The CLASS Center: Graduate--University of Washington

From the beginning, the vision of the CLASS Center developed out of interaction among faculty and graduate students who shared intellectual interests in comparative socio-legal study. The graduate students from multiple disciplines who participated in those formative years provided the incentive for investment in the CLASS vision and the model for the Graduate Fellows program that was initiated in spring, 2001. At the heart of this vision is the aspiration to provide students with a curriculum, a cohort of faculty mentors, and a range of intellectual experiences that cultivate multi-disciplinary understandings serving to enhance, rather than replace, disciplinary-based education in socio-legal study. The result is an opportunity for one of the most exciting, diverse, and dynamic graduate programs of coordinated study about law and society in the nation.

CLASS now offers an interdisciplinary certificate program than enables qualified students to earn a certificate in socio-legal studies as they pursue their doctorate. PhD students from the social sciences, Evans School , and Law School are eligible to apply to the certificate program. PhD students who are accepted into the certificate program will be designated CLASS Fellows, and will be eligible to receive upon graduation a certificate designating completion of an independent interdisciplinary law and society program.

Acceptance into the CLASS certificate program offers many benefits. The CLASS Center provides a network of faculty, classes, and financial resources to CLASS Fellows . The academic work for this program will be coordinated with and integrated into ongoing disciplinary academic work of students. CLASS Fellows will also enjoy:

All application materials from students applying to the certificate program in 2008 are to be submitted to the Acting Graduate Program Director (Katherine Beckett) by May 9 2008 (kbeckett@u.washington.edu). A complete description of graduation requirements and application procedures is available here.

About a dozen graduate students from a broad range of social science departments presently are CLASS Graduate Fellows. In the future, students from the humanities, law, and professional schools are expected to be invited into the Fellows program as well.

Jessica Beyer
Graduate Student, Political Science
e-mail: jlbeyer@u.washington.edu

I am a PhD candidate in the Political Science department. I received my BA from the UW's Jackson School and my MA from the University of Bath, UK. I am currently conducting my dissertation research. I focus on internet locations that are generally considered “apolitical,” such as Facebook, online video games, and posting boards. I have found that in these locations young people vigorously debate property rights; argue over issues that citizens usually vote on (immigration, abortion, war, etc); collectively articulate identity/behavior norms; compare “hidden transcripts” vis-à-vis authority; and engage in cooperative activities that bridge disparate social and economic groups.

Yasmine Bouagga
Visiting Graduate, Anthropology
e-mail: bouagga@u.washington.edu

Yasmine Bouagga is a Visiting Graduate from France. She is a student from the Ecole Normale Superieure and earned her her MA in Anthropology in the EHESS, Paris, 2006. She has conducted research on Palestinian refugees in Syria and became interested in prisons in the United States. She is currently doing research on practices of confinement in Washington State prisons. Yasmine is interested in social practices of law and anthropological perspectives on power and institutions.

Dominic Corva
Graduate Student, Geography
e-mail: corvad@u.washington.edu

I am a Ph.D. student in Geography, studying the relationship between the transnationalization of the U.S. war on drugs and economic globalization. My work is critical of how this connection draws on and exacerbates political and economic inequality: the “violence of the law” meets “structural violence.” I specialize in how this has played out in the Americas. I have designed and taught an evening degree special topics course for LSJ, “Globalization and the War on Drugs,” Geography of Cities (“The Urbanization of Poverty and its Discontents”) as well as Geography 330: “Latin America: Landscapes of Change” in winter 2007. My LSJ advisors are Steve Herbert, for whom I have TA’d, and Katherine Beckett, whose work on race and the drug war in the US dovetails nicely with my own interests. This past year I have made two eye-opening trips to Bolivia, which has really shaped how I understand the transnationalization of the police function over the last 20 years, and its relationship to “neoliberal imperialism.”

