Scholars 2016-17

A leading contemporary critical theorist, with a particular interest in punishment regimes, political economy, and critical theory, Bernard E. Harcourt is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought at Columbia University, and directeur d’études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author, most recently, of Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Harvard University Press 2015) and The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Harvard University Press 2011). He is also an active death penalty lawyer, currently representing inmates sentenced to death and to life imprisonment without parole in Alabama.

This project offers a major reconsideration of international politics by analyzing Palestinian engagement with an oft-deployed but rarely studied global governance technology: the investigative commission. Commissions reveal a great deal about political epistemologies, the social processes and categories by which proof and evidence are produced and mobilized in political claim-making, and offer a lens onto systems of political thought and global institutions through which Palestinian worthiness to self-rule has been debated and evaluated. Based on ethnographic interviews and archival research, the project analyzes six commissions convened in Palestine over the past century. In historicizing the ways in which Palestinians have engaged developmentalism, humanitarian sensibilities, the UN, and human rights law as contested fields of power through commissions, I show how they have functioned as a liberal colonial device—one that operates on a pretense to consultation, fostering a belief in the existence of a global moral community guided by reason.

Lalaie Ameeriar's current research explores the relationship between women's rights, human rights and humanitarianism through an analysis of legal protections involving cases of forced marriage and so called honor killings within Muslim communities in the United Kingdom. This research examines the disjunction between the law and the community and between human rights and humanitarianism, particularly where these coalesce within discourses regarding women’s rights in marginalized communities.

Fadi A. Bardawil investigates the traditions of intellectual inquiry, practices of public criticism, and modalities of political engagement of contemporary Arab intellectuals, both at home and in the diaspora. In doing so, he tracks the international circulation of theoretical discourses, their translations and political appropriations. His current project examines the high tides and ebbing away of Leftist revolutionary thought and practice in the Levant.

Following the completion of the Human Genome Project, private companies and public initiatives have busily sought to parse the small portion of the genome that differs across populations. My project investigates the relationship between science, law, and society in the wake of new genomic sovereignty policies that restrict foreign access to a population’s genetic information—South African DNA, Indian DNA, and Mexican DNA among others. Are such developments a misguided reassertion of nationalism, an empowering example of postcolonial science policy, or something else entirely? In addressing this question, I draw upon in-depth interviews, participant observation, and a mixed archive of documents and media to examine how genomic knowledge circulates across three main sites—government initiatives, private enterprises, and subaltern mobilization. Whereas social scientists are trained to be wary about the resurgence of biological determinism, I argue that genomics is powerful and problematic due to its epistemic agility (making competing knowledge claims) and normative dexterity (asserting conflicting political claims), rather than its strict enforcement of hierarchy.

How does torture persist worldwide? Positing that torture is not just a problem of instrumentality, I aim to understand the political arrangements by virtue of which it exists. While at the Institute, I will be working on theoretical explanations, and bringing them into dialogue with Southeast Asian case studies.

In recent years, statistics, probability, and quantitative evidence more generally have become increasingly common in criminal trials. My project examines the use of statistics and probability in criminal trials as a lens to think about the fair trial, the right to a defense, and the requirement that guilt be established beyond a reasonable doubt.

Andrew Dilts is a political theorist who works primarily on the relationships between race, sexuality, political membership, sovereignty, and punishment in the United States. His current project traces how contemporary white supremacy in the United States is not a contingent aspect of political ideology and legal practice, but rather is built into the core of the neoliberal subjectivity and techniques of government that presume an idealized "free" subject. In response, they offer an account of how we might better question, resist, and ultimately destroy white supremacist and hetero-patriarchal institutions and practices drawing on the tradition of abolitionist movements in the United States and, in particular, the work of queer and trans prison abolitionists.

Karen Engle is a legal scholar specializing in international human rights law and advocacy, particularly as they intersect with women’s rights and indigenous rights movements. Her current project critically maps the relatively recent turn to criminal law in human rights, situating it in the post-Cold War, neoliberal era in which it has emerged.

