Congratulations to Arianna Gatta and Alaa Badr, from the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences, for receiving their doctorates in April 2023, after unanimous decisions from the Jury.
Gatta defended her thesis entitled A target on the head? Welfare targeting, conditionality, and the persistence of disadvantage on 5 April 2023, while Badr defended her thesis entitled Contributions Toward the Remaking of the Arab Intellectual Scene. Informal Intellectual Collectives on 24 April 2023.
Arianna Gatta's thesis is an extremely sophisticated thesis on welfare targeting and conditionality (and not to forget non-take up), poverty, and homelessness based on the Italian experience. In terms of theoretical depth and (mixed-) methodological operationalisation, Ariana Gatta's dissertation explicates highly interesting findings. The committee underlines that the dissertation is extra-ordinarily good.
Read Arianna Gatta's thesis in Cadmus.
Alaa Badr's thesis is remarkable and the committee considers it to be a groundbreaking contribution to the study of the reshaping of the Arab intellectual landscape after the Arab spring. Badr shows how the figure of the traditional post-colonial Arab intellectual who focussed on pan-Arab political issues is challenged by a younger generation of activists who are not pan-arabist, not involved in the political scene regardless of their critic of the existing regimes, and who invest in more grassroots and marginal kind of intellectual and artistic expression, like blogs and satires.
Read Alaa Badr's thesis in Cadmus.