Yuna Blajer de la Garza, Ethics in Society Fellow, Stanford University
Yuna studies sociopolitical cleavages, inequalities and the "side effects" of democratization — with special attention to belonging, citizenship and the discursive justifications of structures of domination. In her dissertation, she analyzes the tension between citizenship and belonging through the figure of the "citizen who does not belong" to think about two overarching themes: the democratic promises of equality, and the stickiness of sociopolitical inequalities. The dissertation proposes that formal membership has come to be understood as sufficient for belonging to political communities, effectively crowding out informal exchanges that are actually necessary to guarantee a substantive equal membership in political communities, which she dubs "democratic belonging." Her work combines political theory with ethnographic methods to ground debates of political theory within empirical realities. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago.