Anja, Ragnhild and Andrew join Sampol and the ERC ConFront project
PhD candidates Anja Tucker, Andrew Newman and Postdoctoral fellow Ragnhild Nilsson have recently taken up their positions at the department and are all part of Aaron Spitzers ERC Starting Grant project "Contested frontiers: Understanding the metapolitics of settler-state peripheries" (ConFront)
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Anja began her PhD journey in October 2024 at the Department of Comparative Politics. She has an MA and a BA in Comparative Politics from UiB. The topic for her MA thesis was judicial selection methods. Anja’s research is centered on studying self-determination in the US Pacific territories of American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.
Andrew began his PhD at Sampol at the beginning of February 2025. He joined the department after completing his master's in political, legal, and economic philosophy at the University of Bern, where he also worked as a teaching assistant. He holds a bachelor's degree in economics with a minor in sociology from Trinity College Dublin. Andrew's research will be mainly focused on normative justifications for group rights to territory and natural resources. This will necessarily have an indigenous rights component. He will use the findings from the normative exploration to critique current legal treatment of rights to territory. This research will examine jurisprudence in cases from Norway, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand related to native title. This is to determine the reasons given for different treatment by courts in these countries of native title to offshore territory and native title to land.
Ragnhild earned her PhD in Political Science at the University of Stockholm. She now holds an assistant professorship at Mid-Sweden University in Östersund. Her postdoctoral research with ConFront will explore the organization and implementation of Sami self-determination. Nilsson is also participating researer in the project IMPART about Indigenous participation through majority-based political parties, and she have been part of conducting the 2013, 2017, 2021 and 2025 Sámi Parliament Election Studies in Sweden.
The ConFront project led by Aaron Spitzer – who is also Anja and Andrew's main supervisor – aims to develop a theory of frontier metapolitics. It will study contests over constitutive principles in, and how such contests shape and are shaped by, settler-state peripheries. It will gather and test data from settler federal territories and related peripheries to pursue four research objectives: conceptualizing metapolitcs to render it cognizable, compiling the first dataset of frontier constitutive metapolitical contests, analyzing such contests and their interaction with the constitution of peripheries, and normatively theorizing how such contests should be approached and resolved.
