Jeremiah Sullivan Graduate Fellowships
Gyudae Kim, PhD - Department of Geography & Geographic Information Science
Nuclear systems are sustained not only through technical and strategic means but also through communication systems that shape how those systems are understood and trusted. By focusing on documentary films as infrastructure, the project offers a new way to think about how knowledge is managed within high-security environments. It also has broader relevance for understanding how governments communicate
complex technological risks in contexts where full transparency is not possible.
Katie Worrall, PhD - Department of Political Science
Atomic bomb testing in the United States did not end with the Manhattan Project. Until 1992, the Atomic Energy Commission of the U.S. federal government tested 1,001 nuclear bombs on public lands in the Great Basin, a region that mostly lies in Nevada. Thousands of downwinders across the region were affected by radioactive fallout. The Nevada Test Site, now known as the Nevada National Security Site, is still used today for military training and weapons testing. Over the last decade, the Trump Administration has made several attempts to expand the site into the Desert National Wildlife Refuge, the largest refuge in the lower 48 states. Public lands meant to be held in trust for the public good and stewarded for future generations are continuously threatened in the American West.
Edward A. Kolodziej Undergraduate Fellowship
Rhian Dixon-Yearby - Global Studies
Rhian hopes to build on her previous experience at University of Chicago's Chicago Project on Security and Threats, with a research project examining far-right and Islamist terrorism in Europe and the European Union’s legal and policy responses to these threats, both within its member states and along its borders. The project will draw on both quantitative and qualitative measures, using data as well as preexisting scholarship to analyze how the EU’s counterterrorism architecture responds to ideologically distinct threats. I am particularly interested in how legal frameworks function in practice, and whether they are applied consistently and just as effectively across far-right and Islamist cases.
Pranav Thamballapalle - Political Science
Having read all 10 available IJOIS publication volumes, one particular study that stood out to me was “The Political Psychology of Regime Change in Iran” by Ryan Vetticad, particularly for its use of psychological analysis, as it pertains to regime-level decision making. This inspired me to think and develop my own research topic, focused on the extent to which regime type affects the usage of moral narratives as a justification for initiation of international conflict. Specifically, my research hopes to answer the following question: Are moral narratives justifying international conflict initiation more prevalent in democratic or authoritarian states? As such, I hypothesize that moral narratives aimed at increasing public support for initiating military conflict are more prevalent in democratic regimes because these regimes rely on public support, while authoritarian regimes have less obligation to justify acts of aggression.