Students

BIO:

Originally from New Delhi, I earned my BA with a concentration in economics and geography from Sarah Lawrence College. Following, I spent four years at the Roosevelt Institute, an economic policy think tank based out of NYC with a network of student chapters. During my time at Roosevelt, I led the Network’s financialization of higher education program and Re: Public, a national project challenging the privatization of public goods. In 2020, I earned my MS in Development Sociology from Cornell. Currently, I’m a Ph.D. candidate in Development Sociology at Cornell. Chaired by sociologist Dr. Fouad Makki, my committee spans several disciplines including sociology, anthropology, and urban planning. At Cornell, I’ve had the opportunity to teach on the long history of development, colonialism, and capitalism with Dr. Phil McMichael. My work has been presented at the annual conferences of the ASA, SASE, Karl Polanyi Institute, and the Institute for new Economic Thinking (YSI). Currently, I’m about 2 months into full time fieldwork in Bangalore, to be continued in July 2022.

Research Description:

Focused on the South Indian state of Karnataka, my research examines how waning nationalist industrial development is connected to the emergence of India’s booming land market as an investment hub for global finance capital. Following a longer history as India’s post-colonial public sector industrial capital, Bangalore, Karnataka’s capital, has been rebuilt as a global hub for information technology and real estate since the 1990’s through a booming land market, the relocation of formerly urban industrial factories, and urban peripheral re-industrialization. My research focuses on the Tumkur highway region, a former industrial highway turned real estate frontier, a valuable site from which to view the contestation of industry and real estate at the urban periphery. These contestations are both material—over state support and land—and discursive—over whose imaginary gets to shape the city. These disputes center on the state, especially Karnataka’s Industrial Areas Development Board (KIADB). This industrial board is not only crucial to urban peripheral re-industrialization, its caste-based dispossession and acquisition of peri-urban agricultural land also make it vital to the real estate economy.

My research examines Bangalore and the Tumkur highway region through three research questions. First, I examine the networks and mechanisms through which developers and industrialists acquire land at the urban periphery where the price of land has increased by as much as 10,000% over a decade. Second, I look to situate the contested and contradictory role of the state, especially KIADB, within these dynamics. As one of just two state agencies able to circumvent Karnataka’s agricultural land purchase restrictions, KIADB plays a key role in land acquisition not just for industrialists, but developers too. Third, I investigate how a carefully calibrated imaginary of Bangalore as a global destination lures global capital. KIADB’s industrialization imaginary appears to both fit and contradict developers’ promises of secluded, tranquil real estate luxury. Through the lens of Indian urban elites, my work centers the relationality of financialization and nationalist industrialization by examining how state agents and elites manage and contest the competing pressures of producing an exploding land market for global financial and real estate capital while enacting an industrial policy of making things.

My research uses multiple methods including interviews, observation, financial data analysis, and discourse analysis. My research looks to engage with critical political economists, particularly scholars of financialization, critical urbanists, especially those of the ‘global’ city, and socio-cultural anthropologists and sociologists in the making of markets tradition.

BIO:

I am a political scientist with interests centering around Black politics, public health, and political economy. My dissertation project, Corrupting the Conscience: The Congressional Black Caucus and Constraints of Black Politics, looks at why, even in spite of increasing influence and seniority, the Congressional Black Caucus does not account for corresponding gains for Black communities around the country. My research has been published in Sociological Forum and Politics, Groups, and Identities. I am also the author of Latino Politics, 3rd. Edition w/ Professor Lisa Garcia Bedolla.

Research Description:

My dissertation asks how the activities of the Congressional Black Caucus align with those of the Black community and how that relationship has changed over time. The critical core of my dissertation focuses on the tendency within both political science and Black Studies to evaluate Black politics from the perspective of Black leadership and its frequent failure to live up to the messianic promise of the Civil Rights Movement. I argue that the failure of Black electoral politics obscures more than it clarifies, missing the broader point that structural features of institutions like Congress have hamstrung Black liberation movements and elected officials above and beyond factors of individual corruption and betrayal. My dissertation focuses on developing a political economy of descriptive representation. My core empirical chapter theorizes what i call "representational triage" arguing that as the parties have polarized within Congress, the bills sponsored by the CBC have become more and more symbolic in contrast to the bills that were more focused on anti-poverty and housing during the first decade of the CBC's existence. In other words, while there certainly are a number of ways in which the CBC fails Black communities by their own hand, focusing on their failures as leaders misses the ways the window for the types of transformative legislation that they are able to champion has narrowed as the very functioning of Congress has become more and more byzantine, a phenomenon I term "anti-Black governance."

