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Concordia University Concordia celebrates 50 years!
Concordia University Concordia celebrates 50 years!

Department of Political Science

Department of Political Science

PhD students

Current students

Abdulai Abdul Karim

Fields: 
International Relations, Comparative Politics

Marc Ashford

Fields: 
Political Theory, Canadian & Quebec Politics

Issam Banifadel

Areas of Concentration: 
Canadian & Quebec Politics, Comparative Politics

Dissertation Title: Self -Determination in the Comparative Context: A Study between Indigenous Peoples of Canada and “Stateless” Palestinian

Thesis supervisor: Professor Daniel Salée

A brief summary of the dissertation:

The dissertation will shed light on the political implications and consequences of Indigenous Peoples of Canada and “Stateless” Palestinian demands for self-determination. The significance of this study stems from the fact that there are several common denominators between Indigenous peoples of Canada and Palestinians. Both are groups who demand self-determination and for whom the core conflict is about the sovereignty over land. One group is under occupation and is considered as stateless (Palestinians) while the other group is part of an existing state (Indigenous peoples of Canada). Indigenous peoples of Canada and Palestinians are still demanding the right of self-determination even though their rights of self-determination are recognized on the world stage long time ago.

I will investigate the international and national factors that either facilitate or hinder the realization of self-determination despite the fact that both their rights for self-determination are recognized on the world stage, and will furthermore examine whether self-determination is implemented in the same manner for the two groups. This study aims to shed light on the subject of self-determination within post colonial context by studying their demands for self-determination based on their conceptualization of the term; how each group views self-determination, is an important question through this research.

Antwi Bosiako

Fields: 
Comparative Politics; International relations

Research interest:
Bilateralism, Democratization, Foreign policy, Sub-Saharan Africa, Trade, Foreign Aid

Dissertation topic: 
Aid Givers or Trade Partners: Re-Examining Canada's Relations with Ghana and Tanzania

Holly Elizabeth Ching

Current research: My doctoral research, “The Prospect of Immortality: Reflections on the Role of Gnosticism in the Rejection of Finitude,” aims to understand the relationship between mortality and the human condition by asking what the implications are for the human condition in light of scientific research initiatives related to the indefinite extension of human life. By exploring this topic, my research seeks to highlight the fundamental capacities of human existence with concern for how this knowledge relates to our political life.

Research interests: classical and continental political thought; philosophy of science; technology; hermeneutics; phenomenology; metaphysics; Plato; Aristotle; Hannah Arendt; Eric Voegelin; Hans-Georg Gadamer; Hans Jonas.

Mariève Deschamps-Band

Areas of Concentration:  
Public Policy, Comparative Politics

Daniel Dickson

Fields: 
Public Policy and Public Administration; Canadian and Quebec Politics

Research interest:
Disability politics; developmental disabilities; aging politics; governance; identity; intergovernmental relations; social inclusion; social services

Dissertation topic: 
How do divergent provincial governance structures differently affect the promotion of social inclusion outcomes for older adults with developmental disabilities in Canada?

Eléonore Komai

Areas of Concentration:  
Public Policy, Comparative Politics

Mark Kwakye Frimpong

Fields: 
Public policy; Comparative politics

Research interest:
International relations; Sub-Saharan Africa;  interactions between the public and private sectors in the sanitation and energy sectors

Dissertation topic: 
An examination of energy policy reforms in Africa through neo-institutionalist lens.

Provisional dissertation title: Power Politics, Reforms, and Utilities Performance in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana

Mark Kwakye Frimpong is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Concordia University. He received MA in Political Science from Brock University and MPhil in Political Science from the University of Ghana. Professor Amy Poteete supervises his doctoral dissertation, which examines the underlying factors that influence the performance of the electricity sector in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. The research receives funding from the Fonds de Recherche du Québec.  

Publications

Graham, Emmanuel, Ishmael Ackah, and Mark Frimpong. 2019. “A Century of Ghana’s Electricity Policy: Stasis, Crisis and the Change Agents,” International Journal of Strategic Energy and Environmental Planning 1, no. 1: 27-47.

Frimpong, Mark, Bossman Asare, and Evans Aggrey-Darkoh. 2018. “Taxation Policymaking in Ghana,” pp. 1-13 in Ali Farazmand (ed.), Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance, Springer International Publishing.

Asare, Bossman and Mark Frimpong. 2013. “Public-Private Partnerships and Urban Sanitation: Do Expectations Meet Realities in Madina-Ghana?” Journal of African Studies and Development 5, no. 5: 113-124.

