This project examines how French cinema acts as a fragmented and often evasive site of memory surrounding the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). France has a longstanding reputation as a leading global producer of culture and intellectual thought; yet, this prominent status in the artistic space has privileged French perspectives while marginalizing and at times even obfuscating others. Through a close analysis of post-war films, films about banlieue housing projects, and subsequently more recent works, this project traces the ways in which France’s difficulty confronting its colonial past manifests itself in cinema through silence, distortion, displacement, and incremental acknowledgment. Methodologically, textual film analysis is combined with scholarly research on memory, alongside original interviews with French filmmakers Laurent Heynemann, François Luciani, and Caroline Huppert, whose insights highlight how creative and political constraints shape mechanisms of representation. More specifically, this research draws on films such as Le Petit Soldat (1963), Le thé au harem d’Archimède (1985), Indigènes (2006), and Pour Djamila (2011), as well as works from prominent scholars and historians such as Leslie Hill, Guy Austin, Benjamin Stora, and Alec Hargreaves. By revealing how French cinematic productions and storytelling have impacted postcolonial memory, this project highlights the urgent need for renewed political accountability to address the afterlives of Empire.

My research topic refers to the ceaseless clash between human rights and state rights since the late modern period. The birth of democratic revolutions and the Enlightenment across Europe in the late 18th century brought forth a new demand for rights that appeared through the state. Thus, the establishment of nation-states and the integration of citizen rights were foundational in building a groundwork for human rights. The end of World War II and the creation of the United Nations brought forth a new world order, especially with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, with the Cold War following, conservative European forces redefined human rights, which Moyn describes as “the conservative Christian interpretation” (74). In diverse places such as Asia and Africa, these human rights rooted in Christian imperial law directly conflicted with state rights that were influenced by other religions and cultures. In other words, the objectivity of human rights was reactionary, trying to reassert European values internationally, with Christianity being the universal good. Thus, my research question aims to cover the extent to which this historical clash between human and state rights has manifested itself in the modern political landscape. Specifically, I hope to contribute to this conversation by presenting how state rights have established greater modern superiority over human rights.

Campus policing is often excluded from broader analyses of law enforcement, despite the fact that nearly one-third of U.S. police agencies operate on college campuses. This research investigates how campus police departments, in coordination with university administrations, municipal police, and state or local governments, form a multi-jurisdictional law enforcement web, which increasingly functions as a politically dominant, coercive power. Drawing on theories of institutional design and decision-making, I argue that policing capacity has expanded, while routine arrests decline, resulting in campus police retaining latent coercive power. This power is expressed via high-intensity interventions in student demonstrations, framed as crises. Using data from the Survey of Campus Law Enforcement Agencies (SCLEA), Clery Act data, and case studies of the 2024 encampments at UCLA and Columbia University, I employ a mixed-methods approach combining database analysis with process tracing. Data shows that arrest rates have declined over time, while policing capacity is increasing and is deployed during moments of protest to suppress students. Together, these findings suggest that student free speech is constrained not through constant enforcement, but through the combined effects of selective policing and the lack of institutional channels for student dissent. This study contributes to research on policing by demonstrating how capacity, rather than enforcement frequency alone, shape the limits of political expression.

How do intergenerational Vietnam War narratives and silences shape the political socialization of Vietnamese Americans? Political socialization refers to how individuals develop political attitudes, values, and behaviors, yet the role of refugee histories in shaping this process remains understudied. After the Vietnam War (1955–1975), many South Vietnamese faced reeducation camps, political persecution, and displacement, leading to migration to the United States and the formation of diasporic communities shaped by exile and anticommunist politics. This project examines how memory, trauma, and silence shape the political development of Vietnamese American young adults. Using snowball sampling, I interviewed 18- to 25-year-old descendants of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants. Findings show that during childhood and adolescence, participants largely adopted their parents’ perspectives, shaped by cultural values, migration histories, and lived experiences of war and displacement, ranging from staunch anti-communism to apoliticism. As young adults leave home, many begin forming independent political identities, often reinterpreting or challenging inherited narratives and silences. These findings demonstrate that silence itself is political: even in the absence of explicit war narratives, it continues to shape identity, belonging, and political orientation. More broadly, they reveal how the legacies of war persist across generations, structuring political identity formation within refugee and diasporic communities.

My project examines how international climate change initiatives affect women’s empowerment. Many international climate frameworks increasingly prioritize gender, however, it is unclear whether these efforts translate into meaningful participation and decision making power for women and girls. This study analyzes how international funded climate adaptation projects in Peru and Bolivia impact women’s participation. The findings show that these projects move beyond tokenistic inclusion by integrating women into education systems, leadership training, and governance processes. However, participation within these projects are often consultative or mechanistic, where decision making power is inconsistently guaranteed. As a result, these projects partially institutionalize women and girls' empowerment. These findings suggest that while these projects are making significant steps toward gender equity, effective adaptation requires more explicit forms of integration of women into formal governance structures which can assure them authority in decision making processes and resource allocation.

Why do some financially vulnerable households rely on payday lenders, pawnshops, check-cashing services, and other high-cost borrowing while others do not? Existing research shows that the use of alternative financial services (AFS) is shaped by household economic instability, barriers to mainstream banking, and unequal forms of financial inclusion that often expose marginalized communities to more exploitative credit options. However, less attention has been given to whether institutional trust helps explain how individuals navigate financial vulnerability. This project examines whether trust in the federal government is associated with the use of AFS and whether that relationship varies across racial and ethnic groups. Using data from the 2020 Collaborative Multicultural Post-Election Survey (CMPS), I employ binary logistic regression to estimate the likelihood of AFS use as a function of trust in the federal government while accounting for key socioeconomic and demographic factors. I expect lower trust in the federal government to be associated with a higher likelihood of AFS use, though this relationship may vary across racial and ethnic groups given unequal experiences with the state and formal financial institutions. By linking financial behavior to institutional trust and racial inequality, this project contributes to broader conversations about economic vulnerability, exclusion, and the role of public institutions in shaping everyday financial decision-making.

This study investigates whether the effects of political risk on foreign direct investment (FDI) vary across regimes. Specifically, it asks: “Does regime type condition the relationship between political risk and FDI inflows?” Using political risk scores from the International Country Risk Guide (ICRG), regime classifications from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) “Regimes of the World” dataset, and macroeconomic data from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (WDI), this study analyzes country-year observations from 1984–2021 across four regime types: closed autocracies, electoral autocracies, electoral democracies, and liberal democracies. It employs country and year fixed effects panel regressions with interaction terms to estimate how political risk affects FDI across regimes. The results show that risks related to institutional quality are more strongly associated with FDI inflows in electoral regimes than in closed autocracies. Conflict-related risks exhibit stronger associations with FDI inflows in liberal and electoral democracies than in autocratic regimes. These findings contribute to the literature by challenging the assumption that political risk affects FDI uniformly across regimes.