CISS Names Erin Tatz as Inaugural CISS Dissertation Fellow
The Center for Innovation in Social Science (CISS) is pleased to announce that Erin Tatz, a doctoral candidate in political science, is the Inaugural CISS Dissertation Fellowship recipient. The fellowship is for an outstanding social science doctoral candidate who will complete their dissertation during the 2025-26 calendar year. Erin was selected from a large and exemplary field of candidates, who were evaluated by faculty member representatives from the departments of Anthropology, History, Political Science, and Sociology. Candidates were evaluated on the basis of research achievements and potential; potential of the dissertation research to advance social science research, theory, or practice; satisfactory progress in their graduate program; and certainty of a successful dissertation defense in Summer 2026.The fellowship provides a 12-month salary of $46,350 for the period of September 1, 2025 through August 31, 2026. Martin Aucoin, a doctoral candidate in anthropology, and Si Wu, a PhD candidate in political science, each received Honorable Mention Awards, which are accompanied with a $1,000 research grant. Congratulations to the recipients! Learn more about the scholars and their dissertation projects.
Erin Tatz. ‘Human Like Me’: White Liberal Subjectivity and Empathic Consumption of Black Death. Tatz argues that empathy, despite its largely unquestioned position as a definitive social good especially in the face of antiblackness, functions insidiously as a tool of white supremacy and a mechanism of racial violence. Specifically, her dissertation is about the limits of empathy as it has emerged and been conceived within contemporary social sciences and political discourses, particularly within the areas of social and racial justice. The dissertation project offers a critical and unique intervention into the fields of race studies, racial aesthetics and affect theory, as well as Black literary and political studies. Within the discipline of political theory, this work provides a critique of empathy (a concept that has hardly been touched, and certainly not comprehensively discussed in the field), and which also aims to elucidate the insidious underpinnings of the epistemologies of whiteness and white supremacy. One award committee member characterized Erin’s research on empathy as “profound, important, provocative, and troubling in the best possible way.”
Martin Aucoin. Globalization’s Leftovers: Poverty, Moral Economies of Meat, and Disassembled Values in a Poultry Commodity Chain. This dissertation examines the economic, dietary and moral relationships that structure global poultry commodity chains. Using a multi-sited ethnographic approach, he explores how industry decision-makers in northeast Georgia construct narratives of poverty and dependency to justify expanding poultry exports, while Gambian consumers navigate the material and symbolic consequences of dietary transformation. More broadly, this dissertation sheds light on the moral, economic and dietary drivers of humanity’s increasing dependence on industrial chicken. The evaluation committee predicted that this work will have “a major impact that cuts across a number of fields and disciplines.”
Si Wu. From Control to Choice: Women, Work, and Power in China’s New Birth Planning Regime. Wu’s doctoral work explores the relationships among a country’s economic development, women’s and men’s economic decisions, and their fertility choices. She focuses specifically on China – the world’s second largest economy. Her dissertation develops a theoretical understanding of the evolvement of women’s labor market participation in China since its economic reforms in the late 1970s and the implementation of its one-child policy in 1980. While these twin interventions were driven by distinct policy goals – marketization and population control – together they shaped gender norms, economic opportunities, and family structures in ways that continue to have effects today. The committee noted the importance and timeliness of her topic, and the clarity of her proposal.