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Department Newsletter

June 2012

  • Letter from the Chair

Dear alumni, 

2011/12 has been an exciting year for Politics at UCSC, with a lot of new developments and achievements to update you about in the department. 

We are happy to report the successful conclusion of our search for a new professor of American Politics. The department has hired Melanie Springer, currently an Assistant Professor at Washington University and an expert on elections and federalism.Prof. Springer examines the factors that explain voter turnout in the fifty American states, an issue that promises to receive much attention in the coming presidential election. Her work traces historically how state laws have discouraged and excluded some voters, particularly minorities, and identifies the kinds of measures that might work to facilitate voting.

Our new addition will join the department at a particularly vibrant moment. The last few years have seen the promotion to tenure of six new Associate Professors: Eva Bertram (American), Dean Mathiowetz (Theory), Eleonora Pasotti (Comparative), Vanita Seth (Theory) Megan Thomas (Theory) and Ben Read (Comparative). The department is also looking forward to the return of Assistant Professor Mark Massoud, an expert in legal studies who spent the 2011-12 academic year as a visiting professor at McGill University. Our speaker series this year featured talks on such topics as post-conflict reconstruction in Afghanistan, lessons from the Egyptian revolution, and the posthumous repatriation of migrants to Mexico. As you can see below from the list of new books that our professors have published in the last several years, the Politics department is in the midst of a remarkable period of research activity.

Even as the department celebrates the successes of its newest members, we honor the passing of a man who played a critical role in the founding not just of the department but of the campus itself. Prof. John “Jack” Schaar died in Ben Lomond on December 26, 2011. As many of you know, Prof. Schaar was a legendary teacher who played a significant role in the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, and an influential theorist whose publications included Loyalty in America, Escape from Authority, Legitimacy in the Modern State, and The Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond. On March 16, 2012 more than a hundred of his former students and colleagues gathered to share their memories of Prof. Schaar in a memorial organized by the Politics Department. Others who could not attend have posted a number of moving tributes to Prof. Schaar on the Politics Facebook page, which we encourage you to follow.

Looking both to preserve our excellent undergraduate program while simultaneously building our innovative PhD program, we have also identified a number of fundraising initiatives for the department. To give you an example, the department seeks to introduce “sophomore seminars” capped at 20 students that would provide an intimate and intensive learning experience at an early and critical point in our majors’ undergraduate careers. For the PhD program, our goal is to provide graduate student fellowships that will allow us to offer multi-year packages of support for talented applicants. Go to our Giving page to learn more about the need and please consider making a donation. 

Please see below for further news and updates as we seek to better engage with and connect the various members of the UCSC Politics community, including alumni. I’d like to thank those of you wrote with updates last summer in response to our online alumni survey. We’ve included information from some of these responses below – please continue to update us via email (politics@ucsc.edu.) We hope you’ll look forward to our future newsletters keeping you abreast of developments within the Politics department at your alma mater, and we encourage you in the meantime to stop in at our recently redesigned webpage.

Sincerely,

Kent Eaton

Faculty Update

 Eight professors have published major new books in the last three years:

  • Ronnie Lipschutz, Political Economy, Capitalism and Popular Culture (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010)

What does The Dark Knight have to do with political economy or Lord of the Flies with capitalism? A great deal, according to guide to basic concepts and practices in capitalism, neoclassical economics, and political economy. Drawing on film and fiction from the past sixty years, this book describes and analyzes the role of popular culture in the production and reproduction of contemporary society.

  • Dean Mathiowetz, Appeals to Interest: Language, Contestation and the Shaping of Political Agency (Penn State University Press, 2011)

It has become a commonplace assumption in modern political debate that whit and rural working- and middle-class citizens in the United States who have been rallied by Republicans in the "culture wars" to vote Republican have been voting "against their interests." But what, exactly, are these "interests" that these voters are supposed to have ben voting against? It reveals a lot about the role of the notion of interest in political debate today to relize that these "interests" are taken for granted to be the narrowly self-regarding, primarily economic "interests" of the individual. Exposing and contesting this view of interests, Dean Mathiowetz finds in the language of interest an already potent critique of neoliberal political, theoretical, and methodological imperatives-and shows how such a critique has long been active in the term's rich history.

  • Eleonora Pasotti, Political Branding in Cities: The Decline of Machine Politics in Bogotá, Naples and Chicago (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

Drawing on the experiences of three cities on three continents, Eleonora Pasotti shows how cities suffering for decades from poor government and social conflict transitioned to a new form of governance: brand politics. The theory of brand politics shows mayors emulating marketing mavericks: in commerce, consumers aspire to become different people by acquiring products; in politics, citizens support mayors' brands because they seek to become carriers of the same values. Voting and buying have thus become increasingly synonymous in citizens' primal search for a means of expressing their identities.

