PARTICIPANTS 2017
Bedour Alagraa
PhD Candidate African Studies Brown UniversityMy research consists of a comparative study on the geographies of death, catastrophe, the creation of death-driven architectonics, and the liminal material/spiritual space of the 'living dead' in post-Katrina New Orleans and post-earthquake Haiti. More broadly, she is interested in understanding how different ecologies of blackness are shaped and sustained by their relationship with death and mortality.
Eduardo Altheman Camargo Santos
PhD candidate, Department of Sociology, University of São PauloMy name is Eduardo Altheman Camargo Santos, 29 years old, and I am a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. I am currently spending one year as a visiting scholar at the Literature Program at Duke University, USA. In my research, I pursue to establish a link between the works of the Frankfurt School (especially Herbert Marcuse) on the Welfare State, on the one hand, and Michel Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism, on the other. My research interests are mainly: marxism; Western Marxism; neoliberalism; critical theory.
Chad Attenborough
PhD candidate at Vanderbilt UniversityChad is a 1st year PhD candidate at Vanderbilt University studying Atlantic-African history and intellectual history. His research focuses on African conceptions of world, identity, and sovereignty in the early modern era, tracing changing dynamics of power, class and authority in historical contexts.. He is interested in the topics of cross-cultural exchange.
He received his bachelor's degree in French from Bowdoin College in 2012 with a minor in history. He explored French colonization, literature and language during the course of his education, as well as passing an academic year in Nantes, France. He is studying with Professor Catherine Molineux.
Paper Presentation (Subject to change) -
Title: An Enlightened Mulatto
Abstrat: This paper aims to contextualize Free Mulatto, written in 1824 by Jean-Baptiste Philippe, within the social and political landscape of early nineteenth century Trinidad and of the contemporaneous circum-Caribbean world. The principal question I am attempting to answer is, what historical factors moulded Jean-Baptiste Philippe’s philosophy?
Akua Banful
PhD student in Columbia's English DepartmentAkua Banful is a second year Ph.D student in Columbia's English Department with a concentration in the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Her primary research interest is in the consolidation of empire; by exploring how literature legitimized and romanticized the colonization of other territories, she hopes to zoom in on the moments where state power reifies and becomes transnational in a more meaningful way. She also works in postcolonial theory, and is interested in exploring lusophone traditions to articulate a timeline of empire and decolonization that does not separate Africa and South-East Asia from Latin America.
Marina Bedran
PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton UniversityMarina Bedran is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. She has a master’s degree in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the University of São Paulo (USP) and did her undergraduate studies in Politics, Sociology and Anthropology. Her research interests include Latin American photography, literature, and visual arts from the late nineteenth century to the present, with a focus on discourses and politics of nature in post-war Brazil. In 2014, she received a Lassen Fellowship in Latin American studies from PLAS (Princeton). She recently published a book on the correspondence between Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson, which she translated to Portuguese.
Felicia Bishop Denaud
Africana Studies doctoral program Brown UniversityFelicia Bishop Denaud earned her B.A. cum laude from Columbia University, where she pursued Sociology and African American Studies as a John Kluge Scholar. Her current research at Brown University in the Africana Studies doctoral program engages modernity, empire, and epistemology to explore the relationship between knowledge production and political action within the Black radical tradition, with particular interest in revolutionary Haiti. Her research attends to the religious and cultural dimensions of black political knowledge to both capture the social dynamics of political change and interrogate disciplinary formations. Felicia draws extensively from black intellectual and literary history, black feminism, political theory, philosophy, and historiography.
Maura Brighenti
Postdoctoral fellow, Conicet in IDAES – National University of San MartínMaura received her doctorate in Political Science from the University of Bologna (Italy) and currently holds a postdoctoral fellowship with Conicet in IDAES – National University of San Martín (Argentina). She specialized in Latin American critical theory, postcolonial studies, social movements, and contemporary territorial conflicts in Argentina. She currently collaborates with the course Collective Action and Social Movements (under the professor Dr. Karina Bidaseca) in the Sociology Department, IDAES-UNSAM and participates in research projects about postcolonial theories and gender.