[Daniela Costanzo de Assis Pereira]

BIO:

Daniela Costanzo is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Sao Paulo (USP). She holds a degree in Social Sciences and a master's degree in Political Science from the same university. She is a researcher at the CEBRAP Development Center. She is editor of Political Institutions, Public Policy and Comparative Politics at Leviathan Magazine (USP). She is a researcher at the research group Thought and Politics in Brazil (CNPq-dgp.cnpq.br/dgp/espelhogrupo/2479669908202031). She works as a professor in courses on research methods and techniques at Cebrap. She was a researcher at CEPESP-FGV. She works on qualitative, quantitative and multi-method research. In english, she is the author of a chapter book “Technocratic Decisions and Financial Arrangements in Subway Services” In: MARQUES, Eduardo. The Politics of Incremental Progressivism (Wiley/IJURR, 2021) and of a paper in co-authorship with Rafael Marino in Latin American Perspectives: “Film Review: Autonomy with Servitude” (2021).

Research Description:

My research interests are mainly political economy in Brazil in the field of Political Science. I have been studying the relationship between the State and the private sector at the federal and state levels and how the executive and legislative powers relate to companies and entrepreneurs. My research topics also cover urban studies, economic development, Brazilian social and political thought and political behavior.

In the master's degree, I studied an urban policy - the São Paulo subway - permeated by public and private interests, especially with the first Public-Private Partnership (PPP) in Brazil (Line 4 - Yellow). During the development of the master's thesis, I realized how the private interests of large infrastructure contractors were linked to partisan interests in the state executive and legislature, which led me to study this topic more specifically in the PhD. In the PhD, I deepened the analysis of this relationship, but, this time, in the federal government, focusing on the period of the Workers' Party (PT) governments - especially in the Dilma Rousseff government and her impeachment. This research is being carried out now and should be completed by the end of this year. During the research, I ended up finding a link between the parties of the so-called “centrão” - a great coalition of physiological parties in the legislative - and the big construction companies that help to understand Rousseff's impeachment. Rousseff changed old practices of corruption in the government and in the nomination of “centrão” parties before the well-known Car Wash Operation discovered corruption schemes, and this caused her to lose support in Congress. Rousseff's impeachment has been treated by the literature in Brazil as one of the cases of new types of coups, as a category defined by Nancy Bermeo, for example.

In Brazil, I am part of two research centers that study various topics in the social sciences: the Brazilian center for analysis and planning (Cebrap) and the Center for the Study of Citizenship Rights (Cenedic) at University of Sao Paulo (USP).

BIO:

I am a PhD candidate in American Studies at Harvard with a secondary field in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. For the 2022-2023 academic year, I will carry out dissertation research as a Beyster Fellow with the Institute for Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers University. I previously was a co-coordinator for the Harvard American Studies Workshop, and served for two years as a resident tutor in Cabot House. I earned my MA in History from Brown University and BA from Oberlin College.

Reseach Description:

My dissertation is a history of cooperatives in the twentieth-century United States. Drawing on archives of the Cooperative League of the USA (founded in 1916) and other regional organizations, I am tracing a cooperative economy that linked the League's headquarters in New York City to strongholds in the upper Great Lakes region. My project combines cultural and economic analysis to understand the cooperative movement's arc over the first half the twentieth century. I am especially interested in the relationship between the social and geographic contexts shaping cooperatives and their approaches to profit, ownership, debt, and other financial questions. My broader research interests currently include the history of capitalism, US environmental history, feminist theories of labor and economics, and histories of the commons.

BIO:

Harry Begg works on the political economy of banking reform since the Global Financial Crisis. His dissertation, supervised by Professor Pepper Culpepper, focuses on regulatory reform processes in Australia, the UK, the US and Switzerland. In particular, Harry’s research seeks to understand the impact that upswings in public salience directed against the interests of large global banks have on financial regulation, a domain of policy typically dominated by business interest groups. The project investigates why countries usually characterized as similar political economies, such as the US and the UK, ended up with regulatory outcomes that diverged, while the UK and Switzerland – thought of as different political economies – achieved some reform that is very similar. Harry argues that the answer lies in varying salience attached to different policy issues, and the nature of business power in relation to the activities being regulated.

