桔子云2025-outline

I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University’s Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance. In September 2025, I will join University of Alabama’s Political Science Department as an Assistant Professor.

My research focuses on the pluralizing world order, and the challenges posed by this plurality to existing regimes of liberal global governance, especially concerning questions of shared value, legitimacy and authority. I argue that, at a world political time when the old hegemonies are fraying and new ones have not taken their place, piecemeal negotiations of existing regimes are critical places from which to analyze the changing terrain of global politics. I call these renegotiations, which take place at the intersection of formerly hegemonic and newly emergent terms and which target the grounds and goals of governance, “contentious participation.”

Substantively, my research focuses on global cultural politics - as a key domain of plurality within the world order - through UNESCO’s world heritage regime. Such tracing reveals that, while culture has always been a domain of substantive plurality, the implications of such plurality for global governance on putatively universal terms are closely tied to the global politics of culture. Specifically, it is when culture becomes a domain of claim-making and recognition within the world order, grounded on plurality, that it raises particular questions of shared value, legitimacy and authority.

At the same time, these renegotiations point to new, and at times contradictory conceptions of value, actors of authority, and understandings of legitimacy. Attending to these emergent mechanisms and actors, rather than returns to universalist values and forms of governance might hold greater promise for governance in plural contexts.

My work has been supported by the Robert T. Holt Distinguished Dissertation Development Fellowship.

I received my B.A. (Hons) in Political Science from Vassar College in 2006, my MSc (distinction) in European Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2009 and my PhD from the University of Minnesota’s Political Science Department (2025).