The Integrative PhD Fellowship Program

Fellows

2019-21 Fellows

Omer Leshem

Omer Leshem is a doctoral candidate for clinical psychology at The New School for Social Research. His research focuses on audience-performer communication in different performing arts mediums. As a passionate musician and an avid music consumer, he is particularly interested in exploring how trait empathy, musical preference, and cognitive appraisal shapes this type of reciprocal interaction in live music settings. For his dissertation, he is working in collaboration with the College of Performing Arts on a study that will investigate audience members’ cognitive interpretations of musically induced emotions and their affective reactions during live musical concerts. This innovative research connects empirical psychological assessment with theoretical discussions about art perception, social cognition, empathy, aesthetics, and emotions. Using data visualization methods, he aims to construct an interactive platform to display collective experience in live concerts.

Orsolya Lehotai

Orsolya Lehotai is a doctoral student in the Politics Department at The New School for Social Research. Orsolya earned her Masters degree in Gender Studies from the Central European University and in Political Science from Corvinus University, Budapest. Her doctoral research focuses on the politics of care, as well as the conditions, articulations, and multiple forms of civic responsiveness and belonging in relation to the mediation of the suffering Other in contemporary Hungarian politics. Coming from a journalistic background, her research focuses on the ways in which mediation through various media platforms bring about and build upon exclusionary discourses. In her research, she combines an extensive ethnographic fieldwork with media analysis and critical discourse analysis.

Lizabeth Dijkstra

Lizabeth Dijkstra is a PhD student in philosophy at The New School for Social Research. Her research focuses on the nature and limits of subjectivity and (human) cognition, especially within the context of moral experience, judgment and recognition. Within the context of the Integrative PhD, Lizabeth is interested in how artificial forms of cognition challenge our understanding what it means to ‘be moral’. Whereas artificial systems are often very capable to rationally justify their decisions, they similarly seem unable to truly perceive the moral significance of a situation. Lizabeth aims to investigate what this latter aspect of moral existence entails, as well as what role this aspect plays in the social practice of ascribing moral statuses. Lizabeth holds an MA and BA in philosophy, as well as a BA and BSc in religion studies and neuroscience from the University of Amsterdam.

Bettine Josties

Bettine Josties is a doctoral student in Sociology at The New School for Social Research. Working at the intersection of social theory, political economy, media theory, and affect theory, her research explores contemporary practices of governance, design and programming that aim at further intensifying the affective relation between human bodies and digital media technologies and how they relate to the current workings of the digital economy. Bettine holds an M.A. and a B.A. in Social Sciences from Humboldt University of Berlin.

Marcy Hudson

Marcy Hudson’s academic background is in psychology (M.A., The New School), developmental psychology (M.A., Tufts University), and graphic design (B.F.A., the Rhode Island School of Design). She is currently a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at The New School for Social Research. Marcy has worked extensively supporting NIH funded clinical research for children and adolescents at Judge Baker Children’s Center, Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, MIT, and Boston Children’s Hospital. Her research lives at the convergence of human-computer interaction, design, survey methodology, and psychological change. She asks questions about how visual elements in interfaces and questionnaires shape users’ emotions, reflections, and decisions. Marcy aims to offer mental health providers novel information related to the use of technology for clinical care to consider how we can use our digital spaces most consciously and effectively. 

2018-20 Fellows

Emily Breitkopf

Emily Breitkopf is a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at The New School for Social Research​, where she has taught courses on the intersections of media, psychology, and gender.​ For her dissertation she ​is researching the​ medical practice of fetal sex determination (FSD) and related gendering discourses​ ​in the United States​. Through a critical ​​psychological approach, she examines the role of FSD in US legislation (eg. sex selective abortion laws), online social practice (eg. gender reveal parties), pregnant subjectivity (eg. interviews with pregnant subjects), and US medical discourse over the past two centuries (eg. medical journals). ​Emily​​ ​is interested in the ways that cisnormativity is discursively and affectively reproduced, regulated, and resisted through the assignment of fetal sex and gender​ during pregnancy. Her work interfaces with theoretical discussions about gender, intelligibility, personhood, and justice that are central in queer theory, transgender studies, and critical and feminist psychologies. Through the Integrative PhD Fellowship Program, she aims to construct a visual representation of her work that invites users to engage with her project and participate in her analytic process.

