Inés Valdez - PhD Candidate
UNC Chapel Hill
Junior Visiting Scholar
Nuffield College, Oxford
inesv [ at ] unc.edu

Teaching

I have served as Teaching Fellow at UNC Chapel Hill for Feminist Theory (pdf syllabus) and Latin American Politics (pdf syllabus). I have taught courses of my own design at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (Critical Development, pdf syllabus), Elon University (Latin American Politics through Film, pdf syllabus), and UNC Chapel Hill (Transitions to Democracy, pdf syllabus). I have twice been granted a competitive award to design and lead discussions in Spanish for bilingual students in the UNC program Languages Accros the Curriculum (see the course sites here, and here). I have served as Teaching Assistant in courses such as Modern Political Thought, Latin American Politics, and Global Issues.

 

 

I'm a political theorist and I will complete a Ph.D. in Political Science with the dissertation "Deporting Democracy: The Politics of Immigration and Sovereignty.” My dissertation claims that the way societies deal with immigration works as a 'canary of democracy.' I argue that the contemporary focus on a strong sovereign right to control borders transforms immigration into an issue of national security. The securitization of immigration, in turn, impoverishes (“deports”) practices of democratic politics. My work bridges the differences between two dominant approaches to the politics of immigration: the literature on freedom of movement and the work on (internal) popular sovereignty. Against them, I argue that immigration affects the substance of democratic politics, because the way in which polities handle immigrants intensifies the tension between democratic practices and the arbitrary imposition of territorial and citizenship boundaries.

 

Research

In addition to my dissertation research, I have ongoing projects on American political development, Latino/a Studies, and feminist theory. In particular, I write on narratives of gender, race, and nation on contemporary films that feature Latinas as central characters. Additionally, I co-author work with Desmond King on the symbolic construction of the fight against illegal immigration as a war. Finally, with Hollie Mann, we write on the conception of agency implicit in past and current French debates about the ban of the burqa. As a comparative minor I'm interested in critical studies of development, particularly the theoretical frameworks utilized to study neoliberal reforms in Latin America.

For more information, please check my vita (pdf / html).