His research shows that, despite the technocratic consensus preferring to work through multilateral governance institutions, national regulation remains the most significant avenue for the expression of public interest in financial sector reform. Despite this, the post-crisis public drive for banks to work in the interests of customers has in many cases only partially been served: neither politicians nor bureaucrats are willing to fundamentally transform financial sectors because of the tax receipts and high-wage employment that derive from being a home to large global banks. Even in cases where banks’ commercial interests have been hampered through sweeping regulatory reform – as in the UK and Switzerland – this has not meaningfully changed the dominant role that finance plays in these mature and financialized democracies. The project documents a key clash of recent times between public and business interests, and how public attitudes towards capitalism influence the policy process.

Research Description:

Harry Begg works on the political economy of banking reform since the Global Financial Crisis. His dissertation, supervised by Professor Pepper Culpepper, focuses on regulatory reform processes in Australia, the UK, the US and Switzerland. In particular, Harry’s research seeks to understand the impact that upswings in public salience directed against the interests of large global banks have on financial regulation, a domain of policy typically dominated by business interest groups. The project investigates why countries usually characterized as similar political economies, such as the US and the UK, ended up with regulatory outcomes that diverged, while the UK and Switzerland – thought of as different political economies – achieved some reform that is very similar. Harry argues that the answer lies in varying salience attached to different policy issues, and the nature of business power in relation to the activities being regulated.

His research shows that, despite the technocratic consensus preferring to work through multilateral governance institutions, national regulation remains the most significant avenue for the expression of public interest in financial sector reform. Despite this, the post-crisis public drive for banks to work in the interests of customers has in many cases only partially been served: neither politicians nor bureaucrats are willing to fundamentally transform financial sectors because of the tax receipts and high-wage employment that derive from being a home to large global banks. Even in cases where banks’ commercial interests have been hampered through sweeping regulatory reform – as in the UK and Switzerland – this has not meaningfully changed the dominant role that finance plays in these mature and financialized democracies. The project documents a key clash of recent times between public and business interests, and how public attitudes towards capitalism influence the policy process.

BIO:

My name is Jun Zhou (she/they). I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan, a student affiliate with the Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics, and a certificate holder in the Science, Technology & Society Program.

I am a first-generation college graduate. I have a master's in Sociology from the University of Chicago (2019), a master's in Gender and Development (with Distinction) from the University College London (2017), and a bachelor's in English (with honors) from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (2016).

Before graduate school, I was a research assistant in the Economics Department at the University of Chicago, where I worked on a longitudinal project on women’s employment in Saudi Arabia. I also worked as a gender/sexuality scholar-activist in China, where I taught sexuality education to migrant children in Beijing, designed sexuality education textbooks, and wrote articles on feminist and LGBT/queer politics in China. When I was in London, I was an academic consultant for local NGOs, served on the project design committee (specializing in race/ethnicity, migration/immigration, and gender/sexuality programming), and provided sexuality education for refugee children in London.

I am originally from Hefei, a capital city located in the mid-east of China and close to one of the biggest lakes in the country. I grew up in a historic town where I developed my love of Jiangnan architecture, green tea, and spicy food. I love reading poetry, listening to rock music, and photography.

Research Description:

Jun's research interests center on gender/sexuality, economic sociology, global and international sociology, science and technology studies, and social theory. I study the intersection of gendered subject formation, techno-politics, and political economy.

Jun's dissertation is a comparative study of gender in the political economy by tracing the evolving control technology in post-socialist China. Specifically, Jun uses ethnographic and historical methods to compare two ideally situated forms of feminized labor—factory worker and digital influencer—to examine how the state and market invent and reinvent varying technologies of control to regulate women’s labor across different workplaces in China, the country that has emerged as both the world’s factory and the fastest-growing digital economy. To examine how gender is imbued in the technologies of control in the two economic sectors, Jun compares the technology of control in the digital sector with that in the manufacturing sector, juxtaposing the restriction of women’s bodies in time and space by the machinery on assembly lines and present-day technologies of tracking, surveilling, and valuing on digital platforms. This research has implications for studying the evolving relationship between gender, techno-politics, and political economy in an age of digitalization.

Concurrent projects focus on the collapse of work-family division in the post-industrial US, looking at how the ideal of "work-family division" came into being, its consequences, and its implications for understanding the entanglement between family and market.

