Introducing the 2026 Inaugural Incite Institute Doctoral Dissertation Fellows - Incite at Columbia University

2026 Fellows

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  Kay Kemp English and Comparative Literature

  “Fictional Realities: Digital Perspectives on the End of History and the Death of the Real” deals with the changing aesthetics of properties designed to represent and explain the "real"; working across several methodologies and genres, including documentary, museology, and literature, the dissertation aims to establish the ways in which fictional works establish the narrative requirements for non-fictional works, and how digitization alters our expectations for these works even further. The dissertation concludes with a section on temporary political occupations and how activists use the languages and aesthetics of reality to give credence to the worlds they create in spaces not intended for this purpose, altering what characterizes an effective protest.

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  Betselot Wondimu Sociomedical Sciences

  Betselot Wondimu is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociomedical Sciences (Anthropology and Public Health) at Columbia University. His research focuses broadly on structural determinants of health, along with the emotional and subjectifying consequences of coping with structural racism and societal devaluation. His dissertation examines how psychological resilience is constructed in public health and psychotherapeutic settings. Based on ethnographic research in a community-based mental health clinic in New York City, this project argues that resilience promotion traditionally relies on medicalizing and moralizing logics that obscure the institutional production of social suffering and naturalize unequal distributions of life chances, disposability, and premature death. Rather than treating resilience as an unequivocal virtue, this project explores what assumptions about agency, deservingness, efficacy, empowerment, and responsibility become embedded within dominant neoliberal and biomedical resilience frameworks. Ultimately, this project aims to contribute to alternative ways of thinking about resilience grounded in liberation psychology, structural competency, and psychological resistance.

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  Kelsey Reeder Columbia School of Social Work

  Have you ever felt critical of something you also depended on? Maybe a school, parent, healthcare provider, or workplace—relationships from which, despite profound disagreement, we cannot simply walk away. As anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation and authoritarian politics intensify, LGBTQIA+ social service organizations have become increasingly vital infrastructures of survival. Yet such nonprofits have faced central contradictions that long predate the current political moment. Professionalization and liability culture have governed queer and trans care, often sidelining mutual aid and other anti-carceral, non-pathologizing collective traditions that sustained communities long before institutions claimed responsibility for their care. So how do queer and trans care workers navigate institutions that are both infrastructures of survival and constraint? Working in co-researchship with queer and trans care workers across LGBTQIA+-specific organizations in New York City, Kelsey explores how they navigate these enduring contradictions, including how they draw on community-based care values to negotiate, resist, and reimagine institutional care.

• 
  Wesley Cornwell English and Comparative Literature

  How does seismic technological change shape creative labor and aesthetic experience? If modern theater makers — and those who study them — agree on anything, it’s that the advent of incandescent lighting fundamentally transformed the modern American stage. Despite this widespread consensus, the history of stage lighting remains remarkably understudied and underappreciated. To fill this gap, I draw on historical, theoretical, archival, and technical material to trace the emergence and professionalization of lighting design. My dissertation maps the networks of designers, electricians, and engineers who created, standardized, and inherited techniques for theatrical lighting, and in turn, it demonstrates how their expert knowledge and technical skills shaped the aesthetics and politics of modern performance. Ultimately, I argue that design pedagogy, labor, and professionalization are constitutive of, rather than incidental to, the history of modern aesthetic experience.

• 
  Mahdi Sabbagh Architecture, Planning and Preservation – Urban Planning

  My dissertation, titled The Architectures of the Land Movement 1948–1978, examines the environment of the Palestinian Arab citizenry in the decades following the establishment of the Israeli state. I investigate the Land Movement through its practices of space making and mobility that disrupted the structure of the Israeli military rule between 1958 and 1966. The Movement’s committees and clubs, membership, publications, and gatherings crafted a political positionality that challenged the fait accompli of the state apparatus. In reading the collective movement’s work through spatial practices, this dissertation studies how Palestinians identified, employed, and repeated spatial practices that constituted the possibility of a counter-architecture. What was built was a temporary architecture at times unassuming and difficult for the authorities to identify: the home turned meeting room, the village club as political gathering, the private printing press, and importantly the movement and connection between them. This dissertation seeks to probe methods of space making as a continuous tradition imprinted into the spatial lives of communities and culminating into the overt and visibly landed struggles of the late 1970s.

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  Pedro Leonardo Ramos Pastrana Architecture, Planning and Preservation – Urban Planning

  To what extent are urban resilience narratives intertwined with planning, policy, and water management practices? Pedro Ramos’ dissertation investigates how water scarcity is produced and governed, focusing on the rise of resilience-building narratives and practices. Centered on Mexico City, the study traces how resilience narratives are constructed and embedded in planning and policy instruments, and how they shape—and are reshaped by—the everyday practices of communities living under chronic water stress. The study adopts a mixed-methods case study approach, combining qualitative content analysis of policy documents, reports, and media with in-depth interviews with key informants, and quantitative analysis of public datasets using descriptive statistics and spatial analysis. By critically analyzing the tensions and alignments among globalized resilience narratives, locally implemented government agendas, and the localized adaptation practices of communities historically affected by water stress, the study sheds light on how unequal conditions, competing priorities, and power structures shape how urban resilience is experienced, contested, and enacted under conditions of enduring scarcity.

• 
  Hedwig Liebeck Political Science

  Why do scholars and practitioners fully aware of law's tendency to increase existing inequalities nevertheless turn to the law to dismantle them? Hedwig's dissertation addresses this question by studying two legal reform movements in the 1920s in the US and Germany and their postwar successors. By following their arguments for new methods of legal interpretation, innovative legal institutions, and a different accounting for the relationship between law and politics, her project introduces two complementary approaches to progressive legal reform: Critical Formalism and Democratically Defensible Deformalization. After the 1920s reformers partially implemented their respective agendas, their postwar heirs to the 1920s reformers grappled with their predecessors' limitations. To address the shortcomings of each approach, they turned to tools and insights from the other. This partial convergence, the dissertation shows, offers valuable insights on the hopes connected to and the limitations of law as an instrument for social transformation. It also recasts debates on the possibility for legitimating law beyond its liberal model.

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  Helen Han Wei Luo Philosophy

  Helen Han Wei Luo is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in Philosophy specializing in ethics and classical Chinese philosophy. Her dissertation, Etiquette as Ethics: The Search for Egalitarian and Multicultural Standards of Civility argues for the normative importance of etiquette in ordinary life. Drawing on the Confucian ethical ideal of li (禮 ritual propriety), this project defends the norms of civility and politeness as central to the expression of interpersonal regard in day-to-day interactions. Far from being an antiquated system, contemporary versions of etiquette have a special place in modern democracies as rules of ordinary interaction reflecting the cosmopolitan principles of egalitarianism and multiculturalism.

• Ibuki Sugiura