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Hire a UW PhD
Students on the Job Market for 2011 - 2012
Please click here for Political Science's Job Placement Record
Jessica L. Beyer
Ph.D. completed August 2011.
Fields: Comparative Politics, International Relations, Public Law
Specialization: Internet/Technology and Society
Dissertation: "Youth and the Generation of Political Consciousness Online"
Committee: Joel Migdal (Chair), Michael McCann, Philip Howard, Gina Neff
This dissertation focuses on the communities occupying four of the chaotic online social spaces that millions of individuals enter, spend time in, and exit moment by moment—Anonymous, IGN.com, World of Warcraft, and Pirate Bay. The central question I address is: Considering that political behavior occurs in all four explicitly non-political websites, why did only Anonymous and The Pirate Bay foster significant cross-national political mobilization? I argue that the construction of the technological space itself has a strong role in determining the possibility for political mobilization. In the four cases I analyze, three attributes of the technological space have been critical to mobilization: 1) the degree to which users identify themselves or remain anonymous, 2) the type of formal and informal regulation of the site, and 3) the degree to which the site provides opportunities for users to engage in small-group interaction. This argument is counter-intuitive: I demonstrate that the likelihood of political mobilization rises when a site provides high levels of anonymity, low levels of formal regulation, and minimal access to small-group interaction. In addition, I note in my observations of the four sites that a high level of conflict between the dominant norms in the online space and the legal and behavioral norms embraced offline seems to provide a favorable context for political mobilization. The implications of this study are: (a) that young people are more politically engaged than much of the literature on civic engagement finds and (b) online mobilization may differ from traditional mobilization in that action arising from online social spaces appears to be more frequently episodic than sustained. The principal methodology I use for this study can be characterized as political ethnography. I use participant-observer and observational research methods; textual analysis of materials in community spaces; and process tracing, using news reports of behaviors, archived community documents and artifacts, and published interviews of prominent community members. The theoretical framing of this study draws on historical institutionalist work, theory about organizational culture, networked society theory, and comparative politics state-in-society approaches.
email: jlbeyer@u.washington.edu
website: http://www.beyergyre.com/jlbeyer/
Loren Collingwood
Fields: American Politics
I am a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Washington studying American politics, specifically campaigns and elections, political behavior, race and ethnicity, and I specialize in quantitative methodology. My dissertation, "The Pursuit of Victory and Incorporation: Elite Strategy, Group Pressure, and Cross Racial Mobilization," focuses on when and how candidates mobilize members of the opposite race. In addition, I am working on several projects on direct democracy, negative television advertising, race of interviewer effects in telephone surveys, and supervised learning methods. I work with the Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Sexuality (WISER) as well as the Center for American Politics and Public Policy (CAPPP). I also work with the Washington Survey Research Center (WASRC), where I play a key role in conducting the annual Washington Poll.
email: lorenc2@uw.edu
website: http://staff.washington.edu/lorenc2/
Jennifer Fredette
Fields: Public Law, Comparative Politics, Political Theory
Ph.D. Completed June 2010
Committee: Michael McCann, Christine Di Stefano, Rachel Cichowski, and Naomi Murakawa
Professor Fredette (Ph.D. June 2010, University of Washington) teaches courses in constitutional law, comparative law, and sociolegal studies at the State University of New York, Albany. Her research addresses law and society themes such as law and identity, legal consciousness, and legal mobilization, as well as political theory’s concerns with justice and democracy. A comparativist by training, Professor Fredette studied at Sciences Po-Paris in 2006, and was a visiting research fellow at Sciences Po-Bordeaux in 2008. She is currently preparing her dissertation for publication as a book. On the Muslim Question: The contentious politics of citizenship in France explores the disconnect between how Muslims and French elites discuss citizenship, identity, and belonging. In addition to the book, Professor Fredette is co-authoring a paper (with Holly Jarman, SUNY Albany) about "Gangster Government" discourse in the American blogosophere, and conducting research on conceptions of citizenship among supporters of the Tea Party. Her most recent publication, "Social movements and the state’s construction of identity: The case of Muslims in France", can be found in the upcoming Special Edition of Studies in Law, Politics and Society. Professor Fredette received her MA in political science (“What Not to Wear,” winner of the Stuart Scheingold Award for Best Public Law Paper) from the University of Washington, and a her BA in French and Political Science from the University of the Pacific in her native, sunny California.
email: jfredette@albany.edu
website: http://www.jenniferfredette.com
Gregg Miller, Ph.D.
Field: Political Theory
Dissertation: “Mimesis in Communicative Action: Habermas and the Affective Bond of Understanding”
Committee: Christine Di Stefano (Chair), Nancy Hartsock, Jamie Mayerfeld, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen (Comparative Literature)
Currently an Affiliate Lecturer at the University of Washington, Tacoma, I have taught previously at Brooklyn College, Lewis & Clark College, Western Washington University and the University of Washington in Seattle and in Tacoma.
My dissertation won the 2006 Dissertation Award granted by the Western Political Science Association for the best Dissertation in Political Science in the Western States, 2004/2005, and is under contract with SUNY Press.
