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CUNY Political Science PhD

By akshaul March 23 in Waiting it Out

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Anyone with admission updates from CUNY's PoliSci Phd?

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Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants

2024 Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grantees

The American Political Science Association is pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant (DDRIG) Awardees for 2024. The APSA DDRIG program provides support to enhance and improve the conduct of doctoral dissertation research in political science. Awards support basic research which is theoretically derived and empirically oriented.

• Daniel Baquero-Mendez , New York University
• Alison Boehmer , University of California, San Diego
• Michelle Bueno Vásquez , Northwestern University
• Ian Callison , University of Washington
• Jerome Patrick Cruz , Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Narelle Gilchrist , Princeton University
• Jonas Heering , Georgetown University
• Alyssa Heinze , University of California, Berkeley
• Emily Jackson , Cornell University
• Angie Jo , Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Sarah Elizabeth Jones , Syracuse University
• Margaret Kenney , University of California, Berkeley
• Jiyoung Kim , University of California, Los Angeles
• Brian Leung , University of Washington
• Zikai Li , University of Chicago
• Baruch Malewich , University of Minnesota
• Matthew Martin , University of Texas, Austin
• Nathan Micatka , University of Iowa
• Ayse Busra Topal , University of California, Riverside
• Rebecca Wai , University of Michigan
• Lindsay Walsh , Pennsylvania State University
• Adee Weller , Emory University

Daniel Baquero-Mendez is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics at New York University. His research focuses on elites, state capacity, and development. His dissertation examines the role of elites in state building and their long-term effects on economic development. He argues that, in contexts of high economic inequality, electoral exclusion, and electoral control, the composition of economic elites and the ties between them at the local level are crucial for understanding the variation in the provision of public goods across the territory. Importantly, this variation in state capacity is not only persistent over time, but also has implications for current economic and development opportunities. To test the main argument, Daniel’s dissertation focuses on two countries in Latin America: Ecuador and Peru. In the case of Ecuador, one chapter uses surnames in each locality to assess how diversity within the economic elite affected the provision of public goods in the early 20th century. Another chapter focuses on the case of Peru and examines how changes in the ties between economic elites shape the type of institutions adopted and their influence on the state-building process. To explore these topics, his dissertation relies on quantitative analysis using archival data. Daniel holds a B.A. in Economics from the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador, an M.Res in Economic History from the London School of Economics, and an M.A. in Politics from NYU. Prior to NYU, Daniel was a lecturer in the Department of Economics at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito and worked as a senior economic researcher at the Corporación de Estudios para el Desarrollo (CORDES) in Quito, Ecuador.

Alison Boehmer is a Ph.D. candidate in the political science department at UC-San Diego. Broadly, she studies how work can operate as a form of political control, theoretically and empirically investigating how the structural features of jobs (e.g., the physical organization of workers, incentive schedules, physical demandingness, etc.) condition workers’ ability and willingness to engage in political action within and outside working hours. Her dissertation studies this dynamic in the context of U.S. state prisons. While political science is increasingly interested in the political correlates of the U.S. carceral state—namely, how previous incarceration shapes one’s political activities upon release—insufficient attention has been given to imprisoned people’s political experiences and behaviors while incarcerated. This leaves a shortage in understanding of not only how imprisoned people navigate, survive, and resist the coercive and violent prison context, but also how the prison manages, responds to, coopts, and suppresses political activities to maintain its interests. Alison’s dissertation theoretically develops prison labor as a tactic within prisons’ repertoire of political control, considering how features of jobs (e.g., competition, surveillance, assignment, coercion) construct the strategic environment in which imprisoned people make decisions about political activity. Empirically, she asks “What is the role of prison labor in US state prisons, from the interpretations of both state actors and imprisoned people? (How) Does prison labor facilitate political control over the political activities of imprisoned people?” She studies these questions using fives sources of data produced by state actors and (formerly) imprisoned people: a) Bureau of Justice Statistics “Survey of Prison Inmates” and “Census of State Adult Correctional Facilities”; b) Semi-structured interviews with prison staff and job program administrators; c) State Department of Corrections archives (CA, NY, MN, TX); d) Interviews with formerly imprisoned people, and e) Archives of prison-based newspapers from the “American Prison Newspapers, 1800s-present: Voices from the Inside” archive. She uses interpretive methodology to both empirically ground and interrogate her theory’s assumptions and concept validity, and rigorously evaluate whether and how prisons use labor as a form of political control over imprisoned people. In addition to the APSA DDRIG, her work is generously supported by the UCSD Center for American Politics, the Jacobs Social Impact Summer Fellowship, and the Yankelovich Center. Alison received her bachelor’s degree from Austin College in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics in 2019.