Eleonora Cappuccilli
Postdoctoral fellow at Filippo Burzio FoundationEleonora Cappuccilli is post-doctoral fellow at Filippo Burzio Foundation. In 2016 she was awarded a Phd in History of Political Thought at the University of Bologna after discussing a dissertation on Mary Astell, an early modern English philosopher, theologian and pamphleteer. In 2017 she started a new research project on female prophecy in Europe between the Protestant Reformation and the English Revolution, receiving a research grant from Edith Saurer Fund. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Scienza & Politica. She is also interested in contemporary feminist political theory.
Lucia Cavallero
Doctoral fellowship in Social Sciences, University of Buenos Aires (U.B.A.)Lucia Cavallero, age 31, sociologist graduated from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Since 2015 I have a doctoral fellowship to investigate financial crimes, its treatment by the justice system and the relation between the penalization of those crimes and the dynamics of financial capitalism. Also, I am member of “Ni una menos”, a political collective that is worldwide known for the massive demonstrations it has organized to denounce violence against women.
Matilde Cazzola
PhD program in History and Cultures (University of Bologna)I am currently enrolled in the second year of the PhD program in History, Cultures, and Civilizations at the University of Bologna. During the last year, I carried out research at King’s College London and at the World History Center, University of Pittsburgh. I am researching on the conceptions of sovereignty and capital accumulation of some of the governors of the British Empire in the stretch of time between the Stamp Act (1765), which opened the American Revolution, and the Colonial Validity Act (1865), which established the non-repugnancy principles between colonial and imperial laws. After analysing Ireland as the incubator of modern British imperial ideology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I focus on the political concepts developed during main colonial crises: the American Revolution in the province of Massachusetts-Bay, the years between the abolition of slavery (1833) and the Morant Bay Rebellion (1865) in Jamaica and Barbados, and the Sepoy Mutiny (1857) in India.
Aaron Colton
PhD candidate in English at the University of VirginiaAaron Colton is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Virginia. His dissertation, “Reconstructing Metafiction: Ethics, Politics, and Resistance, 1919-2010,” investigates the capacity of self-aware fiction to expose and subvert the ethical and political paradigms of industrialism, post-industrialism, and neoliberalism.
Kristian Jeff Cortez Agustin
PhD student at Hong Kong Baptist University School of Communication/Academy of FilmKristian is currently a research student (PhD) at Hong Kong Baptist University School of Communication/Academy of Film and a visiting researcher at the Vargas Museum, University of the Philippines-Diliman, where he also worked as a creative consultant and exhibition designer for several years. He accomplished his Master of Arts (MA) degree in Visual Culture at the University of Westminster, London in 2012, and obtained his Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in Interdisciplinary Art Studies from the University of the Philippines, Diliman, in 2006. He specializes in visual art (calligraphy, ink, painting), various media (digital photography and video, film, graphics, sound), performance art (movement, music, theater), and literature (poetry, creative writing). He often brings together these specialisms in his curatorial practice and directorial experience—working in Hong Kong, London, and Manila. He co-founded the advocacy organization Sirkulo ng Kabataang Artista (Circle of Youth Artists) in 2002 and hitherto serves as its Artistic Director Emeritus.
Bruna Della Torre de Carvalho Lima
PhD candidate, Department of Sociology at the University of São PauloI am Bruna Della Torre de Carvalho Lima. I am a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. In 2016 I am staying one year as a visiting scholar at the Literature Program at Duke University. In my dissertation I research the works from Theodor Adorno regarding his debate on aesthetics and how this is linked to marxism. I am especially interested in marxism, literature and Critical Theory.
Huanna Deng
PhD student Department of History at Tsinghua University, BeijingMy name is Huanna DENG, a 2nd year Ph.D student coming from Department of History at Tsinghua University, Beijing. Before I started my doctoral study, I received my BA/MA degrees in International Politics and Political Science respectively. My major academic interests lie in the intellectual history of modern China, and I am working on the Confucian movement in the early 20th Century currently. I speak Mandarin and Cantonese as native language. Besides English, I also speak a little Japanese.
It is a valuable chance for me to attend the Summer School on "Global Studies and Critical Theory". I am expecting an exchange of ideas with the professors and students coming from different disciplines and different regions of the world. This will also be my first trip to Italy. I look forward the coming summer weeks surrounding by Italian coffee, ice-cream and new friends!
