ABOUT
I am a Visiting Assistant Professor in Government in the Department of Government and Legal Studies at Bowdoin College. In the Summer of 2023, I finished my Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University, with an emphasis on International Relations and Political Theory.
I am a teacher-scholar with expertise in ethics, international law, migration and citizenship, human rights, and history and international organizations. I love incorporating lessons from the Improv course I took at Second City in my teaching.
With my current interdisciplinary research project, I want to contribute to ongoing debates on the shortcomings of current legal categories of protection for non-citizens by exploring to which extent they owe their potentialities and limits to notions of deservingness that sideline broader articulations of political responsibility. I take an ethnographic approach to the processes of construction of the categories of the stateless, refugee, and temporary protected status (TPS) through UN archival work and fieldwork with communities of rights claimants.
RESEARCH
THE GLOBAL POLITICS OF CITIZENSHIP: PRODUCING AND PROTECTING THE “DESERVING” SUBJECT
My work is on the legal, ethical, and political frameworks around migration and citizenship. In particular, I am interested in how narratives of ‘deservingness’ have come to dominate discussions about migration, refugee-status, and citizenship. “Deservingness” is in some ways a common-sense idea but it has interesting effects when it becomes the point of connection between ethics, law, administration, and individual welfare at the border. It expands or limits people’s life-chances by supplying the legally binding, but conceptually ambiguous,
answer to the fraught question of who gets to live where. I examine how negotiations of morality intersect
with constructions of race, gender, religion, class, and state borders. Deservingness enables administrators
to classify people into categories, but also has the effect of justifying hierarchies, exclusions, and
injustices through law.
The book project, Undeserving Subjects: The Global Politics of the Margins of Citizenship, investigates how legal categories of protection are interconnected with notions of “deservingness.” It explores how notions of deservingness have shaped rights in the human rights, refugee, and stateless international protection regimes between the early 1940s and the late 1960s. Moreover, exposing the overlap of international law and national contexts, it investigates how deservingness has animated US immigration policy in relation to the gaps in the
international definition of the refugee. It especially considers the construction of Temporary Protected
Status (TPS) in relation to the US intervention in El Salvador, the advocacy of Haitian TPS recipients to
advocate for comprehensive immigration reform, and the potentialities and shortcomings of the refugee
status and the TPS to address increasing displacement connected to climate change. As a result, the book
develops an original conceptualization of deservingness as part of a larger methodological approach to the
study of moral values in global politics. It also presents a concrete history of the formation of
international protection regimes and their mutual dependencies that makes evident that notions of
deservingness shape the mutually constitutive boundaries between political subjectivities, rights, and
institutions. I argue that deservingness empowers officials in governments, NGOs, and IOs to incentivize
rights claimants to take personal and individual responsibility for structural inequality and injustice,
reinforcing narrow narratives on rights and movement while sidelining broader conceptions of political
responsibility.
PUBLICATIONS
Work In Progress
“Above politics: the construction of human rights in the negotiation
of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (under review) explains how state representatives adopted a declaration instead of a convention in the process of negotiation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by inserting them into a teleological trajectory organized around
attempts to separate and demarcate morality and politics.
“Producing (un)deserving
noncitizens: the negotiation of the morality of Salvadorans to limit US responsibility in the creation of
Temporary Protected Status” (under review) argues that Congresspeople relied on notions of deservingness to make protection a matter of the moral worth of Salvadorans and other noncitizens to limit US responsibility for interventions around the world in the
context of the Cold War in the process of creation of TPS.
Book Symposium
“A Conversation about the Politics of Rights within Rights as Weapons” (2019).Book Symposium: A Discussion on Clifford Bob’s Rights as WeaponsEthics and International Affairs Journal
Public Scholarship
Lessons learned from ‘Encanto’: Oscar winner for Best Animated Feature teaches us about flaws of U.S. immigration policy, Northwestern Now, 03/28/2022.
Granting temporary protected status to Ukrainians is a start, but it’s not enough, Chicago Tribune, 03/17/2022
“Feeding Agrarian Reform with Food Donations: a Covid-19 Story from Brazil” (2020).
Living With Plagues: New Narratives for a World in Distress Impressions and Reflections.
Northwestern Buffett Institute for Global Affairs
TEACHING
Pedagogical Training
Faculty Fellow
Bowdoin College's Baldwin's Center for Teaching and Learning, 2024-2025
Teaching Practicum
Northwestern Summer of 2020
Teaching Certificate
Northwestern’s Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching, 2018-2019
Teaching Committee
Northwestern's Department of Political Science, 2018-2019
COURSES
Instructor of Record
Introduction to International Relations (Spring 2023, Fall 2023)
Human Rights (and Wrongs): the International Politics of Human Rights (Fall 2023)
Ethics in International Affairs (Spring 2024)
Deservingness, Law, and Public Policy (Spring 2024)
International Relations Theory (Fall 2022)