Michelle Alexandra Bueno Vásquez is a rising scholar at Northwestern University, pursuing dual degrees as a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science and a Master’s candidate in Applied Statistics. Specializing in race and ethnic politics, she delves into the nuanced realm of race classification among Latinos and the crucial issue of Afro-Latino statistical visibility. Michelle’s research has not only been groundbreaking but also impactful, earning her recognition in the form of the prestigious Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and as a Council of Race and Ethnic Studies Fellow at Northwestern University. Michelle’s scholarly contributions extend beyond academia. Her insights have been featured in esteemed outlets such as the Washington Post and IL Latino News. Through her research and advocacy, she strives to illuminate the complexities of racial identity, contributing to meaningful discourse that will hopefully lead to strides in minority representation.

Ian Callison is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. In his dissertation, he explores the impact civilians have in the production of political violence against non-combatants. Specifically, he seeks to understand the puzzling presence of Pro-Government Militias (PGMs) across so many civil wars, and why certain human rights abuses are outsourced to PGMs while others are carried out by regular military actors. The use of PGMs is puzzling from a rationalist understanding of political violence, where belligerents engage in civilian abuse to alter the incentives of non-committed civilians. If violence is meant to convey a legible signal, why muddy that signal through the use of militias? Building off the argument that PGMs are capable of providing plausible deniability, he argues that states’ decisions to deploy PGMs is a civilian-driven phenomena, where state leaders weigh potential accountability costs against the strategic gains from violence in an `accountability-effectiveness tradeoff.’

Ian’s dissertation leverages a mixed-methods approach, exploring civilians’ roles in the decision to deploy PGMs at cross-national, individual, and sub-national levels of analysis. Ian will use APSA DDRIG funds to complete an original cross-national dataset measuring coordination between PGMs and official state forces in terms of geography, operations, leadership, membership, and information. Findings from this analysis will be supplemented by a survey experiment in Colombia and sub-national case studies. Prior to his doctoral studies, Ian earned a B.S. in Journalism and an M.A. in Political Science from Central Michigan University.

Jerik Cruz is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose research investigates the political causes and consequences of the global rise of knowledge capitalism. His dissertation, “World Wide Webs: How Diasporas and Open Bureaucracies Forged the Knowledge Economy in the Global South”, examines the governance and policy foundations through which developing countries, like China and India, have emerged as powerhouse exporters of knowledge-based services (e.g. software, AI, scientific services) in recent decades. Employing qualitative, historical, computational, and causal inference methods, his project challenges prevailing political economy accounts favoring the role of developmental states, Weberian bureaucracies, services liberalization, and pro-FDI institutions as key drivers of these structural transformations. The DDRIG will support the development of an original database that will track the evolution of industrial, innovation, and investment policies across over a hundred countries since the end of the Cold War. More broadly, Jerik is involved in research projects that leverage both computational and historical methods to reassess canonical theories in comparative and international political economy, such as those concerning trade politics and state capacity. He is a recipient, among others, of the MIT Presidential Fellowship, the MIT Open Data Prize, and the Pralong Prize for graduate students in Switzerland. He completed his B.A. at Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, and M.A. at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland.

Narrelle Gilchrist is a PhD candidate in the Politics Department at Princeton University. Broadly, her research focuses on prejudice reduction, ethnic politics, and peace-building, with a focus on post-conflict societies. In her dissertation, she examines the role that historical narratives about past violence may play in sustaining ethnic prejudice and considers the implications of (not) teaching about historical violence to schoolchildren in post-conflict countries. Many countries, she highlights, have chosen to downplay or ignore their past ethnic conflicts, in the hopes that individuals will forget about them and move on.  However, it is possible that this policy, instead of making the past disappear, simply allows conflicting, ethnically charged narratives of past violence to spread instead, fueling current prejudices and conflicts. Teaching and discussing past violence, however, is also no guarantee of reconciliation. While talking about the past openly has the potential of encouraging a process of forgiveness, it could also simply lead to a deepening of polarization.