Santiago Mandirola

Santiago Mandirola is a Ph.D. student in sociology and historical studies at The New School for Social Research. His research examines how the sophistication of methods and technologies of consumer credit scoring in South America generated the conditions of growth and expansion of these consumer credit markets. His project will address how the management of consumer information was refined in South American credit bureaus since the 1990s, the role of these changes in the incorporation of new sectors to the consumer credit market, and how this process opened up new possibilities of gain for all the actors involved. Santiago holds an M.A. in sociology from The New School and a B.A. in sociology from the University of Buenos Aires.

Ye Liu

Ye Liu is a PhD student in sociology at NSSR who explores spatial politics of human agency, mobility, power, apparatus, and geography especially within concrete historical contexts. This project focuses on how the police try to track or control the monks or pilgrims marching on the mountainous plateau in order to maintain “social stability” and “national security” in Tibet–by using digital tracking device and building roads to monasteries. I will use ethnographic data, mapping and visualization methods to discuss governmentality and territorialization. In addition to studying sociology, I have an academic background in anthropology (Sun Yat-sen University) and architecture (CIHU Aacademy) in China, and sociology (LSE) in the UK. I also have broad regional focus including China, India and Africa.

Karolina Koziura

Karolina Koziura is a doctoral student in Sociology and Historical Studies at the New School for Social Research, New York. Karolina earned her Masters degree in Cultural Anthropology from University of Poznan, Poland and in Nationalism Studies from Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. She conducts her research primarily in Ukraine and the former Soviet bloc and examines the intersections of nationalism, cultural memory, and social change. Her doctoral dissertation explores the intersection of violence and denial in the production of knowledge about Holodomor, the mass artificial famine of 1932-33. By using different techniques of mapping and data visualization, she attempts to investigate various scales – temporal and spatial – on which Holodomor occurred.

Macushla Robinson

Macushla Robinson is a doctoral candidate in the Politics Department at The New School for Social Research, where she will teach a course on labor and love in the fall. Coming from a curatorial background, she delves into the hidden political implications of many cultural practices; her research focuses on the ways in which family heirlooms implicate genealogies in slavery, forming part of a racialized technology that separates ‘legitimate’ bodies, connections and histories from ‘illegitimate’ through the fabric of everyday domestic consumption. Combining an analysis of the transatlantic literature and histories of slavery with the anthropology of cutlery, she hopes to uncover the complex relationship between decoration in the domestic sphere and transatlantic slavery. Given the interdisciplinary and design-based nature of her research, the integrative PhD Fellowship will support a design-informed research and writing methodology.

2017-19 Fellows

Zoe Carey

Zoe Carey is a doctoral student in sociology at The New School for Social Research. Her research addresses new technologies of police surveillance and issues of accountability and bias in algorithmic decision-making. By tracing algorithmic assemblages from creation to implementation, her project will map the social life of a predictive policing algorithm to understand this new mechanism of governance. Zoe holds an M.A. in Sociology from The New School for Social Research, an M.A. in Nationalism Studies from Central European University, and a B.A. in International Studies from the University of California, San Diego.

Anke Gruendel

As a Politics PhD student, I am interested in new forms of political participation and their potential implication on political subjectivities.  I am particularly curious about Public Sector Design, a relatively new form of design practice that has made its way into public administration, drawing on traditions of service design, industrial design, and Design Thinking.  As a trained designer, I want to interrogate the specific processes of legitimation through which design practitioners render  their methods and solutions politically pertinent.  Mapping out the historical intersections of design methods with other post WWII public administrative discourses, I am interested in sketching out a genealogy of contemporary Public Sector Design.

Zeynep Ustun

Anchored to her auto-ethnographic account of the Gezi Resistance in Turkey, Zeyno Ustun examines the logic of digital political action that manifests itself within the morphology of networks that not only engender the decentralized architecture of communication and the rising surveillance Empire, but also provide new ways of organizing contemporary social movements. Mapping the critical power relations that are not only at the national but also at the supranational, regional and trans-local levels all at once, Ustun is currently working on a methodology that she calls cartographic ethnography which aims for enabling efficient navigation online and on-site and captures the multi-layered and networked structure inherent to the political action on the Internet itself.

Katinka Wijsman

Katinka Wijsman is a PhD Candidate in Politics at the New School for Social Research and a member of the Urban Ecology Lab. Her research explores the politics that shape the production of resilient coastal landscapes through the introduction of nature-based infrastructure. Using a feminist and multispecies ethnographic approach, her research asks how climate change governance deals with nature as an active agent, and what it means for the concept of political responsibility to include complex and dynamic assemblages of people, animals, plants, and things. In addition to her research, she teaches courses on Feminism & Ecology and Environmental Justice at the undergraduate college of The New School.

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