Political Science, UPenn)
Alternative Spaces of Participation and Deliberation
Andaiye Qaasim (Music, UPenn):
Keny Arkana: Hip-Hop Activism through Cosmopolitan Routes
Carolyn Chernoff (GSE, UPenn):
Towards an Urban Arts Democracy
"Degrees of Belonging and Graduated Rights: Immigrants and Immigration Policy in the American States”
Alexandra Filindra (Political Science, Rutgers University)
"Deliberation, Disagreement, and Opinion Strength: Processes Underlying Mobilization to Collective Action”
Magdalena Wojcieszak (Annenberg School, UPenn)
"Those About To Die Salute You': Sacrifice, The War In Iraq, And The Crisis Of The American Imperial Society”
Florian Olsen (Political Studies, University of Ottawa)
Discussant: Anna Foy, English Department, UPenn
“The Tutelary Empire: State and Nation-Building in the Nineteenth Century U.S.”
Stefan Heumann (Political Science, UPenn)
Discussant: Matt Karp (History, UPenn)
2007-2008
"Authoring (In)Authenticity, Regulating Religious Tolerance: the Legal and Political Implications of Anti-Conversion Legislation for Indian Secularism"
Jennifer Coleman (Political Science, UPenn)
Discussant: Sourabh Singh (Sociology, Rutgers)
"Establishing a Democratic Religion: Metaphysics and Democracy in the Debates Over the President's Commission on Higher Education"
Ethan Schrum, (History, UPenn)
"Diversity and the Public Sphere"
Ryan Muldoon (Philosophy, UPenn)
Discussant: Katherina Glac (Legal Studies and Business Ethics, Wharton)
"The University at the New Frontier: The Expansion of Higher Education and the Origins of the Student Movements of 1968 in France, Germany and Italy"
Ben Mercer (History, University of Pennsylvania
Discussant: Stefan Heumann (Political Science, Penn)
Indigenous Populations, Citizenship and Constitutionalism in Latin America
Christopher J. Fromherz (Law, UPenn):
Indigenous Peoples' Courts: Egalitarian Juridical Pluralism, Self-Determination, and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
Meredith Staples (Political Science, Rutgers):
Mexico, Indigenous Peoples and Citizenship
"American Legal Pragmatism and Jim Crow"
Hannah Wells (English, UPenn)
"Luck, Responsibility, and Equality in Global Justice"
Mark Navin (Philosophy, UPenn)
"Synthetic Slaves and the Living Dead: Rethinking Civil Death, the Thirteenth Amendment and Felon Disenfranchisement"
Luca Follis (New School for Social Research)
The Judiciary, the Law and Democracy
Phillip Buckley (Graduate School of Education, UPenn):
Critical Citizens or Loyal Citizens: Exploring the Role of Ideology in Student Speech Rights Cases
Claire (Seon Hye) Lim (Economics, UPenn):
Turnover and Accountability of Appointed and Elected Judges