When are ethnic prejudice and historical resentment likely to be sustained and passed down to youth across generations, and when are they likely to be successfully countered or fade away? To answer this question, Narrelle’s dissertation uses an original household survey and field experiment conducted in Nigeria, a country which has rarely taught history in schools in the 50 years since its civil war. She first surveyed over 1300 households, interviewing both parents and children in order to see what narratives about the civil war have spread within families in the absence of formal history education, and how this historical knowledge (or a lack thereof) relates to current prejudice and support for secessionist movements. Using the APSA DDRIG, Narrelle next plans to run a field experiment in partnership with UNESCO, testing the effects of a newly designed history curriculum which aims to reintroduce stories about the civil war into Nigerian schools. This experiment will investigate whether it is possible to teach about past violence in a way that increases reconciliation, ethnic tolerance, and non-violence. The results will have implications for education policies and peace-building both in Nigeria and around the world. 

Prior to Princeton, Narrelle obtained a Master’s from the University of Chicago’s Committee on International Relations program, and a Bachelor’s in political science and African studies from the University of Florida.

Jonas Heering is a Ph.D. candidate in international relations in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. His research focuses on state-business relations in the digital economy and the (geo-)political power exerted by digital platform companies. His dissertation project examines variation in levels of cooperation between host governments and foreign digital firms. Foreign digital platform companies have become important intermediaries for a range of state function, from processing citizens’ data, providing cybersecurity services, and governing online expression. Yet, firms have to balance their own commercial interests with political demands from both their home and host governments. Combining survey experiments with qualitative case studies, drawing on elite interviews conducted in several countries, Jonas’ dissertation shows how foreign firms’ changing perceptions of political risk interact with host governments’ regulatory power to shape the relationship between foreign platform companies and their host governments—with important implications for host government’s state capacity and power. In related work, forthcoming in  New Political Economy  and the  Journal of European Integration , he studies global negotiations over the taxation of digital services and the transatlantic politics of data sharing and privacy. During the 2022-2023 academic year, Jonas was a fellow with the Global Political Economy Project at the Mortara Center for International Studies. Jonas holds an M.A. in European Studies from Georgetown University and a B.A./B.B.A. from Texas Christian University.

Alyssa Heinze is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation studies natural resource politics and gender inequality in rural India. In particular, her research is concerned with how state action interacts with a deteriorating climate to produce gendered social and political outcomes. In her dissertation project, she asks: can including women in control over water resources prevent drought-induced water scarcity from entrenching socioeconomic and political gender inequality? In her broader project, she investigates two modalities of inclusion in water-scarce rural India: 1) top-down formal inclusion of women in water governance bodies, and 2) bottom-up grassroots mobilization of women around water issues. She argues that women’s inclusion in community water control will improve women’s resilience to drought shocks only when their inclusion is via bottom-up grassroots mobilization; conversely, top-down impositions of women’s representation in community water governance institutions is unlikely to shift resource power relations more favorably toward women and enhance their broader resilience in the face of climate shocks. Heinze employs mixed methods in her project, triangulating across micro-level survey, administrative, and interview data. Her dissertation research is also supported by the Fulbright Association, the Center for Effective Global Action, the Weiss Fund, Berkeley Institute of International Studies, and the Berkeley Institute for South Asian Studies. Heinze holds an MSc in Economics from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a BA in Political Science and South Asian Studies from Dartmouth College. 

Emily Jackson is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Politics in the Department of Government at Cornell University and a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellow. Her research interests include reproductive politics, political participation, public opinion, and gender in Latin America and the US. Emily’s dissertation project explores the implementation of abortion reforms in Latin America, focusing on public and elite opinion, relations between activists and professional stakeholders, and modes of abortion access. Her work has been supported by the Einaudi Center for International Studies, the Reppy Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, and the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.

