Speaker Series: 2026-28 Doctoral Fellows
Organizational Responses to Political Pressures in Higher Education by Daniela Juarez
Universities are increasingly operating in politically contested environments where external actors are demanding them to change their organizational practices. This dissertation examines how educational organizations respond to these external pressures. It pays particular attention to how institutions interpret policies, develop new strategies, and negotiate tensions between external demands and internal institutional commitments.
Daniela Juarez is an ABF/AccessLex Institute Doctoral Fellow in Legal and Higher Education. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago.
Challenging the State: Administrative Justice and Legal Mobilization in Kazakhstan by Alisher Juzgenbayev
How do institutions that enable citizens to challenge state action emerge under authoritarian rule, and how might they reshape citizens’ understandings of themselves and the state? My dissertation examines these questions through Kazakhstan’s recent introduction of specialized administrative courts and reforms to its public complaint system. Bringing together the politics of institutional reform in autocracies and the study of legal consciousness, the project investigates both the construction of administrative justice and its implications for individual legal empowerment.
The dissertation consists of two connected parts. The first draws on court case data, legislative history, and interviews to explain the emergence and implementation of administrative justice. It examines how international legal assistance, bureaucratic competition, and inherited judicial roles shaped the reform’s trajectory and the practical possibilities for challenging public authorities. The second draws on interview data to develop a survey experiment that investigates how encounters with courts and administrative complaint mechanisms might affect citizens’ confidence in their ability to pursue claims, expectations of institutional responsiveness, and beliefs about their standing as rights holders and the state’s obligations toward them. It asks whether legal empowerment can coexist with disappointment in state institutions.
Alisher Juzgenbayev is an ABF/Northwestern Doctoral Fellow in Law and Social Science. He is currently a J.D/Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University.
Cash or Groceries? Leveraging Household Differences for Tax Design by Ana Vasilj
Why does the United States subsidize food? Thirty-two states exempt groceries from sales tax (roughly $50 billion a year foregone), and SNAP delivers another $100 billion a year in food benefits. These are very large programs, and the usual rationales are that food is a necessity for poor families, or that they should be nudged toward better nutrition. Yet standard economic theory says these programs shouldn’t exist: the government should just give these households cash and let them spend it as they choose. This prescription rests on an untested assumption that all households want the same things and differ only in how much they earn, so a food subsidy benefits everyone who buys food, lower-income households no more than anyone else. Using new data on household spending, I develop a method that tells apart what households can afford from what they actually prefer. If lower-earning households genuinely value grocery food relatively more—not just because they have less to spend—then food subsidies make sense under the standard theory itself. This would recast the existing programs as effective redistribution, not mere paternalism—and point to ways of designing them better. I’ll also talk about where this fits in my broader empirical research on measuring differences across firms, workers, and households—and the theoretical work on how those differences can be leveraged for better tax design.
Ana Vasilj is an ABF/University of Chicago Doctoral Fellow in Law and Social Science. She is currently a J.D/Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago.
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To register, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.