Margaux Fitoussi
PhD in anthropology at Columbia UniversityMargaux Fitoussi graduated with her Bachelors from UC Berkeley in 2011 and her Masters as a Presidential Scholar from Harvard Divinity School in 2017. She will be starting a PhD in anthropology at Columbia University in the fall. While living in southern and central Africa from 2011-2014, Margaux researched armed groups and implemented civilian projection projects. Her multi-media exhibition about the Hara of Tunis, the historic Jewish quarter, was shown at the Dar Ben Achour Library, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, and at the University of Manouba. Her research focuses on historical memory, cultural production, and French colonization in North Africa.
Kelly Fleming
PhD Candidate in English at the University of VirginiaKelly Fleming is a PhD Candidate in English at the University of Virginia. She holds a B.F.A in Writing, Literature, & Publishing from Emerson College and an M.A. in English from Boston College. She is currently working on her dissertation, entitled “Awful Beauty’s Arms: The Politics of the Accessory in Eighteenth-Century British Literature,” which examines the role women’s fashion accessories play in the politics and the novels of eighteenth-century Britain.
Paul Gutierrez
PhD candidate in political theory, Brown UniversityPaul Gutierrez is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory from Brown University. His research interests span the history of political, social, and economic thought; theories of colonialism, race, and labor; and constitutional law, legal history, and American political development. He is currently working on a political theory of the corporate form that draws on these interests. Gutierrez holds a B.A. magna cum laude from the College of William & Mary, where he majored in government and economics, and an M.P.P. from the Harvard Kennedy School, where he focused on participatory governance and deliberative democracy. He is a NSF/IGERT Fellow and a Ford Foundation Fellow.”
Angela Harris Sánchez
Student in GEMMA: Erasmus Mundus MA in Women's Studies and Gender at Universities of Bologna and UtrechtMy name is Angela Harris Sánchez and I am currently a student in GEMMA: Erasmus Mundus MA in Women's Studies and Gender, at Universities of Bologna and Utrecht. I have a degree in Art History and a master's degree in Art Therapy. I have done various internships in Art Therapy programmes for social inclusion and have also conducted research in the field. I am very interested in this course because I really feel it can help me find a personal way to reconcile activism and academia in my life.
Karen Huang
PhD candidate in English at the University of VirginiaKaren Huang is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Virginia. Her dissertation complicates the distinction between contemporary American and global literature, by both drawing from and critiquing the concept of the transnational.
Suwen Huang
Graduate student in BA Fine Arts from Goldsmiths, University of LondonMy name is Suwen; I'm a graduate student in BA Fine Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London. My academic study is based on laying philosophical consideration over social and political issues, such as the correlation between various motifs (wall, desert, egg, etc.) and the notion of time. It unfolds more broadly to how the process of generating the notion of time( from a scientific perspective) conflicts with the human time-frame and its extra, furthermore how it leads to the dialogue about "the political ones" within the current global political setup.
Andreea Micu
Doctoral candidate in the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern UniversityAndreea S. Micu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University, and a Program Fellow at the Chicago Humanities Festival. Her research examines performance and aesthetic practice across a variety of contemporary activist initiatives and social movements in the South of Europe in the aftermath of the 2008 European economic crisis. Her dissertation, Urban Insurrection: Activist Performance and the European Economic Crisis looks at how the urban poor and immigrants use performance and aesthetic production to imagine alternatives to neoliberalism and (re)build the urban commons in Madrid, Rome, and Athens, where she has conducted extended ethnographic research. Andreea holds a degree in Journalism and Communication from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in Spain, and a masters degree in Performance Studies from Texas A&M University. Andreea’s research interests more broadly include Marxist feminism, political philosophy, affect theory, critical urban studies, and performance pedagogy.
Valeria Morabito
PhD Student: European PhD in Gender and Women’s Studies, University of BolognaValeria Morabito is a PhD student in the EDGES Program (European PhD in Women’s and Gender Studies) at the University of Bologna. She graduated with honors in 2014 with a master's thesis on postcolonial feminism and neomaterialism supervised by Rosi Braidotti, a leading figure in European contemporary feminist thought. She participated in international research projects on migration and human rights such as Projecto Fronteras, a project coordinated by FLACSO Ecuador involving more than ten major research centers in Europe and South America. She is currently working on the issues of slavery and the European slave trade during the 18th-19th centuries, human trafficking and smuggling in contemporary Europe, and gender and migration.