Angie Jo is a PhD candidate in Political Science at MIT.  Her dissertation examines how Liberal welfare states respond to collective crises.  Typically defined by a minimal social safety net and emphasis on individual responsibility, Liberal welfare regimes—like that of the United States—are often compared to the more generous Social Democratic (Denmark) and Christian Democratic (Germany) models in comparative political economy.  However, crises like COVID-19 and the 2008 Financial Crisis have shown that Liberal countries sometimes enact discretionary fiscal stimulus packages that surpass both their historical baselines and the responses of other regimes.

Angie’s research uses mixed methods to understand the conditions under which Liberal countries allocate significant resources to social protections during crises, despite institutional constraints and conservative opposition.  She investigates why emergency spending often takes the form of temporary measures, such as direct cash transfers, rather than permanent welfare state expansion, and how citizens in different welfare regimes perceive the propriety of these interventions.  Her theoretical framework introduces two mechanisms— weak infrastructural power and discretionary crisis politics —that limit Liberal welfare states’ responses, favoring temporary compensation over durable reforms that build welfare state capacity over time.

One of the goals of this project is to extend comparative welfare state studies to collective crises—such as pandemics, mass unemployment, housing debt crises, or natural disasters—where risks are correlated across the population, impacts are experienced collectively, and the cause is perceived as beyond individual responsibility.  Protections against these collective risks are crucial for citizen welfare in an increasingly integrated world, but they are often understudied relative to individualized risks associated with the human life cycle, the business cycle, and normalized conditions of poverty.

Angie’s research is supported by the APSA Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Doctoral Scholarship, and the Homer A. Burnell Presidential Graduate Fellowship at MIT.  Previously, she worked as an Investment Associate at Bridgewater Associates.  Angie holds a Master of City Planning degree from MIT and graduated summa cum laude with a BA in Architecture Studies from Harvard.

Sarah Elizabeth Jones is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Syracuse University. Her research focuses on identity, political attitudes, and social media, particularly short video platforms (SVPs), such as TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts. To date, little research exists in political science on the impacts of SVPs, but this inquiry is crucial to evaluating modern attitudes and behaviors. Existing data suggests that users may use SVPs more often than “traditional” social media such as Facebook and X (formerly Twitter). The substantial variance in time spent, combined with the fact that SVPs tend to focus on content curated by algorithms rather than emphasizing the influence of peer networks, necessitates a dedicated research body devoted to SVPs. Sarah Elizabeth’s dissertation interrogates the relationship between SVPs and identities and argues that these platforms have the potential to heighten identity strength and salience. If substantiated, even individuals who avoid political news and content may be susceptible to politically relevant messages germane to those heightened identities. With support from APSA, her project will leverage a representative survey and experimental survey techniques to test the hypothesis that SVPs can reinforce users’ social identities, enabling those identities to be politicized through messages embedded in the SVPs and elsewhere. The representative survey aims to produce novel data examining social media use, demographic correlates, user motivations, and user perceptions of content. Follow-up survey experiments will investigate the relationship between content consumption and attitudes. She hopes her work will contribute to the field by encouraging research into the significant variation between social media platform functions and how these functions influence platform impact. Additionally, she hopes to empower general audiences with information about how their social media consumption may be related to attitudes and sense of identity. Prior to her Ph.D. program, Sarah Elizabeth earned her B.A. in Sociology and International Studies from Saint Louis University in 2021. She earned her M.A. in Political Science from Syracuse in 2023.

Margaret Kenney is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on international political economy, international tax, and firm behavior. Her dissertation studies how countries coordinated on a global minimum tax to address tax avoidance and evasion. To answer this question, she outlines an analytical history of the creation of the international tax regime. Then, she focuses specifically on the role of the business community and argues that these non-state actors significantly influenced the regulations. She uses natural language processing methods and an original observational dataset to test this argument. The project also investigates the downstream effects of the international tax agreement, particularly on the distribution of foreign direct investment and the use of investment incentives. She outlines a typology of the political economy of FDI attraction instruments. By exploring the preferences of firms, politicians, and voters, she offers predictions on how changes to international tax will affect the use of these instruments. She argues that the that the global minimum tax will dampen the use of investment incentives and shift the politicization of FDI from local politicians to the bureaucracy. Margaret’s work draws on experimental methods, in-depth interviews, and observational data. Before joining UC Berkeley, Margaret received a B.A. in Political Science at Saint Louis University.

