Current PhD Students

My work focuses on the development and evolution of political preferences in a comparative perspective. I am also interested in developing methods to improve survey data analyses.

Andrey's research interests include ethnic nationalism, the radical right and its tensions with the centre-right, white identity, and the comparative study of these topics in Eastern Europe and Western democracies. His current project examines the impact of Russia's international support for the radical right on domestic Russian audiences and social movements.

My research examines the politics of expertise, focusing on how knowledge claims are authorized, enacted, and institutionalized to legitimize political authority. I am particularly interested in the relational and performative dimensions of expertise, how actors strategically deploy different categories of knowledge and the social processes through which claims to the possession of knowledge gain recognition as legitimate.

My dissertation explores the politics of post-independence development projects in Sri Lanka, examining the mechanisms by which assertions of different kinds of expertise become politically generative in contestations over political power between competing actors. Methodologically, I combine interpretive approaches with process tracing to analyze how context-specific meanings shape the causal efficacy of knowledge practices. My broader research interests include conflict and development, theories of nationalism, technocratic populism, and the politics of ethnic and religious identity in South Asia.

Merve's research interests include humanitarianism, gender-based asylum, and the role of state and non-state actors in refugee management in the Middle East. Her research aims to unpack the norms and practices of women refugee empowerment policies in Turkey.

My PhD project focuses on the international fight against HIV/AIDS and minority rights, and I work on global health and African politics

I study the formation of social movements and political parties, the extent to which they are institutionalized, their dynamics of interactions, and the ways in which parties and movements make use of human rights salience to create institutional and policy change. My cases involve countries in East and Southeast Asia with an in-depth investigation on Thailand and Taiwan. Before joining McGill, I spent several years working on human rights advocacy and campaigning in Southeast Asia with a particular emphasis on Thailand.

Research Interests: Comparative Politics and Southeast Asian Politics; Parties, Social Movements, and State Relations; Politics of Human Rights.

Daniel (he/him) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at McGill University. His doctoral research, supported by the Richard H. Tomlinson Doctoral Fellowship and SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship, examines the dynamics of 'rogue statehood' from the perspective of international norm violation, status, and social hierarchy. He also maintains a research interest in East Asian politics and international relations, with a focus on Korea.

Keywords: East Asia (esp. Korean Peninsula), international norms, order and hierarchy, rogue states

Lucas's research explores how the French civil wars of the sixteenth century led to both political breakdown and governmental centralization. His project examines the conflict between increasing legislative professionalism and growing national identity using historical comparative and text analysis methods. 

Research interests: early modern state development, nationalism, text-as-data methods

Se Hyun’s research explores how different imaginations of social boundaries, such as nations and ethnicities, are constructed, dissipated, reinterpreted, and challenged. With a specific focus on China and Korea, his research examines the conditions under which a conceptually vague and contested symbol such as China becomes cognitively salient to the members of the imagined communities through machine learning text analysis (word embedding based on neural network language models) and interpretive methods such as ordinary language analysis.

 

Marjolaine's research interests are at the junction of IR and Comparative politics and encompass global governance, multilateral diplomacy, and international organizations, as well as federalism, multi-level governance, cultural and national diversity, and paradiplomacy (the international activities of “substate” - federated and regional - governments such as Quebec and Flanders). She mobilizes practice theory (IR) to analyze the consequences of substate involvement in multilateral organizations and conferences (UNESCO, the Council of the European Union, United Nations' Climate Change conferences) for the practices and politics of global and national governance.

Rupinder studies visible minority political behaviour with a focus on the South Asian diaspora and the Sikh community. Her work seeks to articulate variations in race, ethnicity and religion and has regional interests in Canadian politics, as well as in other Western democracies.

Sarah's interests include humanitarianism and gender-based violence (GBV) in protracted refugee situations. Using qualitative methods, she examines questions surrounding long-term GBV prevention programming, immediate GBV assessments, and informal remedies comparatively in the South Asian subcontinent and the Levant.

Teresa studies political behaviour, with focus on public perceptions and political attitudes in democratic contexts. Her research examines the intersection of digital media and politics, particularly the role of online humour and internet memes in political communication, engagement, and participation. Methodologically, Teresa works with mixed-method and cross-disciplinary approaches to analyze digital political communication and political attitudes.

Brooke’s research interests include political behaviour and public opinion, especially when they intersect with gender. Her current dissertation work focuses on the harassment of women politicians and journalists online as well as the spread of gendered disinformation

International political economy with a focus on state capitalism, rising powers in the global economic governance, financialization, institutional transformations of development finance, and the implications of these phenomena for developing countries.

Normative Political Theory with those who struggle, Comparative qualitative research on gender in India intersected with contemporary political theory on agency, Democratic Theory with special emphasis on Habermas' 'Discourse Ethics' and alternatives to deliberative democracy such as agonistic politics, Feminist, Race and Postcolonial Theory, Critical Theory, Biopolitics, Foucault and Foucauldian Methods, Marxism and Marxist scholarship, State and Constitutional Theory.