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


Above: at MCA (Chicago). Behind: Three Big Spirits
by Thomas Schütte

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.” This work claims that the conceptions of democracy that we find in existing approaches to immigration either position the debate on the moral realm or posit static, unquestioned conceptions of the sovereign people. Alternatively, my dissertation proposes an understanding of immigration as a force that challenges and destabilizes institutions of membership and sovereignty, taking this indeterminacy to be a constitutive feature of democracy. In other words, defending a strict right for democracies to close their borders may potentially foreclose spaces that are crucial for the renewal of our practices of democratic politics. My theorization proceeds with a double focus on a political understanding of sovereignty and an engagement with the politics of immigration, including anti-immigrant activism and the contemporary transformations of the regulation of immigration.

 

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).