Jiyoung Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the relationship between climate change and intergroup violence in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as potential strategies to mitigate climate-related conflict risks. Her dissertation explores why some communities are more prone to violent conflicts triggered by climate-induced economic distress, while others remain stable. She hypothesizes that people’s perceptions of and reactions to this distress vary based on pre-existing relationships among social groups, potentially influencing conflict outcomes. To assess this theory, she employs both observational and experimental approaches. First, she investigates whether and under what conditions drought conditions are related to reduced outgroup acceptance, using statistical analysis of geospatial drought data and public opinion surveys across 37 African countries. Second, in the context of ongoing conflicts between nomadic herders and local farmers in northern Nigeria, she conducts original surveys with experimental modules. These assess whether climate-induced economic distress exacerbates farmers’ intolerance toward nomadic herders. The experiments also evaluate whether perspective-taking of climate’s impact on nomadic herders can promote farmers’ tolerance toward them. Jiyoung’s research is grounded in in-depth interviews with nomadic herders, local farmers, community leaders, and policymakers in the region. Her research suggests that the conflict risks associated with climate change are determined not only by the severity of environmental challenges but also by their impact on intergroup relations in affected areas.

Brian Leung is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Washington. His research interests lie at the intersection of comparative politics and international political economy, particularly the politics of trade and industrial policies. Motivated by the emergence—and recent subversion—of the free trade consensus between the U.S. and China, his dissertation examines how corporate interests at the firm level shape political elites’ preferences on trade policies. Going beyond traditional accounts of firm characteristics, he situates firm preferences within the context of their interaction with the host country’s evolving political-economic strategies. He demonstrates how four types of firm interests—the “four Ps” of profit, patronage, protection, and predation—dominated different sectors at various stages of U.S.-China trade relations. He traces the connection between firms’ preferences and those of politicians through money in politics, such as lobbying expenses and campaign contributions. His research employs a mixed-methods approach, with a strong emphasis on statistical and quantitative text analyses. Specifically, he leverages large language models (LLMs) to collect fine-grained, time-varying data on firm preferences. He complements these quantitative findings with qualitative data from interviews with Congressional staffers and archival research. His project seeks to uncover the domestic causes of the (un)making of U.S.-China trade relations over the past three decades and to assess how the conflict and confluence of domestic interests may shape the future of economic globalization.

Originally from Hong Kong, Brian received his Bachelor of Social Sciences and Bachelor of Laws from the University of Hong Kong. Prior to his dissertation research, he worked as a nonprofit leader in Washington, DC.

Zikai Li a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Chicago, where he’s jointly enrolled in the MS program in statistics. He studies political behavior and applied research methodology. His current substantive projects examine the politics of place-based industrial policy in the green transition in the United States. He’s particularly interested in the electoral implications of place-based provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act and whether/how policy attribution occurs among voters. His methodological work focuses on data-adaptive experimental design and the use of dynamic difference-in-differences regressions in political science.

Baruch Malewich is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His dissertation project examines how societies under foreign occupation stigmatize and punish individuals who are perceived as collaborating with the enemy. Specifically, the project conceives the allegation of collaboration as a form of contestation over legitimate sovereignty, as well as over strategies of resistance. This contestation occurs both within the occupied society, and between the occupied and the occupier. The central argument of the project is that the growing focus of occupying forces on managing occupied populations in the recent century increased the stakes of said contestation and, as a result, made the treatment of collaborators more severe and less forgiving. This argument is support by inspecting the historical trajectory of the category of wartime collaboration, as well as by inspecting the discourse on collaboration in three late-20 th century occupied society: Algeria, Northern Ireland and Palestine. Baruch’s other work includes research on subjectivity in conflict, the relationship between technology and violence, and colonial processes of knowledge production. He completed an M.Phil. in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge and a B.A. in Government, Diplomacy and Strategy from the Interdisciplinary Center [now Reichman University] in Herzliya, Israel.

