Justitia Center for Advanced Studies

Announcing our Fellows

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Three scholars will join us

The »Justitia Center for Advanced Studies« is happy to announce its new post-doctoral fellows for the academic year 2023/24. They are excellent theorists, and we are delighted to welcome them. Justitia is a forum for political theorists and philosophers. It is generously funded by the Alfons and Gertrud Kassel-Stiftung and directed by Prof. Dr. Rainer Forst at the Goethe University of Frankfurt. From October 2023 to July 2024, the fellows, who reside at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg, will be part of the Frankfurt academic community, especially of the Normative Orders Research Centre, and work on their individual research projects. The Center also regularly holds research workshops, conferences, and seminars.


Peter Giraudo received his PhD from Princeton University in the summer of 2023 with a thesis on "Political Trade Unionism: Industrial Citizenship and the Regulation of Social Conflict in European Thought, 1890 - 1919." His current research project follows on from that work. Giraudo explores a tradition of thought in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that represents labor unions as political institutions.  For Georges Sorel, Max Weber, Eduard Bernstein, Jean Jaurès, and Émile Durkheim, the function of unions went far beyond solving the material question and played a central role in building a socialist workers movement. In their view, unions provided workers with a moral education that created a sense of class belonging. Thus, unions contributed not only to the economic but also to the moral progress of society. According to Giraudo, at a time of resurgence in union organizing and activism, researching this tradition can shed light on how unions can contribute to building a working-class political movement.

Hannah McHugh completed her PhD at University College London with a thesis on "Power to the People: Agent's Role in and Responsibility for Domination." Her research project, which follows her doctoral dissertation, focuses on how social power is manifested and maintained in market economies. According to McHugh, it is often said that markets have power. In the past, this power led, for example, to the resignation of British Prime Minister Liz Truss in 2022 or to the 2008 financial crisis in which many people lost their homes and livelihoods. How is this kind of power to be understood and who, if anyone, is exercising power over whom here? McHugh's project aims to answer these questions by examining the centrality of coordination in markets through an analysis of social practices. Following this analysis, McHugh argues that regulation aimed at changing individual incentive structures, rather than revolutionary structural change, can be a solution to redress normatively problematic markets.


Belén Pueyo-Ibáñez received her PhD in Spring 2023 from Emory University in Atlanta with a dissertation on "(Im)possible Communities: The Cooperative Structure of Moral Thinking." Some of the dissertation topics will be continued in her current research project, "The Democratic Sentiment: Rethinking Politics through the Lens of Affect." In it, Pueyo-Ibáñez addresses the connection between democracy and the emotional dimension of human experience. According to Pueyo-Ibáñez, the account that democratic attitudes and actions are fundamentally determined by the intellect and free of emotive components, while antidemocratic attitudes and actions are primarily guided by passion, is based on a false dichotomy between reason and emotion. She defends the hypothesis that democratic sentiment-a term that subsumes a variety of emotions such as concern and compassion- precedes the democratic order logically as well as temporally. Pueyo-Ibáñez thus argues for an alternative to an overly intellectualist conception of democracy, and for an affective turn in democratic theory.