What explains violent display? By violent display, I mean a coordinated, collective effort to stage violence for others to see, gaze upon, or take in. Violent displays occur across different contexts and involve a range of actors, from soldiers and police to ordinary men, women, and children. Examples include spectacle lynchings in the U.S., the videotaped beheadings by the Islamic State, and the sexual tortures perpetrated at Abu Ghraib. To maximize theoretical insight into violent display, the project uses a "most different system" design. It compares three episodes that occurred in divergent contexts: a massacre of civilian men during the Bosnian war; the lynching of a black man during Jim Crow; and the killing of a prominent family during the Rwandan genocide. The theoretical focus is on the pathways and mechanisms that are similar across the three sites, while analytic attention is on the contextual layers that shaped the local process through which the violence unfolded. Data come from over one hundred interviews that I conducted in the rural communities where the episodes took place. Additional data come from primary sources, including local newspaper accounts, police records and affidavits, and trial transcripts.

Vanja Hamzić is looking into the ways the law relates to human subjectivity formation, especially with regard to various historical and present-day Muslim gender-variant communities. He is interrogating praxis and insurrectionary vernacular knowledge as broad analytical categories, applicable to modes of resistance to formal justice systems.

David Kazanjian is examining dispossession in colonial New England and Yucatán. Focusing on court cases of indentured and enslaved Afro-diasporans, he considers how racial capitalism works not simply to take possessions like labor and land from exploited subjects, but also to possess or invest such subjects with racial being, and how Afro-diasporans responded by repurposing race. These cases also urge us to revise contemporary theories of accumulation by dispossession by unsettling foundationalist understandings of ownership.

My current project examines the hitherto underexplored nexus of migration, religion, and nation-states, focusing on the asylum-seeking of unauthorized migrants on religious grounds. Drawing on multisited ethnographic research, I situate asylee-making in the regime of "probationary citizenship" of contemporary immigration states, in which various state and non-state actors mobilize multiple, and often mutually contradictory, understandings of the "redeemability" of unauthorized migrants.

Sida Liu’s theoretical interests focus on understanding the social processes that produce the shape of social spaces. His current empirical project uses the case of lawyer mobilization in China to examine the ecology of political activism. Meanwhile, he is also writing an essay tracing the theoretical lineage of social space in the Chicago School tradition.

Allegra McLeod’s current research focuses broadly on efforts to radically reform criminal and immigration law enforcement. One current project critically engages the globalization of U.S. crime control initiatives and a second project explores prison abolitionist movements, which aim to end the racialized brutality of U.S. carceral practices.

Reuben Jonathan Miller’s research examines life at the intersection of punishment and social welfare policy. His project, an ethnography of prisoner reentry in Chicago and Detroit, demonstrates how emergent techniques of state and third-party supervision have transformed citizenship, activism, public health, community, and family life in this carceral age.

I am interested in ways that markets and states shape the dynamics of poverty and inequality. My project this year focuses on blurring lines between profit-driven business and socially-driven investment. The project describes the contradictions and opportunities created by this blurring, and what they imply for economic theory.

This comparative study of five case studies from Africa undertakes an examination of articulations and clashes between liberal rule of law and local norms through an analysis of three main instances: a) sites of access to justice and locales of dispute resolution; b) post-conflict contexts and transitional justice; and c) land property, disputes and juridico-political imaginations on land. The project centers on the historical trajectory and current predicament of the figure of the postcolonial citizen in the context of the striking resurgence, over the past three decades, of customary law, "autochthony" politics, and figures of traditional juridical authority. The main research question is: how are liberal African democratic regimes of rule of law inflected by the resilience and revitalization of customary norms, and the force and legitimacy of local figures of traditional juridico-political power?

Ayşe Parla will be completing her book, which explores the significance of law in producing anxious hope as a structure of feeling among Bulgarian Turkish migrants, a migrant group that possesses relative privilege within the migrant landscape in Turkey. She is interested in a legal anthropology of emotions to address how anxious hope is sustained through historical-legal legacy and contemporary regulations, and circulated among migrants through their encounters with law’s informal manifestations.

