Scholars 2018-19

Dorian Bell's book-in-progress, Planetary Prejudices: Race, Migration, and Technology in the New Global Order, examines how contemporary upheavals like migration and populism are reconfiguring racisms in Europe, the U.S., and South Africa. He also explores how social media is inducing us to rethink the relationship between structural racism and individual prejudice.

Mabel Berezin researches challenges to democratic cohesion and solidarity in Europe and the United States. The author of Illiberal Politics in Neoliberal Times and Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Inter-war Italy, she will work on a monograph on the resurgence of extreme nationalism in contemporary Europe.

How did the environment become visible, factual, and operable? To a striking degree, the specific crisis the environment realized, the forms of responsibility it authorized, and the analytic horizons it routinized all bear the imprint of hydrocarbon afterlives. David Bond’s project describes this process and its implications for theory and people today.

Robin Celikates works on a book that develops a critical theory of "democratizing disobedience." His research aims to bridge the gap between the commitment of critical theory to be grounded in social struggles and the undertheorized transformative potential of civil disobedience in response to the structural shortcomings of liberal democracies.

Hae Yeon Choo's research project examines the politics of land ownership in contemporary South Korea, delving into macro-level political contestations over land rights, together with the narratives of people who pursue class mobility through real estate speculation. The project asks how the paradox of democratic citizenship emerges alongside deepening economic inequality.

Rodrigo Cordero's research is situated in the intersection of critical theory, political sociology and conceptual history. His current project studies how society becomes an object of critique and intervention in moments of constitutional creation, and explores the material force of concepts in constitutional struggles to define the form of social life.

A critical social history of the Palestinians through the social lives of stone. The project attempts to decolonize and globalize the Palestinian experience by interrogating the meanings of indigeneity, peoplehood, and statelessness as embedded in the material and discursive forces of everyday life.

In his research project, Andreas Eckert argues that the history of different labor forms in Africa - as well as how they were categorized in much of the historiography of the continent - have a great deal to offer by way of lessons to a history of global labor in critically engaging with the idea of the North Atlantic as "normal" and the rest as "exceptional."

Martin Hartmann's project focuses on the impact of various forms of inequality on people’s ability to criticize unjustifiable inequalities. It thus aims to supplement recent studies on inequality that seldom pose the question as to why the evidence of the data does not translate into larger forms of social unrest or protest. It further seeks to continue and deepen the egalitarianism debate in philosophy that has somehow come to an end without bringing the conceptual insights to a more practical level. Finally, it situates itself within the tradition of Critical Theory in seeking to develop an analytical tool for describing people’s inability to critically relate their socio-economic situation to that of other social strata.

Murad Idris will be writing a book on constructions of Islam in language across political theory and popular discourse. The project explores the genealogies of claims such as “Islam means submission,” “Islam is peace,” and “Islam needs a Luther,” appeals to the etymology of the word islām, and the political imaginations that make Islam into a subject.

The critique of emotional subjectivity must tiptoe between internal and external critiques, what Eva Illouz calls post-normative critique. Based on the view that emotions and economic activities are normally intertwined, this research project evaluates critically the moral norm of emotional authenticity as it has been fashioned by consumer culture.

The aim of Rahel Jaeggi's project is to conceptually develop the idea of a normative-functional crisis, as it is related to the normative-functional "grammar" of life forms, their possible erosion and decline, and to apply the concept by analyzing social conflicts and crises within contemporary societies.

Michael Kazin is writing an analytical history of the U.S. Democratic Party, focusing on its organization, constituency, and ideology.

Munira Khayyat's research revolves around life in war. She is writing a book entitled A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Survival in South Lebanon that examines meshworks of collaborative, multi-species survival, or the various ways of propagating and sustaining life that blooms in violent spaces and conditions considered adverse or deadly.

Ji Li's research explores a wide range of topics including Chinese judicial politics, state-business relations, conflict resolution in transnational contexts, the expansion of emerging market economies and its institutional impacts in host countries. He is currently working on a book that offers a unified theory for analyzing judicial behavior in China.

In Toward a Political and Intellectual History of Poverty in Contemporary Uruguay, Aldo Marchesi focuses on the ways in which the series of economic crises changed intellectual and political views on inequality and poverty. To study those views he will examine political parties, intellectuals, civil society, and international organisms that participated in those debates.

Clara Mattei’s research contributes to the history of capitalism, exploring the critical relation between economic ideas and technocratic policy making. She is currently working on her book project called Economic Crisis and Technocratic Repression: On the Origins and Rationality of Austerity.

Greta Wagner's study examines normative orientations on the part of volunteers engaged in refugee support in rural Germany, where villages until 2015 still often displayed complete ethnic and cultural homogeneity. She is interested in questions about the modes of help, their affective sources, normative pitfalls, and the critical practices connected with them.

Sophie Wahnich is working on the role of emotions in the construction of social bonds in a past/present relationship. She proposes to compare our anxiety today in front of "hyperbolic doubt" to the one arising in the 17th and 18th centuries with the emergence of a plurality of creeds. Historical anthropology of rituals and of the sacred will be of special focus this year.

Jessica Winegar's book project, Counter-Revolutionary Aesthetics: How Egypt’s Uprising Faltered, examines how aesthetic forms, judgments, and practices play a central role in both delegitimizing revolutionary movements and in producing everyday right-wing attachments. It is part of her larger scholarly work on art and cultural politics in the Middle East.

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.

Chitralekha Dhamija describes certain historical particularities to surveillance, and resistance in (Indian) Kashmir. Drawing from years of ethnography in amongst its most troubled districts, she examines ways in which contemporary discourses (and erasures) in both physical and digital spaces negotiate reflexivities of self, politics, and modes of resistance.

Gregor Dobler is writing on the critical potential of otium: moments during which we escape a focus on productivity. In ethnographic descriptions of everyday activities, he shows how people try to escape sheer productivity. Experiences of otium, of being at liberty, can become socially and politically effective and lay the grounds for an emic critique of alienation.

Dora Isabel Herrador-Valencia's research interests have mainly focused on human geography, and include rural development and the environment in Latin America through participatory approaches. Recently she has been interested in the mitigation based on adaptation to climate change, an interesting approach which emphasizes adaptation strategies by small scale farmers in tropical landscapes.

Jennifer Petersen is working on a history of how media technologies have changed what constitutes the “speech” in free speech law. The project shows how changes in media technologies, from silent film to computer code, have transformed the way that legal practitioners understand communication, ultimately enabling the inclusion of diverse objects and actions within the legal guarantee of freedom of speech.

Neryvia Pillay Bell's research focuses on the ways in which government policies can reduce inequality by influencing individual outcomes, with a particular focus on education. She is especially interested in how the interaction between resources and identity formation shapes the effectiveness of policy.

Eugene Richardson is a physician-anthropologist who uses biosocial approaches to explore prevention, containment, and treatment of epidemic disease in sub-Saharan Africa. He is currently writing a book examining the role discursive power in propagating infectious disease outbreaks.

Achim Vesper's project discusses the question of whether the idea of moral objectivity can be reconstructed within the frameworks of moral constructivism and moral constitutivism. The aim is to show that moral constructivism is a project worth defending as long as it is completed by certain aspects of moral realism.

Deborah J. Yashar’s research has addressed the study of regime politics, state capacity, ethnic movements, and violence – themes related to efforts to deepen and/or subvert citizenship. Next year, she will start research on urban politics, housing, and ethnic enclaves/segregation in the developing world. While her primary area of research has been Latin America, this current project is broadly comparative.