Congrats to Global Grad Sarah Manski on her PhD Defense!

Award Recipient: 

Sarah Manski PhD Defense

Award Date: 

Monday, July 20, 2020

Global Studies PhD graduate student Sarah Manski passed her dissertation defense with flying colors – her committee (Professors Rich Appelbaum (Emeritus), John Foran, Mark Juergensmeyer, Howie Winant) is excited about her research, and believes she will become a leading expert on distributed ledger technologies (DLTs – popularly known as blockchains) and their impact on global political economy, both potential and actual. DLTs, as Sarah shows, are still in their early phase: they have enormous potential to foster more democratic, cooperative forms of political and economic governance – and the potential to do exactly the opposite. Congratulations, Sarah, well done! This is great work, cutting-edge, and important!

Sarah Manski studies the global political economy of distributed ledger technology. Her dissertation, "Socio-Technical Futures: A Blockchain Technology Assessment," analyzes the affordances of distributed ledger technology in the areas of organization, production, cooperation and governance. She has presented her research at the meetings of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, American Sociological Association, and Global Studies Association, as well as Blockchain Unbound, RadicalxChange and elsewhere. Sarah has published in the journals Strategic ChangeLaw & CritiqueFrontiers in Blockchain, and the British Journal of Sociology, and co-authored a chapter in "Digital Innovation and Societal Changes." Sarah Manski began in our PhD program five years ago, shortly after the birth of her first child. In the years following, she was a TA for nine quarters and took two quarters leave for the birth of two more boys. She will begin teaching at George Mason University in the fall.