Matthew Martin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. At the heart of every constitution lies a powerful idea: “the people” are the ultimate source of authority. But how do those in power use public input when creating new constitutions? His research aims to understand the motivations behind public consultations and how the political elites who draft these constitutions actually use public input from a cross-national perspective. He is constructing the Public Consultation in Constitution-Making Dataset (PCCD), an original, cross-national dataset that tracks all public consultations in constitution-making processes from the beginning of the third wave of democracy in 1974 to 2021. To complement this dataset, he examines two recent cases: Chile and Cuba. Chile, a post-authoritarian democracy, and Cuba, a repressive autocracy, provide a unique contrast. By studying these cases, he seeks to understand how public consultation is integrated into the strategies of those negotiating new constitutions. To do this, he will conduct interviews with key players involved in the constitution-making processes in both countries and analyze the records of their discussions to see how public input is referenced during deliberations. His main objective is to assess the strategic value of public consultation—specifically, how drafters use public input as a rhetorical device in these high-stakes situations. He argues that public consultation is not a tool for uncovering the public’s “true” preferences, but rather a way for elites to build consensus around their preferred constitutional project. His research has broader implications for how we understand the role of citizens in shaping the foundations of their political systems. It could also inform policies and practices around public participation in political processes, highlighting the importance of transparency and accountability in constitution-making. With support from the APSA Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, he will be able to gather the necessary data and conduct a thorough analysis, helping shed light on these crucial aspects of both democratic and non-democratic governance.

Nathan Micatka is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Iowa. He is a poverty scholar who studies American political behavior and public policy. He asks questions related to how experiences with social welfare policies influence political behaviors, attitudes, and orientations. His dissertation investigates the relationship between people’s experiences with social programs during youth and their political behaviors and attitudes in adulthood. In doing so, Nathan uses a mixed methods approach involving statistical analyses of various government panel datasets combined with original qualitative data collected through individual interviews. He pays special attention to the racialized nature of welfare experiences by conducting sub-group analyses based on race and ethnicity and centering the voices of minoritized individuals in his qualitative work. With APSA’s DDRIG support, Nathan will field an original survey among adults who were on means-tested welfare during youth about their experiences with welfare during adolescence and political attitudes and behaviors in adulthood. To reach nuanced inferences about this relationship, he will conduct up to 30 one-on-one interviews with survey respondents to uncover the political consequences of adolescent experiences with means-tested welfare. Results from his dissertation have implications for our collective understanding of public policy and political inequality. Through this work, we gain new insights into how to better design public policies to meet the needs of economically marginalized individuals without leading to political alienation and disengagement. Before starting his PhD, Nathan earned a B.A. in political science and a B.A. in ethics and public policy from the University of Iowa. He also earned a M.A. in politics from the University of Southern California.

Ayse Busra Topal is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. Her dissertation explores how the perceived source of religious discrimination might motivate or discourage Muslims’ political engagement by triggering distinct emotions. She argues that Islamophobia from certain sources induces anger, which motivates individuals to participate, while other sources cause anxiety and lead people to disengage from at least some political activities. She tests these expectations through interview and survey data to determine Muslims’ perceptions of different sources of Islamophobia. Then, she will experimentally test the emotional mechanisms behind the relationship between Islamophobia sources and political engagement. Busra collects novel data on this overlooked population in the U.S., and her project will improve our understanding of Muslims’ political responses to religious discrimination. In addition to the APSA-DDRIG, her dissertation has received generous support from the APSA-Centennial Center and the Gabbert Award at the University of California, Riverside. Her other research projects explore questions in the areas of political psychology, behavior, race and ethnicity, communication, and religion and politics. Before attending the University of California, Riverside, Busra received a B.A. in Psychology from Istanbul Bilgi University and an M.A. in Conflict Analysis and Resolution from Sabancı University.

Rebecca Wai is a Ph.D. candidate in the Political Science department at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor. Her research looks broadly at factors that determine the acceptance of migrants and refugees in host communities and intergroup cooperation. Her dissertation project focuses on the dynamics of cooperation between refugees and nationals in Uganda, especially in the setting of economic community institutions. She is particularly interested in distinguishing between the two outcomes of prejudice reduction and cooperation promotion in the study of intergroup contact theory. Her dissertation project uses surveys and lab-in-the-field experiments to understand how cooperation sustains or breaks down among refugees and hosts in farmer groups in Uganda. She lived in Uganda for a year to carry out extensive fieldwork in rural refugee-hosting communities. Her work has been supported by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) and the National University of Singapore (NUS). She holds a B.A. in Policy Studies and Economics from Lafayette College.

