The Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy is pleased to have supported the education of many excellent graduate students.

Patrick Cottrell, Political Science

Wei Dong, Economics  

Jaime-Alexis Fowler, History

Elizabeth Holzer, Sociology

Pranay Kapadia, Business

 

Enrique Martínez-García, Economics

Gil Ribak, History

Daria Vassina, Industrial Relations Research Institute

Vanessa Walker, History

Amber Wichowsky, Political Science


Research Fellows

 

During the academic year 2004-5, the Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy funded three graduate student research fellowships and several program assistants. In their dissertations each of these outstanding students sought to enhance our understanding of how the international economy functions.

Christine Overdevest is a doctoral candidate in the UW Department of Sociology and Rural Sociology. Her dissertation, conducted under the supervision of Frederick Buttel, evaluates participatory standard setting institutions and their operation as economic and environmental regulatory mechanisms in the forest sector among Scandinavian and US firms and country contexts. Recent publications include: "Information Politics, Treadmill Politics, and Public Policy: Toward a Political Economy of Information" Organization and Environment (forthcoming March 2005); "Codes of Conduct and Standard Setting in the Forest Sector: Constructing Markets for Democracy?" Industrial Relations/Relations Industrielles 59.1 (2004):172-198; "Volunteer Stream Monitoring and Local Participation in Natural Resource Issues," co-authored with Orr. C.S., and K. Stepenuck, Human Ecology Review (Winter 2004):177-185.

Sebnem Ozkan is an advanced dissertator at the Industrial Relations Research Institute and currently in the process of writing her dissertation titled as "More Global Than Ever, As Local As Always: Internationalization and Shop-floor Transformation in Turkish Automobile and Electronics Manufacturing". Her dissertation focuses on the dynamics and implications of the ongoing internationalization of production and markets, and the accompanying changes in work organization at the plant level centering on workers' experiences. She previously worked as a project assistant at the EU Center and Center for European Studies at the UW-Madison; taught "Industrial Relations in Developing Countries"; and gave guest lectures on EU industrial relations and EU enlargement. Her research interests include international political economy, work organizations, and social policy, with special emphasis on the EU and developing countries.

Jeffrey S. Rothstein received his Ph.D. in sociology from UW-Madison in August 2005 and is now a research fellow at Wayne State University. His dissertation, Driven to Compete: Workers, Unions, and General Motors' "Global Manufacturing System" in Mexico and Wisconsin, contributes to debates around the implications of neo-liberal economic policies and widespread industrial restructuring for workers, their unions, and industrial relations systems. Through a comparison of two auto plants assembling Chevy Suburbans, one a greenfield site in Silao, Mexico and the other an eighty-year-old plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, Rothstein shows how workers and their unions help shape the implementation of new production systems, based on the local context in which they work and their own experiences with the changing economic landscape. Recent Publications include: “Economic Development Policymaking Down the Global Commodity Chain: Attracting an Auto Industry to Silao, Mexico”, Social Forces 84, 1: 49-69 and “Creating Lean Industrial Relations: General Motors in Silao, Mexico”, Competition & Change 8, 3: 203-221. He can be reached at jrothste@ssc.wisc.edu.