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.

Aengus studies political behaviour and particularly participation and motivation of online political activists. He studies these phenomena in Canada and other mature democracies. Methodologically, he works with survey, census, and social media data with additional interests in data science, machine learning, natural language processing and computational social science more generally. His work has been published or is forthcoming in The Journal of Politics, The Journal of Experimental Political Science, Party Politics, The Misinformation Review, and The Canadian Journal of Political Science.

My research interests revolve around state-society relations in decentralized institutional settings and how political processes shape public policies, from design to implementation. My dissertation adopts a subnational comparative research design in Brazil and Argentina, and employs mixed methods to unpack how, to what extent, and under which circumstances policy-makers implement gender violence and sexual and reproductive health public policies.

I am interested in decision-making on the Supreme Court of Canada. Particularly, analyzing judges as members of a community, using sociological frameworks and role theory to study judicial behaviour and conduct both on and off the bench.

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.

South Asian politics, the politics of expertise, technocratic populism, judicial politics, theories of nationalism, the politics of ethnic and religious identity, personal law and legal pluralism.

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.

Michel Fournier-Simard is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at McGill University specialized in the social impact of Artificial Intelligence. His dissertation looks at police policy making in the era of AI. As the police enacts the State monopoly of legitimate violence over a given territory, the way it engages with technological innovations to enhance this power - or not -, and how society responds, are crucial dynamics illustrative of the challenges AI poses for policy makers. When integrating police AI technological innovations, services must identify which products or services provide the best balance between optimized technical capacities and cost efficiency, while developing use policies addressing privacy, inequality and unaccountability concerns. Michel dives into the decision-making process of police policy leaders, arguing they make sense of complex AI technologies through a simplification process centred on the impact of technologies on traditional policing, the type of surveillance capacities they enhance, and the perceive maturity of each technology. In addition to his PhD research, Michel is a dedicated part-time educator in the Faculty of Political Science at Dawson College. He holds an MA in Political Science & Public Policy (École doctorale de Sciences Po - Paris), and a B.S. in Political Science & History (University of Ottawa – summa cum laude). His doctoral research is supported by a Wolfe 2020 Graduate Fellowship, as well as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

 

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 student in the Department of Political Science at McGill University. His doctoral research, supported by the Richard H. Tomlinson Doctoral Fellowship, focuses on rogue states’ engagement with international norms, in particular the question of partial or incomplete compliance.

Keywords: East Asia (esp. Korean Peninsula), international norms and global governance, “rogue states”

My thesis, “National Identity and Early State Development,” investigates how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century officials’ conduct during the reigns of Henri III, Henri IV, and Louis XIII were influenced by their belief in France’s historical mission. It asks how early modern bureaucrats were able to achieve a sense of collective identity that was sufficiently strong to enable them to solve the coordination problems inherent in state-building. In France, these bureaucrats were responsible not only for implementing centralized taxation, but also for instituting a religiously exclusionary criminal justice system and for developing the first modern theories of sovereignty. These observations suggest a strong link between early French bureaucrats’ legal and religious philosophies and their drive to build a centralized state.

To complete this research my dissertation will draw on both comparative historical and history of political thought literatures. My central case studies are the work of legal theorist Jean Bodin (1529/30-1596) and his influence on the subsequent development of French administrative theory. By exploring the exclusionary nationalist underpinnings of Bodin’s theory of sovereignty this research project helps reassess the ongoing debate about whether strong states or nationalist movements were the primary factors behind the rise of the European nation-state. My research indicates that the initial impetus may be located a small group of early modern French bureaucrats who sought ways to build a stronger state in order to spread their nationalist ideology and legal theory more widely.

I contend that new insights into the way that nation-building was historically conjoined to the development of a legal theory of exclusionary state sovereignty remain relevant today in settler and post-colonial states such as Canada. This is because nationalist bureaucrats used the state apparatus not only to sustain independence movements but also to essentialize and repress Indigenous peoples in the name of creating ethno-culturally homogeneous national identities.

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.

Mathieu is interested in campaign and media effects, public opinion, political psychology, and political behavior. He has a regional focus on Canada and other Western democracies and mostly relies on survey and textual data.

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.

Research Interests: Memory politics, transitional justice, post-communist transition, nationalism and ethnic wars, South Eastern Europe, Orientalism and Balkanism, authoritarianism and dictatorships, legacies of communism and social cleavages, European Union, EU conditionality and democratization.

Zarlasht’s areas of research are the political economy of development, GVCs, and trade. Her PhD project, which focuses on the effect of trade liberalization on global value chains (GVCs), is supported by Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship & McGill University.

Research Interests: IPE, GVCs, trade & development.

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.

My research focuses on the effects of public policy and partisanship on voters’ decisions in Thailand. More generally, I am interested in the factors that shape voters’ attitudes about democracy and governance in developing democracies in Southeast Asia.

Bilal is interested in understanding and evaluating modes and mechanisms of policy formulation in democratizing societies. Broadly speaking, he is interested in studying the linkage between the structure of domestic political infrastructure and democratic performance. Particularly, Bilal is interested in the usefulness of actively creating ‘democratic facades’ as a means of retaining autocratic power in democratizing societies.

Research Interests: Comparative politics and International relations.

Erik Underwood is currently pursuing his PhD degree in Political Science at McGill University under the supervision of T.V. Paul. Previously, he completed his masters at McGill and his undergraduate education at the University of Toronto. He specializes in international relations, with his main research interest being status relations in international politics. His dissertation is on the topic of the foreign propaganda strategies of rising powers targeting the West, particularly those of China and Russia, and how these strategies fit into their larger status and geopolitical ambitions.

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.

My dissertation examines state capacity building strategies in neopatrimonial regimes and relates them to contentious dynamics. I employ a mixed methods research design and focus on Middle East and North African politics.

Research Interests: Comparative clientelism, state-building, and contentious politics in authoritarian regimes.