Marcelo Nogueira
PhD student in Romance Studies at Duke UniversityMarcelo Noah is a Ph.D. student in Romance Studies at Duke University. He received his master's degree in Critical Theory/Creative Writing from PUCRS (BR) in 2011. His research interests are Latin-American art & literature, aural productions, and intermedia studies. His work also focuses on modernism and neo-avantgarde movements in Brazil.
Cassandra O'Mahoney
PhD in Spanish contemporary literature University of VirginiaMy name is Cassandra and I am currently studying a PhD in Spanish contemporary literature. My focus is on contemporary themes as well as comparative literatures, and I am especially interested in the incorporation of contemporary social and political issues into Spanish literature. I am looking forward to studying at the Summer School and expanding my research interests to include contemporary politics, social movements and international relations."
Timothy Ogene
Masters in Creative Writing at UEABorn and raised in Nigeria, Timothy has lived in Liberia, Germany, and the US. His writings have appeared in Numero Cinq, Harvard Review, Glasgow Review of Books, Hong Kong Review of Books, Tahoma Review, and other places. He holds a BA in English and History from St. Edward’s University, a Master’s in World Literatures from Oxford, and in the process of completing a Masters in Creative Writing at UEA. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and shortlisted for the 2010 Arvon International Poetry Competition, Timothy’s collection, Descent & Other Poems, was included in Australian Book Review’s Best Books of 2016, and his first novel, The Day Ends Like Any Day, was released in April, 2017.
In October this year, Timothy will begin a PhD in English (Culture and Criticism) at Cambridge, where he plans to research contemporary cultural productions from Anglophone Africa.
Angela Yesenia Olaya Requene
PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de MéxicoSince the beginning of my academic career and as Afro-descendant women born in the municipality of Tumaco in Colombia, I have been interested in studying and reflecting on the living conditions of Afro-descendant communities in the Colombian Pacific. I have focused my attention on the historicity of racist practices in the region, displacements and forced migration within the context of the Colombian armed conflict and the struggles of Afro-descendant communities for the defense of their territories and cultures. I am currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. My current research is known as: "Afro-Colombian social movement: dispossessions, forced displacements and frontiers". This project has the objective to contribute to the anthropological analysis of the historical flow of economic, political and racial dynamics that have an impact on mobility, settlement and production practices in Afro-descendant communities. To explain these dynamics, I discuss the various conditions of social change in Afro-descendant territories throughout the different extractive capital transitions in the region. As well as the diverse socio-territorial transformations of these communities, as a result of the armed conflict that has catastrophically affected the Pacific region in the last 50 years.
Wael Omar
Masters graduate in International Politics from SOAS, University LondonMy name is Wael Omar, and I am a recent Masters graduate in International Politics from SOAS, University London. I have lived most of my life in Palestine, but have been moving between the Middle East and Europe for the last 10 years. I have developed interest in radical social movements and have accumulated experience in political activism. I currently work as a Teaching and Research Assistant at the Political Science Department at Birzeit University. Lastly, I have a an interest in music and good conversations.
Anwar Omeish
Undergraduate student at Harvard UniversityAnwar Omeish is an undergraduate student at Harvard University studying Social Studies with a focus field in colonization, decolonization, and liberation theologies in the Muslim world. Her primary research interest, at the intersection of Islamic studies, postcolonial studies, and social movement theory, lies in the ways in which Islam has been used and articulated as a theology of liberation (and an alternative epistemology) to mobilize people against colonial regimes. As a community organizer with the Student Labor Action Movement, the Phillips Brooks House Association, and the Anti-Islamophobia Network, Anwar is also interested in the implications and lessons this research has for faith-based activism today.
Manuela Peitz
Graduate student in International Relations (IR) BerlinManuela Peitz is a graduate student in International Relations (IR) from Berlin, Germany, and working at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Throughout her studies in Berlin, Beirut, Paris, and Heidelberg, she has been combining fields of political philosophy, political science, and IR and focused on critical approaches, especially on postcolonial and gender theories. She is interested in investigating forms of ‘the political’, sovereignty, and power, how they have evolved throughout history and in different global settings, and how they lead to the formation of today’s political situation. Furthermore, she is interested in finding ways to convert those critical reflections into political action.
Victor Pressfeldt
PhD candidate at Lund UniversityMy name is Victor Pressfeldt and I have been a Ph.D. candidate at Lund University since 2013. My project covers the growth of neoliberalism with a special focus on Swedish neoliberal intellectuals and their transnational connections.
