Featured Student News from our Spring 2020 department newsletter, Homo Politicus. Access the newsletter archive here.

Andrés Besserer (level II) published “Why School Securitization Fails. Lessons from Morrill and Musheno’s Navigating Conflict” in Metropolitics. He also co-authored with Javier Padilla Moreno-Torres (level I) “How to Understand Vox Voters with Ethnography” in Spain’s El País research blog, Agenda Pública.

Harry Blain (level III) published “The Useless War Powers Act,” “The Conservatism of Impeachment,” and “How the Judiciary is Chipping Away at the War on Terror” in Foreign Policy in Focus. Harry received a Knickerbocker Award for Archival Research in American Studies.

Abby Dobson (M.A.) published “From Baldwin to ‪Beyoncé‬: Exploring the Responsibility of the Artist in Society— Re-envisioning the Black Female Sonic Artist as Citizen” in African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity (Rutgers 2019). Dobson was also elected President of the Board of Directors at The National Organization for Women, NYC Chapter in January.

Philip Johnson (level III) published “The Crime and State Terrorism Nexus: How Organized Crime Appropriates Counterinsurgency Violence” in Perspectives on Terrorism. The article was covered by CUNY’s SUM, The Graduate Center, and the Thought Project podcast. He also published “Revisiting the Battle of Culiacán” in NACLA and a book review of Angélica Durán-Martinez’s The Politics of Drug Violence: Criminals, Cops and Politicians in Colombia and Mexico in Strife Journal. Finally, Philip published “Sharing the process, not just the finished product” in the Graduate Center’s Publics Lab project blog.

Rebecca Krisel (level I) published “Consent-Based Spaces in New York City after the Repeal of the Cabaret Law” in the Columbia Public Policy Review (CPPR). The article also appears in the 2019 CPPR print edition focused on innovation in policy.

Kyong Mazzaro (level III) received a fellowship from the Dangerous Speech Project to study the relationship between government-sponsored anti-media speech and threats to the physical integrity of journalists in Venezuela.

Ariel Mekler (level II) was awarded the ISA-Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section Convention Award for her papers “LGBTI Mainstreaming and the United Nations” and “Re-pathologizing queer bodies: The re-emergence of ‘gender ideology’ at the United Nations” submitted to the cancelled 2020 ISA annual convention.

David Monda (level I) was a guest speaker at the Medgar Evers Honors Programs series in December, and he presented on “Civil Society, Immigration and Xenophobia in Johannesburg South Africa” at the Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society‘s workshop in November. David also published “Long Walk to Freedom: Xenophobia Continues Against African Migrants in Johannesburg South Africa” in Political Animal Magazine and the GC’s Advocate.

Javier Padilla Moreno-Torres (level I) published A Finales De Enero (Tusquets 2019) and was awarded the Premio Comillas de Historia, Biografía y Memorias for his book. The book, which was recently reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, is a biography of three members of Spain’s anti-Franco student movement in the late 1960s.

Christopher Putney (M.A.) published “Trump’s likely impeachment acquittal shows just how much the Constitution has decayed” on the London School of Economics’s US Centre blog. He was also featured on the GC’s Thought Project podcast to discuss the same topic.

Scott Ratner (level II) was going to present “Getting the Bang for your Buck: Competing Strategies of Economic Statecraft in the Syrian Civil War” at the cancelled 2020 ISA annual convention.

Sally Sharif (level III) wrote a book review of When Movements Become Parties: The Bolivian MAS in Comparative Perspective by Santiago Anria in the LSE Review of Books. She presented the paper “Agents with Principles? The Role of Domestic Norms and Institutions in Conflict-Related Sexual Violence” at the Four Corners Conflict Network conference at the University of Arizona. She received the Provost’s Digital Innovation Implementation Grant to complete her DDR-18 dataset and the Open Pedagogy Fellowship to develop a zero-cost syllabus for her course “Civil Wars and Peacebuilding” at Baruch College.

Rosa Squillacote (level III) secured a Doctoral Curriculum Enhancement Grant for the Political Science department to implement a series of student-led “Praxis Clusters,” which focus on collaborative, reflective exploration of ethical research processes and other practices of public engagement. She worked alongside Philip Johnson (level), Professor Michael Fortner, Kyong Mazzaro (level), Nick Reynolds (level), and Professor Charles Tien. Rosa also received a Center for the Humanities Teaching Fellowship.

In Memoriam 

Our colleague and friend, Daniel Golebiewski, 29, passed away over the winter break. Dan joined the doctoral program in political science in the Fall 2015, eager to study International Relations. He worked closely with his mentor, Professor George Andreopoulos. Below is an email Professor Andreopoulos shared with his colleagues at the Center for International Human Rights:

“Dan was a star student at John Jay, a research assistant at CIHR, a graduate of the Human Rights Program at Columbia and in his second year at the Graduate Center’s Doctoral Program in Political Science. In addition to his many contributions to CIHR, that included his co-authorship of two major research reports, Dan was an active member of the Interdisciplinary Studies Section (IDSS) of the International Studies Association. In the latter capacity, he served superbly as the administrative assistant to the Conference Organizing Committee of the 2016 IDSS Conference in Thessaloniki, Greece, where he also presented a very good paper on ‘Responsible Solidarity’: Poland’s Response to the EU’s Refugee Quota System. In recognition of his contributions to IDSS, the Executive Council voted to create the Daniel Golebiewski Best Paper Award. Beginning with the 2021 ISA Convention, the Award will go to the best paper by a graduate student presented in a panel sponsored or co-sponsored by IDSS/ISA at the Annual Convention. Dan was a very promising young scholar and a terrific team player. He will be sorely missed. May he rest in peace.”

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