Kristin Zuhone

Kristin Zuhone is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, studying Contemporary Political Theory, the History of Political Thought, and Comparative Politics. She holds a BA in Political Science and an MA in the Liberal Arts from the University of Pennsylvania.

Kristin works at the intersection of political theory and international relations, exploring opportunities for democratic participation, political representation, and legal contestation above and below, as well as across and beyond, the territorial boundaries of sovereign states. Over alternatives of citizenship and subjection, her dissertation defends affectedness as the best answer to the question of how to constitute the demos, on the grounds that it alone satisfies both substantive and procedural conditions for democratic legitimacy, necessitating only the subjective identification of individuals, not objective categorization by institutions.

In two standalone papers, each of them co-authored with Joseph Warren, Kristin uses a combination of formal and historical methods to make further progress on solving the boundary problem in democratic theory. Her research interests also include interpretive social science, heterodox political economy, philosophical anarchism, and institutional design.