BIO:

Kenton Card is a teacher, filmmaker, and PhD Candidate in Urban Planning at UCLA. He is currently a guest researcher at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and Free University Berlin, where he is also involved in co-organizing a Community Reading Group associated with the ‘Deutsche Wohnen und Co. Enteignen’ campaign. In California, Kenton has been a member of the Los Angeles Tenants Union, and formerly worked in Sacramento with Housing California and the Planning and Conservation League.

His academic research has long investigated how housing is nested within structural economic, gender, and racial inequalities. Kenton draws on the methods of interviews, participant observation, policy analysis, and documentary filmmaking. His dissertation compares housing politics across the United States and Germany, and how political groups, such as tenant movements and landlord associations, influence government officials and policy outcomes. He is currently editing Special Issues on ‘housing movements and racial capitalism’ with Margit Mayer and Akira Drake Rodriguez (Environment Planning C) and on ‘housing movements and care’ with Desiree Fields and Emma Power (Antipode). His films have been featured by Antipode (“Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore) and Interface (forthcoming, “Why Abolition Now?).

Research Description:

Los Angeles and Berlin face crises of housing affordability, which have only worsened during Covid-19, in spite of increasing mass participation in housing politics. My project compares two varieties of capitalism and their distinct housing regimes: ‘dualist rental system’ in the United States and an ‘integrated rental market’ in Germany. The aim of this comparative analysis is to leverage findings from Germany on new housing taxes to inform research and policy in the United States, and vice versa. The majority renter cities (LA 63% & Berlin 85%) have similar rental housing market conditions (low wages, high rents), despite important differences. Yet, housing scholars have not sufficiently examined how political processes reinforce or disrupt institutional and political legacies. This dissertation investigates how political groups – especially tenant movements and landlord associations – have influenced rental housing policy between 2008-2022. The multi-scalar comparison illustrates striking parallels in movements and policy outcomes across different regimes. The new policies include taxes to fund affordable housing, as well as stewardship of land to curtail gross inequalities in housing market conditions. This project makes a number of significant contributions by combining insights from housing, social movement, and interest group studies, to track the conflict over housing politics between tenant movements, opposition (landlord associations), and their impact on governance institutions (policy, politicians, parties, and agencies). My mixed-methods approach combines data from (1) textual analysis (newspapers, social media, newsletters, government documents), (2) organizational resource analysis (membership numbers, lobbyists networks, and money), and (3) interviews and observations of actors. My preliminary findings demonstrate how tenant movements deploy similar strategies, despite distinct resource advantages, resulting in striking tax policy outcome parallels in the episode between 2008-2022.

BIO:

My name is Lilith Dieterich. I am a research assistant and Phd-candidate at Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. I did my masters at the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena with a focus on Sociology of Labour and Economy. In fall 2019, I had the chance to be a visiting scholar at the Sociology department of UC Berkeley. The last two years, I have been working on a research project called ‘Technology instead of Institutions? The Blockchain-technology as a threat to the banking system’ funded by the German Research Fund. In fall 2022, I will be a visiting researcher at the UC Irvine.

Research Description:

I am interested in Sociology of Finance and Technology. My research focuses on how digital technology (potentially) changes the existing financial system and society. I try to develop a political-economy perspective on the interaction of technology and actors like state institutions- especially regulators- big tech, financial institutions, fintechs, interest groups, NGOs and supra-national entities (such as the EU). So far, I worked on payment structures, financial regulation, blockchain-based electronic securities and financial infrastructure. Currently, I am researching on the European regulation of market in crypto assets (MiCAR), CBDCs and stablecoins/ e-money-token. In September 2022, I start my research phase on the US-regulation of crypto assets.

BIO:

Mo Torres is a PhD candidate in sociology at Harvard University and a Stone Fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is interested in questions of race-class inequality, economic geography, urban politics, the history of the social sciences, and the political economy of racism. His dissertation investigates the politics of urban austerity in post-industrial Michigan from the 1970s to the present. Other projects include research on fringe banking, place and policing, and race theory. Before Harvard, Mo earned a master's in public policy from the University of Michigan and a bachelor's in history and Chicana/o Studies from the University of California, Davis. Originally from Sacramento, Mo was raised in a working-class, union family and is the first in his family to go to college. He is a former middle and high school teacher and in 2019 was a Fulbright scholar in Brazil, where he studied the politics of prison privatization at the Universidade de São Paulo.