Peter Redfield is exploring humanitarian design and efforts to create innovative devices in response to disaster and poverty globally. His research focuses on conceptions of human needs and ethical responsibilities. He is interested in the politics of technology, particularly questions of scale and accountability beyond state administered infrastructure.

A sharp legal inflection marks post-Arab Spring politics in Egypt from its next door siblings, and sets off my book project to chronicle and interrogate the role of legal professionals and their disciplinary logic in the country’s failed revolution, where the "rule of law" emerges since 2011 as both cause and casualty of authoritarianism.

Amy Borovoy works on regimes of social care in postwar Japanese democracy, including family and corporate welfare. She is interested in how the advance of life-extending medical technology affects basic ideas about family obligations. At the Institute she will focus on the issue of live kidney donation, where transplant protocols describe organ donation as "non-reciprocal" and altruistic, but Japanese ethical guidelines limit live donation to within families and cope with pressure to meet demands for organs in a super-aging society.

Linda Bosniak is a legal and political theorist who participated last year as a Member of the School during its theme year on "Borders and Boundaries." She returns this year as a Visitor to complete a book called "Justifying Immigrant Justice: Wrongs, Rights, and the Liberal-Statist Imaginary," which examines the structures of normative debate over the status and treatment of unauthorized immigrants in liberal destination states. These immigrants are concurrently perceived as culpable and vulnerable, and the interplay of these judgments gives rise to sometimes-convoluted political and legal responses to their presence. The book pays particular attention to the way in which these immigrants’ asserted "wrongdoing" against the state is addressed—castigated, elided, defended, or otherwise managed—by various actors, including an increasingly vocal class of irregular immigrants themselves. Overall, the book treats unauthorized migration as one case among others in which growing cross-national movements of persons irrevocably test, and incrementally reconstitute, the insular ethical orders of liberal states.

Anne-Claire Defossez’s current work addresses the question of women’s political participation and representation by exploring the trajectory and experience of women formally involved in politics at local and national levels in France. In particular, she is analyzing how family background and personal history, as well as class, residence, and ethnicity have influenced their engagement, career, and practices in politics.

Patents are widely viewed as essential for research to develop better drugs. Yet independent assessments find that the proliferation of patents since 1980 has not resulted in an increased rate of clinically superior drugs. This challenges the theory of patents and suggests perverse incentives not sufficiently recognized. I plan to investigate and write about non-profit, collaborative models of research based on alternative models and incentives for innovation that appear to minimize commercial biases and develop superior drugs at affordable prices for the two-thirds of the world that live on $10 a day or less, where most hospitalizations and death occur.

Pascal Marichalar's research deals with industrial disease. His current work focuses on contradictions between employment and health in areas that are heavily dependent on polluting and dangerous industries. During his time at the Institute, he will start new fieldwork in an industrial community of New Jersey.

My writing project on New Legal Realism challenges traditional Anglo-American jurisprudence from the vantage of inter- disciplinary and transcultural work in social science. It draws on my previous anthropological linguistic research on the epistemology and language of U.S. law, as well as current work on the discourses of interdisciplinary translation.

Sophie Meunier is a political scientist working on the politics of globalization in the European Union, especially trade and investment policy. At the Institute she plans to start writing her new book project, "Invested in Integration: The European Union and the Politics of Foreign Direct Investment."

My research and writing explore the role that race and migration have played in shaping the contemporary nation-state. My current project, exploring the history of Asian exclusion from white-settler nations, explores the continuity between nineteenth century imperial formations and twentieth century immigration controls.

Yüksel Sezgin’s research deals with pluri-legal religious family laws and human rights. During his residence at the Institute he will work on a book project that examines the relationship between shari‘a and democracy in non-Muslim majority countries by specifically focusing on cases of Israel, Greece, India, and Ghana.

I taught constitutional law and jurisprudence in Beijing for twelve years. During my stay at the Institute, I plan to write a book on China's Human Rights Movement (2003-2016). My research interests include criminal justice, political transition, social movement and political philosophy.