Shauna Fisher
Graduate Student, Political Science
e-mail: fishes@u.washington.edu

Shauna Fisher is a graduate student in the Department of Political Science. Her master's thesis, titled “It Takes (at least) Two to Tango: Fighting with Words in the Conflict over Same-Sex Marriage,” examines the interactive framing patterns that unfold within and between social movement groups during a policy conflict. Her research interests are in American public law, gay and lesbian rights (in particular the politics of same-sex marriage), legal mobilization, social movements, framing, agenda setting, and political methodology. Shauna has previously published on same-sex marriage Policy Studies Journal in 2003 and has a co-authored chapter on cause lawyers in the Sarat and Scheingold edited volume, Cause Lawyers and Social Movements. She regularly presents her research at the annual meetings of the Law and Society Association, the Western Political Science Association, and the American Political Science Association. She received her BA in Political Science from the University at Albany.

Jennifer Fredette
Graduate Student, Political Science
e-mail: jfredett@u.washington.edu

Jennifer Fredette is a graduate student in the Department of Political Science. She earned her BA in French and Political Science at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. Her research interests involve the intersections of religion, gender, identity, and citizenship, specifically in the Western European context. Jennifer's MA thesis, which won the Stu Scheingold award for Best Paper by a UW Grad in Public Law, focused on legal mobilization in France around the issue of the hijab (a Muslim headcovering banned from public schools). Jennifer will be a visiting scholar at Sciences Po-Bordeaux this Fall, where she will also be busy conducting fieldwork for her dissertation on the political and legal mobilization of Muslims in France. Jennifer's fields of study are political theory, comparative politics, and public law.

	Ann Frost Graduate Student, Political Science e-mail: acfrost@u.washington.edu
Ann Frost is a third-year graduate student in political science. As a former public defender, she is interested in the politics of criminal justice. Her fields of interest are American Politics and Public Law. Ann went to the University of Denver for undergraduate school, and to UW for law school.

Amanda M. Fulmer
Graduate Student, Political Science
e-mail: amfulmer@u.washington.edu

Amanda M. Fulmer is a graduate student in the political science department. She received her bachelor's degree in politics from Princeton University, with certificates in political theory, Spanish Language and Literature, and Latin American Studies. Her senior thesis focused on the Pinochet case and legal responses to social turmoil in recently restored democracies. Amanda spent three years after college working at NGOs in the "other" Washington, focusing on varied issues including worker rights in Cuba, sustainable development in Peru, and environmental practices at the Interamerican Development Bank. She spent the year before grad school in Peru working with Oxfam America on extractive industry reform and indigenous rights. Amanda's research interests include the ways that indigenous peoples use transnational legal regimes to defend their rights in the face of controversial extractive industry development projects.

Seth Greenfest
Graduate Student, Political Science
e-mail: swg2@u.washington.edu

Seth Greenfest is a third year graduate student in the University of Washington Department of Political Science. He received his Bachelor and Master's degrees from Ohio University, both in Political Science. Seth worked for three years as an Aide to an Ohio State Senator in the Ohio Senate. His research interests are American politics, Public Law, and Public Policy. His current research projects focus on agenda setting in the federal judiciary; separation-of-powers among the branches of government; the politics of judicial review; and conceptions of judicial power.

Christopher Heurlin
Graduate Student, Political Science
e-mail: cheurlin@u.washington.edu

Christopher Heurlin is a Ph.D. student in the Political Science department. Christopher's research focuses primarily on issues of law and society and contentious politics in rural China. He is currently examining legal mobilization and protests against the local state. He has also written on Hong Kong-China relations and law and society in the former East Germany. Christopher got his undergraduate degree from Carleton College in International Relations.

Peter Hovde
Graduate Student

Peter Hovde is a graduate student in the Political Science Department. He received his B.A. from Columbia University and his J.D. from Rutgers School of Law, Newark. A member of the New York and New Jersey Bars, he served as Law Clerk to the Honorable Barbara Byrd Wecker, Superior Court of New Jersey, Appellate Division. His research interests include comparative public policy, and the comparative opportunities for legal mobilization in different legal systems.

Iza Hussin
Graduate Student, Political Science
e-mail: irh2@u.washington.edu

Iza Hussin is preparing a dissertation on the political dynamics of Islamic law formation during the British colonial period in Malaya , India and Egypt , as an ACLS/Mellon Doctoral Fellow. Her work focuses upon questions of local elite participation in the making of legal codes, questions of jurisdiction and authority, and the enduring impact of colonial era institutions upon the post-colonial state. She has presented and published papers on Islamic law in the contemporary Muslim world, family law reform, Islamic law and post-colonial states, women in American Muslim communities, and on Islam and colonial history. She has taught classes in comparative courts and legal institutions and on contemporary Islam in the Middle East, Asia, Europe and North America . She holds a Bachelors in Social Studies and a Masters in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University .