  • Benjamin Read, Roots of the State: Neighborhood Organization and Social Networks in Beijing and Taipei (Stanford University Press, 2012)

The state-sponsored neighborhood organizations found in the cities of China, Taiwan and elsewhere in East and Southeast Asia seem, at first glance, like anachronistic and bureaucratic curiosities. Descending in part from dynastic and colonial mechanisms of cooptation and control, they perform administrative duties that facilitate a wide range of government programs, including welfare, public health, policing, and (in authoritarian cases) political surveillance. Based primarily on participant observation, surveys, and interviews in Beijing and Taipei, this book shows that these statist structures remain salient and deeply rooted in certain parts of urban society, even as other constituents ignore or reject them.

A close look at these organizations provides insight into the micro-level fabric of state-society ties, and shows how such relationships vary from person to person and neighborhood to neighborhood. While these structures form an important part of the underpinning of repressive regimes like that of China, in other settings they show that institutions once created to control societies can evolve in ways that empower them.

  • Vanita Seth, Europe’s Indians: Producing Racial Difference, 1500-1800 (Duke University Press, 2010)

Europe's Indians forces a rethinking of key assumptions regarding difference-particularly racial difference-and its centrality to contemporary social and political theory. Tracing shifts in European representation fo two different colonial spaces, the New World and India, from the late fifteenth century through the late nineteenth, Vanita Seth demonstrates that the classification of humans into racial categories or binaries of self-other is a product of modernity. Part historical, part philosophical, and part a history of science, her account exposes the epistemic conditions that enabled the thinking of difference at distinct historical junctures. 

  • Megan Thomas, Orientalists, Propagandists and Ilustrados: Filipino Scholarship and the End of Spanish Colonialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2012)

The writings of a small group of scholars known as the ilustrados are often credited for providing intellectual grounding for thee Philippine Revolution of 1896. Megan Thoomass shows that the ilustrados' anticolonial project of defining and constructing the "Filipiino" involved Orientalist and racialist discourses that are usually ascribed to colonial projects, not anticolonial ones. According to Thomas, the work of the ilustrados uncovers the surprisingly blurry boundary between nationalist and colonialist thought. Interrogating the terms "nationalist" and "nationalism", whose definitions are usually constructed in the present and then applied to the past, Thomas offers new models for studying natinalist thought in the colonial world. 

  • Michael Urban, Cultures of Power in Post-Communist Russia: An Analysis of Elite Political Discourse (Cambridge University Press, 2010)

Analyzing 34 extended interviews with leading Russian political figures, this book maps the contours of elite political discourse in that country, showing just what can be intelligibly communicated and what cannot. It thus documents the eclipse of a public in the language of the country's political class and helps to account for the fact that, despite two revolutions in the last century proclaiming democracy, the country remains an authoritarian state.

  • Daniel Wirls, Irrational Security: The Politics of Defense from Reagan to Obama (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010)

Examining the recent history of U.S. military spending and policy under presidents from Reagan to Obama, Wirls finds that although spending decreased from the close of the first Bush presidency through the early years of Clinton’s, both administrations preferred to tinker at the edges of defense policy rather than redefine it. Then came George W. Bush, 9/11 and a vast military buildup with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Wirls argues that the United States has undermined its own long-term security through profligate and often counterproductive defense policies while critical national problems have gone unmitigated and unsolved. 

  • Professor Michael Urban will be retiring in June after more than twenty years at UCSC. Prof. Urban’s research has focused chiefly on politics in Russia, including the mass movements that overthrew the communist regime and the problems of state and society that emerged in the post-communist period. A past recipient of the Golden Apple Teaching Award and a master storyteller, Prof. Urban is well known for classes that bring Russian and Central Asian politics vividly to life for scores of UCSC students.
  • Prof. Ronnie Lipschutz has been appointed as the new Provost of College 8. As a member of the faculty group in Sustainability Engineering and Environmental Design (SEED), Prof. Lipschutz has also helped develop a new inter-disciplinary curriculum on campus that is centered on issues of sustainability, including courses on renewable energy sources, food systems, and urban design.
  • Politics professors are playing important and high-profile roles on campus, including Eva Bertram as the director of the UCDC program, Vanita Seth as the new director of the Center for Cultural Studies, and Megan Thomas as a member of the new Demonstration Advisory Group (DAG).

