Meet the Editors

Agatha Anna Slupek is a doctoral student in political theory and comparative politics at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, tentatively entitled “Feminism, Political Responsibility, and Democratic Justice,” develops a theoretical account of how political actors confront changing institutional paradigms in light of historical and enduring injustices. Of particular interest to scholars of socio-economics is Agatha’s work on the so-called ‘feminization of labor’ in advanced industrial societies. Surveying recent work in critical social theory, feminist theories of reproductive labor, and the historical entanglement of femininity with the ‘social’ rather than ‘political’ spheres, she interrogates the novelty of this phenomenon, which is often associated with the rise of women’s formal entry into labor markets in the 1970s. Agatha’s Master’s Thesis, “Beyond the Fragments: Feminism, Work, and Freedom” was awarded the Joseph Cropsey Prize for Best Master’s thesis in Political Philosophy at the University of Chicago. In 2017-2018 she was a Sciences Po Doctoral Exchange Fellow and she hopes to continue her research in France. Her additional research interests lie in the fields of gender studies, political aesthetics, and the political thought of Louis Althusser and Cornelius Castoriadis.

Alaz Kilicaslan is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Global Health at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater since 2018. His research bridges medical sociology, economic sociology, and organizational studies to understand how healthcare is delivered, and who has access to it, in a global context. More specifically, he studies the moral economy of healthcare by examining how government agencies, medical professionals, and clients negotiate and ultimately shape the healthcare delivery through interactions in organizational settings. His dissertation, entitled “The New Economy of Doctoring: The Populist Restructuring of the Turkish Healthcare System and the Organizational Politics of the Reform”, is an ethnography of healthcare reform in Turkey. It explores the organizational dynamics of the reform by focusing on the shifting work patterns of medical professionals and doctor-patient relationships. It shows that the reform process, which combines neoliberal logics with an expansion of access to services culminated in a model involving a rapid expansion of outpatient care at the expense of inpatient care, an intensive and uncontrolled use of diagnostic technologies, a decline in the quality of healthcare encounters, overworked doctors, and a gradual marketization of services. Thus, it indicates a case whereby populist rhetoric and policies legitimate neoliberal reforms that hollow out the public system and introduce profit-oriented agents and mentality into hospitals.

Barbara Kiviat is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. She graduated from Harvard University with a Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy in May 2019. Barbara is an economic sociologist who studies how moral beliefs and other cultural understandings shape markets and justify the inequalities they produce. She is particularly interested in how normative ideas influence the pricing and allocation of socially important resources, such as insurance, credit, and jobs. Her current project considers how these dynamics play out when corporations use massive amounts of personal data to decide what to offer to individual consumers. Barbara’s research has received awards or funding from the American Sociological Association, the National Science Foundation, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. In 2018, she participated in SASE’s Early Career Workshop in Kyoto, Japan. Her work has been published in Socio-Economic Review, Socius, and Social Service Review. Barbara holds an M.P.A. from New York University, an M.A. in Journalism from Columbia University, and a B.A. in the Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University. Previously, she was a staff writer at Time magazine.

Kostiantyn Ovsiannikov is a postdoc at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. His research deals with corporate governance, labor economics, and determinants of innovation from the varieties of capitalism perspective. His dissertation explores how the pursuit of shareholder-value by management has affected labor policies at large Japanese enterprises listed in the Nikkei 400 index. He focuses on the issue of labor bifurcation, which refers to the division between standard and non-standard employees. Drawing on a political economy view of institutions, he argues that increased returns to stockholders during the last two decades can be explained with changes in the related domains of management and labor. In order to become ‘eligible’ for economic benefits, stakeholders of a firm must form a ‘political bloc’ that lobbies management to consider their interests. Differences in political power thus explain why increased returns have benefited shareholders but have been disadvantageous to non-standard employees. His findings suggest that companies with a higher degree of managerial entrenchment have more pronounced labor bifurcation. His paper entitled “Impact of shareholder-value pursuit on labor policies at Japanese joint-stock companies: Case of Nikkei Index 400” received the 2018 FFJ/SASE Best Paper Award.