Renee Michelle Ragin
PhD Candidate in Literature at Duke UniversityRenee Michelle Ragin is a third-year PhD Candidate in Literature and is pursuing a Certificate in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. Her dissertation is on the challenge posed by the Lebanese civil war to prevailing narratives of national identity – a topic she investigates through recourse to political rhetoric, literature and archival institutions. Prior to starting at Duke, Renee served in the Middle East and Washington, D.C. as a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. Department of State. She received her BA from Harvard in History and Literature with a certificate in Spanish.
Ryan Rhadigan
PhD Student in the UC Berkeley Department of RhetoricRyan Rhadigan is a PhD Student in the UC Berkeley Department of Rhetoric with a concentration in Critical Theory. He has a Master’s degree in American Indian Studies from UCLA. Ryan’s dissertation research historicizes and contextualizes ongoing Native American rhetorical engagements with legal and technoscientific discourses by examining how language-based notions of cultural “worldview” have shaped the conditions of legibility for Native American ontological and epistemological claims, and impacted indigenous communities’ collective efforts to challenge, transform, and democratize scientific practices.
Martino Sacchi Landriani
Phd University of Bologna and Paris1 Sorbonne-PanthéonI was born in Milano where I had my BA in Modern Literature and then moved to Bologna for the Master in Comparative Literatures. I wrote my MA dissertation on the relationship between the first volume of Capital and Foucault's 1970s courses on power. I'm currently finishing the second year of my Phd within a co-tutoring program between the University of Bologna and Paris1 Sorbonne-Panthéon, with a research project in History of Political Thought tentatively titled: "Liberal Citizenship and Police Identification Technologies in XIX Century France and Antilles: a Global History of the Livret Ouvrier".
Matías Saidel
Assistant Researcher at the Argentinean National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET)My name is Matías Saidel. I obtained my PhD in Theoretical and Political Philosophy (2011) with a thesis on the ontological and impolitical perspectives on the common developed by Nancy, Agamben and Esposito. Currently I work as Assistant Researcher at the Argentinean National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) and the Catholic University of Santa Fe, Argentina and Professor of Political Philosophy at the Faculty of Social Work of the National University of Entre Ríos, Argentina. In the last few years I have done research on the common and biopolitics in Italian contemporary thought. My current research delves into the common not only from an ontological but also from a political perspective that bears in mind the relations of power and domination that characterize the neoliberal era. Therefore, it includes sociological, economical, philosophical and juridical perspectives that analyze the relationship between the commons, their new enclosures and their expropriation by neoliberal capitalism.
Nicolás Sánchez
Graduate student in the Romance Studies department at Duke UniversityNicolás Sánchez is a graduate student in the Romance Studies department at Duke University. He is interested in the intersection between finance and literature, governmentality studies, and decoloniality. His current research focuses on the emergence of a credit economy in nineteenth-century Colombia and the discourses and institutions that sought to explain and manage the relationship between monetary signs and the value that they are supposed to represent.
Shareef Shahrazad
PhD candidate in the program in literature at Duke UniversityShahrazad is a PhD candidate in the program in literature at Duke University. She is inspired, first and foremost, by the immanent power and creativity of autonomous organization within contemporary social movements as well as the daily manifestation of the strength and resilience of oppressed people. She is interested in the relationship between politics and philosophy, especially the importance of ontology and subject formation to political action. She studies the Italian political traditions of operaismo, autonomia operaia, and global social movements after world war II; as well as the thought of Antonio Gramsci, Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, and Antonio Negri. In her dissertation, she is grappling with the challenges organization faces ontologically and the generalization of struggle. She seeks to develop a theory of empowerment that accounts for how different forms of mediation, such as those of Italian social centers, support the reformation of desire for democracy and common political projects.
Léna Silberzahn
Grad student at Sciences Po Paris in political theoryI'm a grad student at Sciences Po Paris in political theory who is dedicated to climate justice and photography. My current research focusses on environmental disobedience movements, and how they bring back conflict into the sometimes-depoliticized concept of the “Anthropocene”. More broadly speaking, I’m interested in anthropology of nature, political disobedience, degrowth theories, and eco-feminism. In terms of political involvement, lastly, I’ve been co-organizing and photographing actions for the divestment initiative of my university, Friends of the Earth and 350.org France, mainly against the fossil fuel industry. I'm looking forward to exchange, learn and create with all of you in July!