  

Brent Gerchicoff

Fields: 
International Relations; Comparative Politics

Research interest:
International Security; Causes of War; Foreign Policy-Making; Nuclear Proliferation and Strategy; Strategic Studies; Grand Strategy; Military Doctrine.

Dissertation topic: 
The Origins of Containment: Alliance Structures and the Domestic Politics of Foreign Policy

Audrey Gagnon

Fields: 
Canadian and Quebec Politics; Comparative Politics

Research interest:
Attitudes toward minority groups; Social and political integration of immigrants; Impacts of immigration; Intergroup relations

Dissertation topic: 
An analysis of immigrants’ feelings of belonging in nationalist societies.

Audrey Gagnon is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at Concordia University. She is working under the supervision of Dr. Antoine Bilodeau. Her doctoral thesis is titled “The Politics of Replacement: The Construction of Opinion Against Immigration in Quebec”. In this this SSHRC-funded study, she builds a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms explaining the construction of anti-immigration opinions in both its mainstream and radical forms. She investigates this through the conduct of semi-structured interviews with Quebecers from the mass public and members of anti-immigration groups living across the province. She recently was awarded the Léon-Dion prize for the best article published in the peer-reviewed journal Politique et Sociétés (2018-2019), the Brigitte Schroeder prize for the best master thesis in the Department of political science at the Université de Montréal (2016), and the prize for the best communication at the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship graduate student conference (2016).

For more information about her work:

Gagnon, Audrey. 2020. “Far-right Framing Processes on Social Media: The Case of the Canadian and Quebec Chapters of Soldiers of Odin”. Canadian Review of Sociology 57(3): 356-378. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cars.12291

Bilodeau, Antoine, Audrey Gagnon, Steve White, Luc Turgeon and Ailsa Henderson. 2020. “Attitudes Toward Ethnocultural Diversity in Multilevel Political Communities: Comparing the Effect of National and Subnational Attachments in Canada.” Publius: The Journal of Federalism, pjaa020. https://doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjaa020

Gagnon, Audrey. 2018. “La construction des attitudes envers les Roms: le cas français”. Politique et Sociétés 37 (1): 3-30. https://doi.org/10.7202/1043572ar

Jessica Gosselin

Areas of Concentration:  
Canadian & Quebec Politics, Public Policy

Mounir Katul

Fields: 
Comparative Politics; International Relations

Research interest:
Comparative ethnic politics; electoral systems and coalition formation; civil wars; violence; international political economy; strategic studies, and Middle East politics

Dissertation topic: 
The impact of both international/geostrategic interests and partisan coalition formations on ethnic identity politics, specifically on identity shifts in ethnically divided societies.

Lara Khattab

Fields: 
Comparative Politics; International Relations

Lindsay Larios

Fields: 
Public policy; Comparative politics

Research interest:
Immigration politics; reproductive politics; reproductive justice; care ethics

Dissertation topic: 
The politics of pregnancy and birth for people with precarious immigration status in Canada.  

Website:
www.lindsaylarios.com

Lindsay Larios is a PhD Candidate and a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at Concordia University, supervised by Dr. Stephanie Paterson. As an interdisciplinary policy scholar, she has a background in community-based research and holds a Master of Social Work from McGill University. Her PhD dissertation, titled Pregnant and Precarious: Canadian Immigration through the Lens of Reproductive Justice, focuses on the politics of pregnancy and birth for migrant women in Canada and examines precarious immigration status as a form of structural violence. In particular it argues that the rights of reproductive citizenship need to be universally recognized on the basis of personhood, rather than legal status, and should not be tied to nation-building agendas that value and support the reproduction of certain families over others. Broadly, her work represents a community-engaged research program that aims to illuminate the gendered and racialized dimensions of policymaking and implications for citizenship and social justice.

Recent publications:

Abji, S. & Larios, L. (Forthcoming). Migrant justice as reproductive justice: Birthright citizenship and the politics of immigration detention for pregnant women in Canada. Citizenship Studies, Special Issue: Abolishing detention: Bridging prison and migrant justice.

