VALDEZ, Inés

Max Weber Fellow 2011-2012  

Email Ines.Valdez@EUI.eu  
Tel. [+39] 055 4685 643
Office VF 44

European University Institute
Max Weber Programme
Via delle Fontanelle 10
I-50014 San Domenico

Departmental affiliation: Political and Social Sciences  
Mentor: Rainer Bauböck  and Chris Reus-Smit  

Valdez Personal Homepage 

Prior to joining the European University Institute as a Max Weber Fellow I was a graduate student in Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There I completed my doctoral dissertation, ‘Deporting Democracy: The Politics of Immigration and Sovereignty,’ under the guidance of Susan Bickford and Jeff Spinner-Halev. My publications include a forthcoming Political Studies piece ‘Perpetual What? Injury, Sovereignty, and a Cosmopolitan View of Immigration.’ In past years I have taught several self-designed courses including ‘Feminist Theory,’ and ‘Critical Approaches to Development’ at my home institution and Humboldt Universität in Berlin.

I graduated with a B.A. in Economics (Minor: Political Science) at Torcuato Di Tella University and earned an M.A. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

My research interests include immigration, theories of democracy and sovereignty, Latina/o political thought, biopolitics, and ontological critiques of economics and institutionalism.

To date, my research has focused on the politics of immigration. My dissertation develops a novel framework to analyse immigration politics at the intersection of the external realm of sovereignty and democratic politics. I claim that the present and legacy of a hierarchical international order constructs identities and pre-conceptions that shape how polities deal with immigration. I engage the current literature on freedom of movement and deliberative democracy and propose a political reading of cosmopolitanism that understands immigrants’ political actions as a challenge to the existing shape of sovereignty. I conclude that domestic immigration policing closes spaces of politics and constructs vulnerable populations within democracies. My broader single and co-authored research examines immigration and the American State, post-colonial critiques of Republicanism, and film and photographic narratives of immigration and integration.