IIS is happy to announce our 2023-2024 Pre-Dissertation Grant Recipients.
Jiaqian Ni
When does public opinion help or harm international reconciliation? Countries can normalize relations for reasons of “national interests,” but public animosity lingers in many cases. I argue that when leaders extend olive branches amid domestic public opposition, public opinion can have dual effects: While it helps signal goodwill, it may also engender concern over the viability of conciliatory overtures. What is the net effect of foreign public opposition to conciliation on receiver-end’s willingness to reconcile? I draw upon costly signaling and psychological research on asymmetric affective processing to examine this question. I analyze real-world examples in the Japan-South Korea case. I also test my arguments on the public opinion level in a survey experiment. My research expands our understanding of the role of public opinion in signaling and reconciliation, with practical implications for promoting cooperation between estranged countries.
Sabrina Amrane
During the Islamic Middle Period, northwest Africa straddled between two scopes of dynastic influence: the Marinids of Fez (1244-1465 CE) and the Zayyanids (1236-1556) of Tlemcen in what is today Morocco and Algeria. The extent of their presence in the desert, however, represents a gap in the current historiography which privileges the making of Mediterranean emirates. My research explores the value of the political thrust of major but overlooked oasis cities within the wider trans-Saharan network, interactions between key Saharan actors and coastal imperial rule, and conceptions of territoriality within a nomadic milieu in the medieval Maghrib. Drawing on repositories of written material and collecting oral histories, I am to examine the geographic imagination of Arabs and Berbers in the central Algerian Sahara.
Nathaniel Dolton-Thornton
My dissertation centers on the sociopolitical, economic, and environmental dynamics around the supply chains of minerals required for clean energy transitions, particularly copper and lithium. The dissertation explores three stages upstream and downstream from extraction. I think of these as the ‘three f’s’: ‘finance,’ ‘finding’ and ‘fabricating.’ This summer, I will conduct scoping fieldwork related to the third ‘f’ in Chile and Argentina. Specifically, I will examine post-extraction processes related to copper and lithium in each country. I’m grateful to the Institute of International Studies for its support, and I look forward to sharing my findings with relevant groups when I return.
Sarah Merchant
How can spiritual ontologies inform political action? My current project explores the political articulations of Sufi ontologies within twentieth century movements in the Indo-Persianate world. I explore how wahdat ul-wajud, the perspective describing the metaphysical “unity of being” of all things in the universe, travelled across the Persian and Urdu speaking worlds and acquired particular political valences in twentieth century South Asia and Iran. How did an idea relegated to the mystical realm become mobilized by South Asian anti-colonialists and Iranian revolutionaries? I will answer this question by exploring the transnational traversal of wahdat ul-wajud and its political articulations in the writings of the anti-colonial Indian Muslim revolutionary Ubaidullah Sindhi (d. 1944) and the Iranian Marxist intellectual Ali Shariati (d. 1977). By producing original translations of Urdu texts in Sindhi's intellectual archive, I will put Sindhi's ideas into conversation with Shariati's to explore how appeals to the metaphysical and cosmological realm were transformed into conjecturally specific calls for Hindu-Muslim unity in India and the end of Pahlavi capitalism in Iran.
Adrian Bermudez Perez
Following the collapse of Saint-Domingue’s sugar industry during the Haitian Revolution, sugar plantations proliferated across the Spanish Caribbean. Forested coastal plains were cleared to make room for cane fields as colonists imported thousands of enslaved Africans to satisfy the burgeoning demand for labor in the sugar industry. This dual transformation of both human and nonhuman landscapes significantly altered the socio-ecological fabric of the Caribbean. Enslaved Africans in the region found themselves confronting new environments within the confines of their captivity, an experience that fueled their ongoing resistance against exploitation. My research delves into the intersection of marronage and environmental history by focusing on the creation and re-creation of African and Black environmental knowledge in the nineteenth century trans-imperial Caribbean. Drawing on colonial records complaining about “the problem” of marronage, I aim to provide an environmental “history-from-below” of the African Diaspora in the Caribbean.
J'Anna Lue
Engineering as a discipline maintains a technocentric, self-identified apolitical, utilitarian, overly-positivist culture that can exacerbate structural violence experienced by marginalized communities, especially through the design and implementation of built infrastructure. Water infrastructure - whether access to flood control, drinking water, or wastewater treatment - provides access to a basic need, attends to public health, and improves resilience against extreme weather and climate change. Several communities across the globe do not have access to flood protection and drinking water infrastructure necessary to thrive, reparative engineering attends to issues of infrastructure violence and epistemic violence in engineering practice and education to consider how to do engineering work that addresses harm rather than design for neutrality which replicates harm with or without intention.
Maya Shuen Lu
Maya is a Political Science PhD student at UC Berkeley. Her research examines the movements for the rights of international “low-skilled” migrant women in East Asia and the subsequent reception of these movements by local populations. Conventional literature would view these migrant women as unlikely candidates to participate in contentious politics, yet we see an emergence of migrant women protests, marches, and demands for rights in Taiwan. Her research aims to address the following: What compels migrant women and their allies to push foreign governments for their rights despite the high costs of contention? How is the government and public reacting to these movements?