Arda Ibikoglu
Graduate Student, Political Science
e-mail: ibikoglu@u.washington.edu

Arda Ibikoglu is a PhD candidate in the Political Science Department. He received his BA from Bogazici University, Istanbul and his MA in Middle East Studies from the Jackson School of International Studies, UW. His research interests include comparative politics, Middle East politics, and public law. Arda is starting his fieldwork, in which will compare politics of prison reform in Turkey, the US, and the UK. He also loves playing and watching soccer.

Tuna Kuyucu
Graduate Student, Sociology
e-mail: kuyucu@u.washington.edu

I am a fifth year phd student in the sociology department. I am spending the current academic year in Istanbul to conduct my fieldwork. My dissertation looks into large scale urban renewal and social housing programs implemented in Istanbul to 'turn Istanbul into a global city', to prepare the city for an expected earthquake and to 'clean the city up from informal housing and blight areas'. I am examining the legal and political-economic factors behind these major interventions into the social and phsyical form of the city. My research is supported by two grants: Schwartz grant (from the NELC department of the UW) and the FURS studentship (from the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies based in the UK). I will be coming back to Seattle next fall.

Sooenn Park
Graduate Student, Political Science
e-mail: spark4@u.washington.edu

Sooenn is a PhD student in the Political Science Department, studying political theory, public law and feminist political economy. She is interested in how the recent neoliberal ideological as well as economic shift in South Korea (and else where) reconfigures “public sphere”. She also likes to read a set of theoretical movements that gets to be labeled poststructuralism as theories of democracy in the strongest sense. Sooenn's MA thesis, titled “ The Human in the Making: Politics of Human Rights without human foundation,” won the Stuart Scheingold Prize for Best Paper by a Graduate Student in Public Law in the department in 2007. She received her BA in political science from Seoul National University.

Heather Pool
Graduate Student, Political Science
e-mail: hpool@u.washington.edu

Heather is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science. Heather's primary field is political theory, which manages to combine her abiding interest in philosophy with a nice splash of reality. Having worked several years in municipal agencies that enforced anti-discrimination laws, Heather is much more interested in how law works in people's heads than in how it works within institutions. Her research focuses on questions of exclusion and citizenship, with a particular emphasis on questions of gender and race. Heather received her BA from St. John's College , and attended the Women's Studies Program at Rutgers , The State University of New Jersey.

Karen Rosenberg
Graduate Student, Women Studies
e-mail: ker@u.washington.edu

Karen Rosenberg is a doctoral candidate in Women Studies. Her research interests are in the relationship between social movements and the law, violence against women, and feminist theory. Her dissertation looks at alternatives to criminalization in family violence cases in the United States and Canada. She received a B.A. from Swarthmore College and an M.A. in Women Studies from the University of Washington.

Theresa Squatrito
Graduate Student, Political Science
e-mail: tsquatri@u.washington.edu

Theresa Squatrito is a graduate student in the Department of Political Science. Theresa's area of focus is Comparative Law, with concentration of legal integration in Europe. Her dissertation project will look at the processes of the domestification of international law, placing civil society at the center of analysis. Theresa uses a comparative approach, and hopes to contribute to literature on legalization and globalization.

Bill Vesneski
Graduate Student, Social Welfare
e-mail: vesneski@u.washington.edu

As a doctoral student in the School of Social Work, William's primary interest is in identifying and explaining variation in state implementation of federal child welfare law, particularly the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA). He is also keenly interested in the intersection of child welfare law, race, poverty policy and our understandings of family. William earned his MSW in 1998 at the University of Washington and his JD in 1991 from Seattle University School of Law. Over the last 15 years he has held a variety of positions in the social services sector: first, as a public defender in juvenile court, and thereafter, as a research consultant to youth and family organizations. His consulting clients have included Zero to Three, the National Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) Association, the Oregon Department of Human Services, the Sallie Mae Foundation, and PowerUp (a national digital divide initiative). He is currently the Director of Evaluation and Research at the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.

This page last updated 3/12/08

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Photos: Deborah Hughes