The standard reading of Habermas supposes him an ardent rationalist and a defender of a neo- Kantian concept of autonomy. Under this reading, a respect for persons by democratic procedure secures legitimacy for the use of power. Contrary to this standard interpretation, I argue that the theory of communicative action does not merely entail democratic procedure, but also offers a theory of the production of meaning and solidarity, and that the latter destabilizes the status of the former. I show how Habermas backfills his procedural theory with a substantive accommodation among participants by reintroducing into the concept of rationality its ancient Greek complicity with mimetic power. Habermas’ innovative rendering of a specifically communicative rationality poses mimesis as productive of an articulate, affective binding effect in communication. Properly understood, Habermas’ theory must be viewed not as rationalist, but as an attempt to close the gap within the classical debate between philosophy and poetry, articulating a new field of post-metaphysical thinking and action. Simply put, communicative action is a sublation of mimesis and reason; our affectual bonds take articulate form in and as shared experience. The operation of communicative mimesis, therefore, undercuts Habermas’ claims for discourse ethics, because the testing procedures of validation prove external, not internal, to the experience of understanding. Legitimacy in the modern age, therefore, does not find justification by working out Habermas’ theory of communicative action, though his theory of communication does account for the bonding effect borne of agreement.
My text introduces (chapter 1) generally the themes of reason and mimesis in political philosophy and critical theory. I then develop my reconstruction of communicative rationality over three main chapters concerning Habermas’ appropriation of Platonic mimesis (chapter 2), George Herbert Mead’s account of mimetic identity-formation (chapter 3), and Walter Benjamin’s account of the mimetic experience of language (chapter 4) . My project contributes to contemporary debates in normative political philosophy at the intersection of democratic theory, moral theory and aesthetic theory.
email: ggmiller@u.washington.edu
Heather Pool
Field: Political Theory, Public Law, Race and Politics
Dissertation: “The Politics of Mourning”
PhD Expected: December 2011
Committee: Jack "Chip" Turner (Chair), Christine Di Stefano, Michael McCann, Naomi Murakawa
My dissertation, The Politics of Mourning, argues that political mourning not only gauges standing and belonging, but can also transform them. While mourning is a universal experience, the political mourning I discuss is different. It is greater in scope and wider in impact than private or even public loss. Political mourning occurs when political actors mobilize the deaths of average citizens to argue for political change. How political agents use mourning varies, but four elements are present in all three of my cases: contested identities (dominant ideas about belonging or standing are under threat), visibility (people indirectly affected know of the loss), political agents’ attributions of responsibility (agents make pronouncements about culpability), and calls for institutional change (through collective politics). While numerous instances of this profile are present in American political history, I focus on three: the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, the events of September 11, 2001, and the Triangle Factory Fire of 1911. Each case captures a different aspect of the politics of mourning. The Till chapter shows how mourning can be mobilized to make visible and oppose undemocratic political structures and challenge dominant conceptions of belonging, September 11 shows how mourning can be mobilized to affirm undemocratic political structures and uphold dominant conceptions of belonging, and the Triangle Fire shows how mourning can both affirm and oppose structures and identities on different axes.
Like my scholarship, the courses I most want to teach fall at the intersections of political theory, race, gender, and public law. A partial list of courses I am prepared to teach include next fall include Introduction to Political Theory, American Political Thought, Women and Politics, Gender and Law, Law in Society, Death and Politics, Race as a Political Idea, Marxism and Critical Theory, Feminist Political Theory, as well as canonical political theory (including courses in ancient, pre-modern, and modern political theory).
email: hpool@uw.edu
website: https://sites.google.com/a/uw.edu/heatherpool/
Ashley Jochim
Field: American Politics, Public Policy Processes, Political Methodology
Dissertation: "The Issue Evolution of Partisanship: Agendas and Conflict in American Politics"
PhD Expected: June 2012
Committee: Peter J. May (Chair), Bryan D. Jones, John Wilkerson, and Mark Smith
I specialize in national political institutions and public policy processes with a focus on how political
environments shape the development of public policies. With my dissertation, I develop and examine an
agenda setting theory of partisan divergence. Utilizing novel data on the degree of partisanship across a set
of eighteen issue areas from 1975 through 2004, I show that changes in the policy agenda shape the resultant partisan alignments. This work is unique in dissecting variation in partisanship among issues and challenges the conventional wisdom about the source of partisan divisions in American politics.
email: aew9@uw.edu
website: http://students.washington.edu/aew9/
Seth W. Greenfest
Fields: Public Law, American Politics, Public Policy
Dissertation: “ Congress, the Courts, and Agenda-setting and Change”
Ph.D. expected June 2012
Committee: George Lovell (Chair), Michael McCann, John Wilkerson
During the past two years at the University of Washington, I have had the opportunity to develop my teaching skills through serving as an Instructor for core Public Law courses including Introduction to U.S. Constitutional Law, U.S. Courts and Civil Liberties, and Law in Society. I additionally developed an original course entitled Judging the Courts – syllabi are available on my website at staff.washington.edu/swg2.
My research focuses on the manner in which federal courts set their agendas, and how the issues appearing on their agendas change over time. I argue that courts often have the opportunity to participate in the policy-making process because elected officials create such opportunities. Armed with the constitutional authority to create, staff, fund courts, Congress additionally has the power to set courts’ jurisdiction and to confer standing upon litigants. In determining these rules of access, Congress often exercises that authority in ways that make it more or less likely for courts to be policy venues. The issues to which courts attend are therefore conceived of as more than the product of discrete decisions made by judges at the agenda-setting stage of the process, but reflect as well what courts are able to do under the law.
email: swg2@u.washington.edu
website: staff.washington.edu/swg2
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