While at SCAS, Natalia Castelnuovo Biraben intends to develop a book-length project that examines the intersections of memory, territory, mobility, and infrastructures. The work is grounded in an ethnography of the shifting territorialities of Indigenous communities and criollos stalls in the Pilcomayo region, a pivotal landscape within the Argentine Gran Chaco bordering Bolivia and Paraguay.

Castelnuovo Biraben will be at SCAS as a Barbro Klein Fellow during the spring term of 2027.

During his time at SCAS, Kristoffer Kropp, will focus on a book-length project about social science and EU-research policy. The book analyzes the relationship between social science and EU-research policies and the Europeanization of social science since the 1970s and provides new empirical knowledge on the negotiation and struggle over the relationship between social science and political institutions over the past five decades. The book analyzes the reconfiguration of social science and political institutions at a transnational level. In the book Kropp will develop a field-theoretical perspective to understand empirical cases such as the organization of European research projects, shifts in EU-research policy and the establishment of European social scientific associations. The book will offer a theoretical framework for understanding relations between fields through homology, as a structural and processual concept for understanding power relations. The study will focus on two interrelated processes. Firstly, focusing on the production of social scientific knowledge, it will interrogate how new European fields of social science are shaped by the actions of social scientists through the establishment of institutions and relationships among social scientists in Europe and concrete research projects. Secondly, it will analyze how this emerging field is linked to European bureaucratic and political fields, examining the various forms of mediation between the two and how it had conditioned the Europeanization of social science.

Kropp will be a SCAS-Nordic Fellow in the academic year 2026-27.

Don Mitchell’s term at SCAS will be devoted to making considerable progress on a book with the working title “From Contracts to Contractors, From Sharecropping to Riding Sharing: The United Farm Workers, the California Agribusiness Landscape, and the Surprising Roots of Contemporary Labor Precarity.” Based on extensive archival research, the book examines the rise and fall of the social movement-oriented union, the United Farm Workers (UFW), between the early 1960s and the turn of the century, to show how its fortunes were decisive for the making of a new kind of labor precarity. Examining union, corporate, activist, and state agency records, as well as analyzing a suite of legislative changes and court cases, the book makes two primary claims. First, in its ascendency, the UFW was on the cusp of fully remaking the agrarian labor regime in California, with profound effects for the agribusiness political economy and landscape. Second, with its decline, agribusiness was able to reclaim control over labor relations both by increasing the role and importance of farm labor contractors in the procurement and exploitation of farmworkers, and by developing innovative sharecropping systems that forced the risks associated with growing profits onto the workers themselves. In turn, this latter move, led to a series of court decisions that created the legal landscape that later gig-based companies (like Uber) had to contend with to advance forms of labor precarity presumably vital for their business models.

Don Mitchell will be at SCAS as a Fellow during the autumn term of 2026.