Undergraduates in the News

  • Graduating senior Cally Wong has been chosen to participate in California’s highly competitive Executive Fellowship program as a 2012-13 Executive Fellow.
  • As part of their internship with the Committee to Bridge the Gap, Politics students Matthew Boitano, Joshua Drewes and Tyler Kerce prepared a report examining the breakdown of monitoring by the EPA in the wake of the 2011 Japanese nuclear disaster.
  • Politics senior Elizabeth Marcus spent fall quarter in Washington, D.C. interning with the Center for American Progress, which posted to its website her analysis of “Rape and the Arab Spring.”
  • Tessa Mizokami has won a Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award for her senior thesis entitled “Contesting Hegemonic Perceptions of Security in Colombia.” Tessa also received a Joel Frankel Award in 2011 to finance her research on displaced communities in Cartagena.
  • Politics and Legal Studies senior Lyuda Grigorieva is conducting research on media coverage and bioterrorism as a research assistant with NSF Researcher Susan Wright.
  • During 2011-12, twenty-three Politics Department majors took part in the UCDC program, which combines intensive internship experience with academic coursework in Washington, D.C. Several UCSC Politics students interned on Capitol Hill, working for members of the House of Representatives (Reps. Becerra, Berman, Farr, Sherman, Speier, and Woolsey) and Senate (Feinstein). Other internship placements included the U.S. Department of Education, the Federal Reserve Board, the Public Defender Service of D.C.,  the Center for American Progress, The New Republic, World Resources Institute, the Republican National Committee, Solidarity Strategies, the European Institute, the Center for International Private Enterprise, and the National Whistleblowers Center.

Graduate Spotlight

  • Corina McKendry (Ph.D. 2011) began a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor at Colorado College, one of the country’s most pedagogically innovative undergraduate institutions. 
  • Sara Benson (Ph.D. 2011) was awarded a UC Presidential postdoctoral fellowship to conduct research in the history department at UCLA, where she is continuing her work on prisons, democracy and U.S. legal culture.
  • Irma Sandoval (Ph.D. 2006) has received two fellowships for her work on corruption in emerging economies, one as a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy and another at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.
  • In addition to being named an Outstanding TA by the Graduate Division for 2010-11, Jasmine Syedullah received a 2011 Chancellor’s Achievement Award for Diversity as well as a 2012-13 President’s Dissertation-Year Fellowship.
  • Theresa Enright received a Chancellor’s fellowship in 2011-12 to complete her dissertation on urban politics in Paris, and was also chosen to participate in an April 2012 workshop on campus with renowned sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein. 
  • The department is sending Kate Blakeley to the Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Methods Research at Syracuse University this summer, where she will receive methods training for her work on the U.S. military’s energy policy.
  • Sam Cook joined the department’s graduate program as the newest Stephen Bruce Fellow in fall 2011. Sam joins three other graduate students in the department (Charles Olney, Kate Blakeley and Claire Lyness) whose study at UCSC is being supported by the generosity of Stephen Bruce (Cowell 1979, Economics).

Alumni focus

The Politics department circulated an alumni questionnaire in summer 2011 that generated a great deal of information about what our alumni have been doing since graduation. Here are some of the things we learned (we’ll include more responses in future newsletters):

  • Don Lane (1978) is currently serving as Mayor of Santa Cruz and administrator of the Appleton Foundation, a non-profit organization that examines questions of biotechnology and economic justice.
  • Cheryl Shanks (1983) is a professor of political science and chair of the legal studies program at Williams College, where she conducts research on population, sovereignty, and anti-immigration movements.
  • Andrew Chick (1992) After nearly two decades working in the reinsurance industry in London and San Francisco, he began a position in August 2011 in Burbank as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Lawyers’ Mutual Insurance Company.
  • Christopher Broughton (1998) is a Senior Advisor at the Millennium Challenge Corporation, after receiving his MPA at Princeton in 2004 and working as Director for Stability Operations at the National Security Council between 2008 and 2011.
  • Alejandro Reyes (1999) is Counsel at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Washington, D.C., where he works on issues ranging from housing to voting rights.
  • Trent Crable (1999) After law school at the University of Michigan and work for a firm that represents Indian tribal governments, is Associate General Counsel of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe.
  • Jessica Terman (2002) has received her PhD from the Askew School of Public Administration and Policy at Florida State University and is starting a tenure track job at University of Nevada-Reno.
  • Ami Bass (2005) After interning for Senator Diane Feinstein and working for the Peace Corps in Morocco, Ami is pursuing graduate studies in social work at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. 
  • Sonja Diaz (2007) used her summer break from Boalt Hall at Berkeley to work as a Justice & Regulatory Affairs Intern at the White House, where she focused on a range of issues for the White House Domestic Policy Council — including food safety, regulatory policy, guns and LGBT rights.
  • Theresa Pena (2008) was selected into the state of California’s highly competitive Senate Fellows Program for the 2011-2012 academic year.
  • Connor Dezzani Huff (2010) is starting the PhD program in the Government Department at Harvard in the fall of 2012
  • Charles Schultze (2010) is beginning a MPhil in Management at Cambridge University in the fall of 2012.