Lindsay Walsh is a Ph.D. Candidate in political science and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies (WGSS) at the Pennsylvania State University. In her dissertation project, she examines the effect of electoral institutions on political ambition, or the desire to run for office, in Jordan. She especially seeks to examine the role of tribe and party recruitment practices on political ambition levels. She plans to conduct (1) an online survey of potential candidates – student participants in the Ana Usharek university political engagement program that facilitates dialogue on civic engagement, elections, and political parties, (2) a telephone survey of former candidates in the 2024 Jordanian parliamentary elections, and 3) structured interviews with former parliamentary candidates. Her potential candidate survey will include experimental treatments to test the effect of recruitment strategies, political reforms, and gender quota policies on individual political ambition levels.

Adee Weller is a Ph.D. candidate at Emory University. Her research agenda broadly focuses on the nexus of criminal violence and state-building. Criminal actors, often overlooked, pose critical security challenges for both contemporary and historical states, shaping the effectiveness of state institutions and profoundly impacting human security. Her dissertation examines how interactions with criminal actors during the initial years of English East India Company rule (1769-1775) in Bengal shaped colonial governance. Utilizing a unique collection of internal East India Company documents—comprising official, private, and secret correspondence—she explores the strategic discussions within Company leadership about criminal violence and profit maximization. She suggests that colonial regimes selectively repressed crime based on their relationships with local elites, choosing to suppress or tolerate criminal activities to consolidate power and maintain control. She uses a novel machine-learning technique to digitize over 10,000 pages of handwritten texts, allowing for a detailed, multi-method examination of the deliberations of the colonial regime. This project provides critical insight into the internal political dynamics of governance, the persistence of criminal violence, and the ways in which systematic inequalities are perpetuated through state policies. She holds an M.A. in Political Science from Emory University and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina Asheville.

School of Social and Political Science

Sps academic wins andrew webster prize for best uk phd dissertation in science, technology & innovation studies.

School of Social and Political Science (SPS) academic Dr Benedetta Catanzariti has received an award for the best UK PhD dissertation in science, technology and innovation studies for her thesis on facial expression recognition systems. 

Dr Catanzariti won the Andrew Webster Prize from AsSIST-UK, the UK association for scholars working in science, technology and innovation studies, for the outstanding quality of her dissertation in the field. Dr Catanzariti completed her PhD in at SPS in 2023 with a dissertation titled ‘Seeing Affect: Knowledge Infrastructures in Facial Expression Recognition Systems.’ 

AsSist-UK said: “Benedetta’s thesis examines affective computing applications and their promise to ‘decode human affective experience’ – in essence, to read the face and its emotions, from frustration to boredom and depression – with scientific objectivity. 

“The nomination noted how she brings historical context to these practices by grounding them in older psychological theories (including overtly racist ones) and longstanding Western claims that there are universal emotions, and acknowledges an important legacy of critiques of such projects. Benedetta’s thesis, grounded in feminist studies of science and technology, offers empirical data on the current behind-the-scenes work that goes into the classification practices categorising affective behaviours and validating classification choices.’” 

Dr Catanzariti, who works as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Science, Technology and Innovation Studies (STIS) subject area at SPS, said: "I am really honoured to have received the 2024 Andrew Webster PhD prize. I’d like to thank the selection committee at AsSIST-UK for choosing my dissertation for this year’s award, as I am sure there were many great submissions deserving of this prize as well. I am beyond grateful to my supervisors Morgan Currie, Ewa Luger, and Robin Williams and to the wider STIS community for their support throughout my PhD journey." 

Congratulations are also due to SPS' Dr Vassilis Galanos, whose PhD thesis ‘Expectations and Expertise in Artificial Intelligence’ received a commendation from the Andrew Webster Prize. 

Read the announcement on the AsSIST-UK website .