Paterson, S. & Larios, L. (2020). Emotional Problems: Policymaking and empathy through the lens of transnational motherhood. Critical Social Policy. DOI: 10.1080/19460171.2020.1752760

Larios, L., Hanley, J. Salamanca Cardona, M., Henaway, M. Dwaikat Shaer, N. & Ben Soltane, S. (2020). Engaging migrant careworkers: examining cases of exploitation by recruitment agencies in Quebec, Canada. International Journal of Migration and Border Studies 6(1/2), pp. 138-157. DOI: 10.1504/IJMBS.2020.10030063

Hanley, J., Larios, L., Ricard-Guay, A., Meloni, F. & Rousseau, C. (2020). Pregnant & undocumented: Taking work into account as a social determinant of health. International Journal of Migration, Health & Social Care 16(2), 189-199. DOI: 10.1108/IJMHSC-04-2019-0046

 Larios, L. (2020). ‘Because we are mothers’: The invisibility of migrant mother care labour in the Canadian context. In K. Levasseur, S. Paterson, & L. Turnbull (eds.), Mothering and Welfare: Depriving, Surviving, Thriving. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press.

Manon Laurent

Fields: 
Comparative Politics; Public Policy

Research interest:
Chinese politics; education policies in China; Chinese government and policy-making; nationalism; political support in Canada

Dissertation topic: 
The main shifts in contemporary Chinese education policies and how they shape the education system, especially in middle class urban areas.

Website:
https://manonlaurent.wixsite.com/mlau

Othon Alfonso Leon

Areas of Concentration:  
International Relations, Comparative Politics

Research Interests:

Security and strategic studies; internal and external regional relations; diplomacy; nationalism

Dissertation Topic:
Despite the fact that the Latin American region complies with the theoretical conditions of the conventional wisdom that explain (and lead to) interstate armed conflicts, this geographical territory represents a puzzle, since wars began to decrease at the beginning of the twentieth century and have been absent for almost a century. I argue that multiple reasons can explain the phenomenon.

Website:

https://grandestrategie.com

Rubens Lima Moraes

Fields: 
Comparative Politics; Public Policy

Research interest:
Latin American politics; corruption

Jocelyn McGrandle

Fields: 
Canadian & Quebec politics; Public Policy

Research interest:
Diversity policy; diversity management; human resource management; organizational performance; representative bureaucracy

Dissertation topic: 
An examination of how diversity policies affect organizational performance in federal governments.

Kathy Meilleur

Areas of Concentration:  
Comparative Politics, Political Theory

Louis-Phillipe Morneau

Fields: 
International Relations; Comparative Politics

Research interest:
Security and strategic studies; decision-making processes; institutional coordination; South and Southeast Asian politics

Dissertation topic: 
An analysis of strategic behavior that maximizes foreign policy decision-making autonomy

Cassia Reis Donato

Fields: 
Comparative Politics, Public Policy

Marina Revelli

Fields: 
Public Policy and Public Administration; Comparative Politics

Research interest:
Population Aging; Social Gerontology; Aging Policy in Canada and the United States; Polarized Ageism

Dissertation topic: 
An examination of the different conceptualizations of aging and their impacts/relations to public policy in the United States and Canada.  

Laurence Richard-Nobert

Fields: 
Canadian & Quebec Politics, Public Policy

Kerry Tannahill

Fields: 
Canadian and Quebec politics; Comparative Politics

Research interest:
Democracy; political support; government performance; identity; public opinion; Canadian and Quebec politics; municipal and local government politics

Dissertation topic: 
What aspects of democracy in Quebec are failing and potentially driving discontent with the democratic system more generally?

Ozge Uluskaradag

Fields: 
Public Policy; Comparative Politics

Research interest:
Comparative health policy; politics of bureaucracy; politicization; social policy; developing countries; institutional analysis; research methods

Dissertation topic: 
The impact of the forms and degrees of politicization in policy-making in a comparative setting.

Past students

Donal Gill

Fields: 
Political Theory; Comparative Politics

Research interest:
Imperialism, empire, colonialism; politics and literature

Dissertation topic: 
What does Jonathan Swift’s portrayal of participation in imperialism tell us about human nature?

Lara Khattab

Fields: 
Comparative Politics; International Relations

Matthew Flanagan

Fields: 
Political Theory

Research interest:
Commercial society; the Enlightenment; “the good life”; morality; animal liberation theory; philosophical pessimism

Dissertation topic: 
How the beginning of commercial society changed understandings of “the good life” and shaped theories of moral corruption.

Eli Frieland

Fields: 
Political Theory

Research interest:
Political philosophy; theology;  responsibility; will; crime; correction; penality

Dissertation topic: 
The possibility and consequences of responsibility in Plato’s Laws.

Ali Halawi

Jeremy Speight

Philippe Villard

Department contacts

For any further information on application procedures, program requirements, or available funding please contact the Graduate Program Assistant

 

 
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