The Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College provides a variety of national scholarships and fellowships for recipients to engage in dialogue with noted public servants and to pursue a study of public policy.
The following scholars have been awarded The Dwight D. Eisenhower/Clifford Roberts Graduate Fellowship for the 2022-23 academic year. These recipients were selected from applicants at an advanced stage of their doctoral candidacies, preferably at the point of preparing their dissertations. Each Eisenhower/Roberts Fellow is awarded $10,000 to support the completion of their research.
Marina Lazetic is a PhD candidate in international security and human security at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Her dissertation is Mobilizing Resilience: Forced Displacement and Environmental Justice. Internal environmental displacement occurs in all countries, including the United States. However, most of the recent research and reports looking at environmental (including climate change) displacement focus on countries struggling with poverty and the potential increase in the number of people seeking refuge in wealthier countries. The reports and research projects looking at environmental displacement in the United States and beyond primarily focus on large quantitative modeling or policy analysis of government response and assistance during and after disasters or in cases of mass migration and conflict. We have way less information, however, on how communities themselves react and organize in response to environmental displacement and what motivates them. Lazetic’s dissertation aims to fill this gap. She focuses on analysis of environmental displacement in the United States and the community responses to it through a series of case studies and qualitative data collection and analysis. Her dissertation provides a new insight on internal displacement and better understanding of the community needs, resilience, and organizing. Lazetic is also conducting research in developing countries in the Western Balkans to better understand community motivations, resilience building, and organizing strategies from a wide range of cases.
Scott McDonald is a PhD candidate in Political Systems and Theories, International Security Studies at Tufts University. His dissertation, The Potential of Hierarchy: The Role of Classical Chinese Philosophy in the Foreign Policy of the People’s Republic of China explores how human beings are separated from other animals by their rational faculty, which is their means of survival. Humans must observe the world, evaluate it, make decisions, and act on them in order to live. Decision-makers operating in the international environment face the same challenge and share a tool for understanding their world and thriving in it—philosophy. Although international relations theorists use their own philosophy in developing theories of the international system, the role of individually held philosophy has not traditionally been part of international relations theory (IRT). However, because the international system is ultimately a human environment, the context provided by the worldview of decision-makers is vitally important to understanding what they think about the nature of the world, its operation, and what actions are proper within it. The key to understanding how decision-makers approach these problems is found in their philosophical assumptions. The relevance of a philosophical approach to IRT is highlighted by difficulties western scholars have faced in understanding the foreign policy of an increasingly assertive People’s Republic of China (PRC). Meanwhile, scholars within the PRC are turning to the Chinese philosophical tradition to justify policies and legitimize their view of the proper role of states within the international environment. Moreover, these arguments are being incorporated into the policies and justifications of PRC leaders. This dissertation will contribute to the field of IRT by examining the efficacy of using philosophic analysis to understand the choices made by PRC decision-makers. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to the field by expanding the scope of cultural analysis within IRT to include the philosophy held by individual decision-makers. Moreover, this dissertation will provide insight for greater understanding of PRC strategy and policy, enabling security practitioners to better anticipate PRC policy options and actions.
Kwelina Thompson is a PhD candidate in U.S. History at Cornell University. Her dissertation Bright Masters: Governing the World of Work from 1960-2000 traces the transformation of banking, retail, and telecommunications industries as they came to rely on computing technologies and the swelling population of women in the labor force. This project analyzes the spatial and regulatory politics of service sector work as corporations siphoned off clerical tasks from their core operations and began to outsource labor from places as disparate as the modern suburban home, prisons, and offshore data centers. The increasingly automated office became a sociopolitical problem through which lawmakers and labor activists linked changes in corporate organization to the disappearance of the middle class, the disruption of the family politics, and deepening domestic and global inequalities. In doing so, lawmakers, executives, and labor activists renegotiated the boundaries of both state and corporate power and the meaning of work in the postwar American economy.
Kevin K. Troy is a PhD candidate in the Government Department at Harvard University. His dissertation is Metadata and the Manufacturing of Political Identity, in which he investigates the role of information and communication technology (ICT) in shaping political identities. He theorizes that changes to the structure and cost of ICTs have democratized the production of political identities, making them more diverse and less likely to overlap with the territorial governance structures of most states. This may more accurately reflect the complexity of human experience, but it raises questions about the stability of the state system in general, and democracy in particular. Through lab experiments, survey experiments, and analysis of observational data, he is exploring how newspapers, phones, and social media shape the political identity and discourse of citizens and the emergence of violent and nonviolent challenges to state authority.
Learn more about how the Eisenhower/Roberts Fellowship supports the study of the role of government in a free society, citizen public service, public policy, and improved understanding of America's role in world affairs.