Research Description:

My research contributes to a perspective on racism rooted in the political economy. The sociology of race has largely been dominated by social psychological perspectives that define race in terms of identity and that measure racism in terms of biases and attitudes. I take a materialist approach that asks how racism is produced within the political economy and expressed through material inequalities.

My dissertation research traces the rise of urban austerity in post-industrial Michigan. My goal is to understand how and why austerity became the dominant policy agenda and governing logic across Michigan, with a special focus on the thirteen localities where the state declared local fiscal crises (including Detroit, Flint, and smaller municipalities, nearly all majority Black and with significant poverty levels). My goal is to identify which individuals (e.g., elected officials, state bureaucrats, researchers, activists) and organizations (e.g., political parties, organizations, research centers) promoted, implemented, and justified urban austerity across the state. What were their goals and what political ideologies informed their work? How did they achieve such great success? And, finally, what opposition did they face, and what alternative paths might have been possible? This project uses historical, interview, and survey methods to tell a story that begins in the aftermath of New York City’s financial crisis in the late 1970s and ends with Flint’s water crisis and Detroit’s bankruptcy in the late 2010s. Thus far, this project has yielded two papers currently under review, and eventually—I hope!—will result in a book.

My other projects are paper-length projects. One set of papers (sole-authored and co-authored with Jared Clemons) asks how social scientists can use measures of race to understand class hierarchy, taking the perspective that racism primarily operates through material inequalities. Another set (with Mario Small and Lauren Taylor) asks how race and class shape access to financial institutions, including traditional and fringe banks (e.g., payday lenders). A final set (with Andreja Siliunas and Anthony Williams) asks how federal funding for local law enforcement agencies has transformed suburban and rural policing. While substantively distinct, these projects all ask how racism can be studied and understood by analyzing political economic structures.

BIO:

I am a PhD candidate in Political Economy and teaching assistant in the Department of History, Economics and Society at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. My research focuses on the political economy of central banking in general and on green central banking more specifically.

I hold a Bachelor degree in Economics from HEC Lausanne, Switzerland. During my undergraduate education, I had the opportunity to do an Erasmus exchange at Cardiff University in the UK.I also hold a Master degree in Socio-economics from the University of Geneva and a second one in Economics from HEC Lausanne.

In short, I was mostly trained as a neoclassical economist but I have always been interested in alternative ways of studying the economy. I am now working in a more heterodox department with people in Political Economy from various schools of thought (Post-Keynesian economics, Marxism, French Regulation school, …), as well as economic historians.

Research Description:

Research interests: Political Economy; Central banking & monetary policy; Climate crisis

Usually hidden from public scrutiny, central banks get more and more called upon to take an active role in the fight against climate change. My dissertation focuses on The Political Economy of Green Central Banking.

The first chapter's objective is to contribute to open the black box of the decision process at the ECB regarding climate change. Using a narrative approach, it analyzes the public speeches of the Executive Board members. I highlight an evolution of the ECB's view on its role on climate change, from a conception of climate change outside its mandate, to a limited and lesser place due to its impact of financial stability, to finally being part of its primary mandate. However, despite this evolution, there is no clear breaking point in terms of the conception of climate risk. In other words, there is no paradigm shift but of an adaptation of the existing model. The ECB does not act to fight climate change directly, but to maintain its political legitimacy. It must also ensure that it remains credible in the eyes of the market, and implements measures based on better consideration and disclosure of climate risks. These measures can be described as neoliberal, with the ethos of competitiveness at the center of social life, and a great reliance on market discipline.

BIO:

I am a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and I reside in Washington, D.C. where I am conducting fieldwork and completing my dissertation. Prior to academia, I served in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and the State Department. I grew up in the Philadelphia area. I enjoy cooking, hiking, gardening, and eating my way through new cities, and I am very excited to join you all in Berkeley!

Research Description:

My research interests include political sociology, regulation, social networks, cultural sociology, and policymaking processes. I use multiple methods, including ethnography, interviewing, content analysis, sequence analysis, and social network analysis, to investigate the cultural and relational dynamics of political elites in the United States. My dissertation examines the structural and moral dimensions of policy careers and networks in international trade policy, to understand how lobbyists and policymakers diagnose policy problems and solutions. In other research projects, I also explore culture and regulatory capture, as well as the discursive construction of constitutional law. In addition to research articles on the revolving door, corporate political influence, and international trade law, I am also working on a book project drawing from interviews with policymakers, lobbyists, and other policy professionals on how they navigate their lives and careers in Washington, D.C.