Yuna Blajer de la Garza / Political Theory Workshop

Yuna studies sociopolitical cleavages, inequalities and the "side effects" of democratization — with special attention to belonging, citizenship and the discursive justifications of structures of domination. In her dissertation, she analyzes the tension between citizenship and belonging through the figure of the "citizen who does not belong" to think about two overarching themes: the democratic promises of equality, and the stickiness of sociopolitical inequalities. The dissertation proposes that formal membership has come to be understood as sufficient for belonging to political communities, effectively crowding out informal exchanges that are actually necessary to guarantee a substantive equal membership in political communities, which she dubs "democratic belonging." Her work combines political theory with ethnographic methods to ground debates of political theory within empirical realities. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago.

The Political Theory Workshop offers faculty and other scholars an opportunity to present "in progress" or recently completed work to a diverse audience from political science, philosophy, law, and other social sciences and humanities. Workshop papers come from all areas of political theory, including normative and positive theory, legal theory, and the history of political thought. Papers are circulated ten days before the seminar. Participants are expected to read the paper before the workshop. Each session begins with comments and questions on the paper by a discussant, a brief response from the author, followed by a general discussion.