Alejo Stark
Astronomy and Astrophysics PhD and Romance Languages and Literature PhD student at the University of MichiganAlejo Stark is an astrophysicist and prison abolitionist. Between 2008 and 2013 he was an undocumented student organizer with the migrant justice movement fighting against deportations in South Florida and Rhode Island. More recently he was involved with the Black Lives Matter-inspired group in Michigan — the Ann Arbor Alliance for Black Lives. He is currently a co-producer of Rustbelt Abolition Radio and the spokesperson for Michigan Abolition and Prisoner Solidarity (MAPS). In 2013, he received a Bachelors in both Physics (B.S.) and Africana Studies (B.A.) from Brown university. He lives off of a graduate student fellowship as both an Astronomy and Astrophysics PhD and Romance Languages and Literature PhD student at the University of Michigan where he also coordinates the marxisms collective. In the past, Alejo has taught a comparative literature class at the Women's Huron Valley prison in Michigan titled "borderless cosmos." More recently, Alejo was invited to speak at the Zapatista's 2016 convening "The Zapatistas and ConSciences for Humanity" in Chiapas, Mexico, where he presented a paper titled "Dark Energy and the End of History."
Timothy Erik Ström
PhD student at Western Sydney University’s Institute for Culture and SocietyTimothy Erik Ström grew up in regional Australia and completed his undergraduate degree in cultural studies at Southern Cross University. Since then, he has lived in Barcelona and Seoul, travelled for extended periods, and worked a series of odd jobs; including as a boatyard hand, a journalist, a fruit picker and a street performer. Tim is finishing his PhD at Western Sydney University’s Institute for Culture and Society, and his thesis is called ‘Mapping Google Maps: Critiquing an Ideological Vision of the World’. Located at the intersection of critical political economy, cultural geography and software studies, this thesis is centrally concerned with the production and abstraction of subjectivity and materiality. Tim is currently based in Melbourne where he works as a researcher studying social movements and sustainability, teaches Global Political Economy at RMIT University and writes speculative fiction.
Maysam Taher
PhD candidate in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York UniversityMaysam is a PhD candidate in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Her work is concerned with the visual and territorial operations by which borders sort through and act upon bodies, and with writing a history of present bordering mechanisms between North Africa and Southern Europe, looking particularly at the routes coursing through Libya. Formed in part by a background in comparative literature and a life spent moving across countries and continents, she is interested in interdisciplinary methodologies and in thinking across fields as well as across connected political struggles in order to reinvigorate scholarship coming out of area studies. She also writes on documentary and contemporary visual arts."
Ahmed Teleb
Doctoral candidate in political theory at the University of VirginiaAhmed studies non-electoral mechanisms of democratic rule, pluralism, affect, and deliberation. In particular, he works on the extra-linguistic, non-rational aspects of deliberation, including the imbrication of feelings, bodily reactions, and habits in group processes. He has facilitated community deliberations and dialogues in the Midwest and is currently involved with a policy jury organization. He is currently pursuing a doctoral degrees in political theory at the University of Virginia.
Matthew Whitehouse Gordillo
PhD student in the Romance Studies program at Duke UniversityI am a PhD student in the Romance Studies program at Duke University. In the fall of 2017, I will begin my dissertation, which looks at Latin American cultural production as a way to understand how forms of capitalism that originated in the 1970s have helped shape how time is lived and experienced in Latin America today. Considering the uncertain economic environment in which most of us live, I am particularly interested in studying the relationship between time and economics during moments of economic crisis and the post-crisis periods. Among periods of economic crisis in Latin America, my work has focused mostly on contemporary Puerto Rico and 1990s Cuba, but in my dissertation project I plan also to work with the Argentinian crisis of the late 90s, and with Chile as well.
Jonathan Yong Tienxhi
MSc in Sociology student at the London School of EconomicsI am a MSc in Sociology student at the London School of Economics, for which I was awarded the Chevening Scholarship by the UK Government. Prior to this, I taught English in a Malaysian public school for a period of two years and then worked as a research analyst for the Penang State Government. I completed a law degree from the University of Reading in 2013. My research interests include the sociology of race, critical theory and social inequalities.