www.maziebernard.com

Mazie is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Purdue University. She studies international political economy and global economic governance.

Her primary research examines the practices of experts and staff across international organizations. In her dissertation project, Mazie adopts a relational approach to explain how economic ideas are promoted and transformed by staff within international institutions across the fields of development financing, artificial intelligence (AI), and public health. She also conducts research on the role of bureaucratic representation in rights mainstreaming within international organizations and on the use of AI by international experts, including AI's implementation at the United Nations and in foreign assistance decision-making.

In a second line of work, Mazie investigates the shifting politics of global trade and economic cooperation. She examines how uncertainty and morality are communicated by trade representatives at the World Trade Organization and how domestic leader approval is shaped by both foreign leader reputations and economic constraints in trade renegotiations.

www.winstonberg.com

Winston is a political scientist and Lecturer on Social Studies at Harvard University. He studies how political communities form and defend beliefs under conditions of uncertainty—especially when traditional sources of epistemic authority, like experts, institutions, and consensus, lose their grip.

His first book project, The Infrastructure of Conspiracy Theories, addresses the growing concern that conspiracy theories signal the collapse of factual consensus in democratic life. The project begins with a puzzle that bridges political theory and empirical political science: why does such a breakdown feel so alarming when decades of public opinion research show that broad consensus over facts has rarely existed? 

For Winston, the persistence of this anxiety points to a deeper condition. Conspiracy theories are troubling less because they reveal an irrational or misinformed public, and more because they exemplify what Stanley Cavell called the “threat of skepticism”—the ever-present possibility that others might withdraw recognition from our shared world. Such moments do not mark the loss of a secure agreement, but rather expose the fragility of the mutual attunement on which cooperation depends. Berg argues this fragility is not a problem to be solved but a permanent feature of political life.

Empirically, Winston examines movements that operate without epistemic consensus. One published study traces the genealogy of the “deep state” trope as an interpretive frame that enables differently motivated factions to stay in coalition by productively misreading one another, tacitly bracketing their deepest disagreements. Another project explores public debates within anti-vaccine mandate coalitions, where a front unified in its policy prescriptions ultimately fractures once epistemological differences become impossible to ignore. Across both contemporary and historical settings, such cases reveal that coalitions often endure not through shared facts, but through flexible interpretive frames capable of containing—and obscuring—deep divisions.

Normatively, Winston asks what democratic life might look like if skepticism is accepted as ineradicable, and enduring disagreement is treated as the ordinary condition in which politics has always taken place. What institutions and infrastructures can sustain cooperation without pretending to secure permanent consensus? And how can these arrangements resist domination without devolving into fragmented, exclusive and unaccountable private governance?

Before joining Harvard, Winston received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago, where he also taught in the Social Sciences Core sequence “Self, Culture and Society.” At Harvard, he teaches in the Social Studies sequence, and offers further original courses on political epistemology, social theory and democracy.

https://www.alfredlandecker.org/en/article/tadek-markiewicz

Tadek is the Alfred Landecker Lecturer at the Institute of Social Sciences, SWPS University in Warsaw and a Research Affiliate at King’s College London War Studies Department. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Uppsala University (Uppsala Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies). Tadek received his PhD in International Conflict Analysis at the University of Kent (UK).

Tadek is a scholar of international relations and a political psychologist. He currently leads a unique long-term project addressing Poland's adoption of Holocaust memory policies within the broader context of global politics. This interdisciplinary study combines these two fields to offer fresh insights into Poland's relationship with the Holocaust. It addresses one of the fundamental challenges faced by European civil societies, which are facing ever-growing pressure from populist forces to politicise our history. 

Tadek’s research focuses on understanding the role of identity within global politics. He employs social-psychological and sociological perspectives and draw on constructivist and interpretive methodologies. His work investigates vulnerability and victimhood in wartime self-representations of strong states. These themes are explored in his forthcoming book, The Vulnerability of Strong States. It is the first systematic study analysing vulnerability narratives as a practice of warcraft and statecraft. In it, he shows that, counterintuitively, vulnerability narratives may be used by states as a trust-inducing mechanism. Building on these insights, Tadek challenges existing paradigms in security studies by problematising the traditional focus on power and agency in securitisation theory (link). By introducing the concept of vulnerability into the analysis of securitisation, Tadek argues that in research practice, we overlook the vulnerabilities experienced by securitising actors. Applying these frameworks, he studies under what conditions Israel's political elites incorporate victim narratives towards armed conflicts. Tadek offers a novel systematic investigation exposing that victim narratives can be a challenge for governance (link). The article provides an empirical account of how geopolitical context changes the role of victimhood in a state's public communication. 

Tadek is also a methodologist. He recently published a research article on advanced interview methods (link). In it, he formalises two research techniques essential for conducting interviews about sensitive topics the interlocutors are unwilling to discuss. His latest piece offers a practical solution on how to use fieldwork to empirically study the role individual-level emotions play in states’ behaviour (link). It is the first study to use elite interviews to investigate whether countries experience ontological insecurity. His work has been published in Political Psychology, International Studies Quarterly, Contemporary Politics, and International Studies Perspectives. He also contributed to International Affairs.  Before taking up the Alfred Landecker Lectureship, Tadek was awarded a Jacques Rozenberg Research Grant and a Conny Kristel Fellowship.