Website: https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/irem-cihan-muter

Bio:

Irem Cihan recently received her PhD from SOAS, University of London, and is currently a visiting researcher at Kadir Has University. She holds an MA in Asian Studies from Boğaziçi University and has served as a visiting scholar at Columbia University in the City of New York and Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea. Her research centers on Northeast Asian and Middle Eastern affairs, with particular emphasis on South Korea and Turkey. Her doctoral research examines the aesthetic dimensions of postcolonial and post-imperial national role conceptions and ontological security in international relations, exploring how visual narratives and cultural productions are mobilized to project identity and navigate existential anxiety. Through this work, she seeks to develop new conceptual and methodological approaches to the study of aesthetics and global politics. Her current projects expand into the study of affective politics and cosmological belief systems in global affairs, as well as how spatial narratives construct collective visions of the future.

Website: https://www.annaclosas.com/

‍Bio: 

‍Anna Closas is a political theorist at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, where she holds a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellowship. She received her PhD in Political Science from UC Berkeley. She studies how noncitizens make claims on the state under conditions of injustice and how the state responds to those claims. To that end, most of her work is focused on one of the systems through which noncitizens gain access to the state: asylum.

Methodologically, Anna uses interpretive methods to draw attention to the claims, everyday practices, and lived experiences that shape how state power is negotiated, contested, and reproduced at the margins of formal citizenship. Between February 2023 and February 2026, she conducted fieldwork of the United States asylum system, including participant observation in immigration courts and at the U.S.-Mexico border, and over 140 interviews with asylum seekers, lawyers, state agents, and other key actors. 

Drawing on her fieldwork, her book manuscript, Playing the Asylum Game, proposes a practice-based exploration of asylum to examine the norms and institutions we use to identify and protect those seeking safety, establishing normative principles for a fairer asylum system. She shows that asylum law dominates noncitizens in an objectionable way when it does not satisfy rule-of-law and procedural justice requirements, thereby subjecting asylum seekers to arbitrary power. This argument about the importance of procedural justice comes from asylum seekers themselves, who often experienced immigration law as a cruel, lottery-like game with unclear rules. ‍

Anna has also written on the role of time in asylum (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40878-026-00530-x) and on diasporas in political theory (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajps.70020).

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Website: https://jittipm.wixsite.com/jittipm

Bio: Jittip Mongkolnchaiarunya is a PhD candidate in Political Science at George Washington University. Her research sits at the intersection of climate politics, global governance, and science and technology studies. Growing up in Thailand has shaped her scholarly interest in the politics of the Global South, with a particular regional focus on Southeast Asia.

Her dissertation project, The Techno-Politics of Greenwashing: The Dark Underside of Green Growth Technologies, opens the black box of the science underlying ostensibly apolitical climate technologies to show how utopian promises of technological miracles can work to conceal the complexities and uncertainties inherent in scientific inquiry, with damaging consequences for both the Global South and the planet. Through a close examination of three popular technologies—afforestation, deep-ocean carbon sequestration, and the clean energy transition through electric vehicles and wind turbines—it shows how certain forms of scientific knowledge are neglected or altogether excluded from mainstream understandings of these technologies. In doing so, it argues that technological utopianism can facilitate a form of greenwashing—not as an intentional strategy of corporate deception, but one that depicts green technologies as enabling us to mitigate climate change without having to modify our consumption, while simultaneously obscuring the uneven social, environmental, and labor conditions that make those technologies possible, including deadly forms of extractive labor in the Global South. Methodologically, the dissertation triangulates diverse forms of evidence, including scientific reports, multi-sited ethnographic observation in climate laboratories, interviews with scientists and policymakers, and testimonies from miners who survived human trafficking. A paper based on her dissertation, titled “Why We Grow the Wrong Trees in the Wrong Places,” has received six awards from the International Studies Association, including the Robert W. & Jessie Cox Award, the Edward Said Award, the Best Graduate Paper Award in Science, Technology, and Art in International Relations, the Best Graduate Paper Award in International Political Sociology, among others.