Two political theory doctoral students win major fellowships

Two pieces of good news for theory students I've noticed recently from very competitive fellowship competitions:

Kiran Banerjee Wins Canada’s Most Prestigious PhD Award

[University of Toronto] PhD student, Kiran Banerjee, has won the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, Canada’s most prestigious scholarship for doctoral students. The award recognizes students in the social sciences and humanities, natural sciences and engineering, and health sciences who have demonstrated leadership skills and high standards of scholarly achievement in their graduate studies. The award is worth $50,000 annually for up to three years. Kiran, one of 174 students to receive the award this year, is writing a doctoral dissertation on `Statelessness and the limits of contemporary citizenship: a theory of transnational political inclusion and open membership’.

James Ethan Bourke awarded ACLS fellowship

James Ethan Bourke
Doctoral Candidate
Duke University
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/ACLS Early Career Fellowship Program Dissertation Completion Fellowships 2010


The Politics of Incommensurability: A Value Pluralist Approach to Liberalism and Democracy

This dissertation explores the meaning and political implications of Isaiah Berlin’s theory of value pluralism. Value pluralism is the idea that goods or values are often conflicting and incommensurable to one another; that is, they cannot be measured by a common rubric or systematically ranked against one another. The argument has four main parts: 1) an analysis of what Berlin and others have meant by “value pluralism;” 2) a critique of current attempts to link value pluralism to one or another political view; 3) a new interpretation of the core claim of incommensurability and an analysis of how it affects practical reasoning; and 4) a constructive argument about the liberal-democratic institutions and practices that value pluralism supports.