Sarah Johnson ’06 Wins Fulbright to Study
Critical Theory in the United Kingdom

Sarah Johnson '06, a political-science major whose senior thesis critiques the structure of modern political sovereignty, has won a coveted Fulbright Fellowship to study in England. The grant would cover expenses for a master's degree in critical theory at the University of Nottingham.

Johnson isn't certain that she will be able to accept the award.

"I've already been accepted into several Ph.D. programs in the United States and have committed to the program in political science at the University of Chicago. If I can't defer my acceptance, I may have to decline the Fulbright," she explains, noting that the Chicago program has a strong focus on critical theory that would allow her to pursue her interest in it there as well.

According to Johnson, her activities outside the classroom have played an important role in shaping her academic interests, which focus on relationships between power and space, particularly African spaces.

During her sophomore year, Johnson had an internship at the Clean Air Council, where she looked at the effects of environment on children's health. In the summer of 2004, she used a Bryn Mawr Green Grant to work on an organic farm at the Center for Environmental Farming Systems in Goldsboro, N.C., where she studied sustainable agriculture, touring local farms to see various farming practices.

The organic-farming experience sparked an interest in land use that led her toward a semester-abroad program in Botswana, where she observed a community-based program for natural-resource management in a small village. What she saw, Johnson says, was a program that failed because it did not take "the complexities of local power relationships" into account.

She had been interested in practical issues in rural development, but her observations in Botswana convinced her that development schemes would be ineffective as long as they were based on flawed general theories about how power operates.

"I think African spaces are undertheorized," Johnsonsays. "Our understanding of political theory has been based primarily on the history of Europe. We need political theory that is more responsive to the problems we see in the world."

Last summer, a Hanna Holborn Gray Fellowship funded the research that ultimately led to her senior thesis, which undertakes a re-examination of the concept of sovereignty in the context of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

"Neighboring states have taken advantage of ethnic-political conflict in the DRC to make incursions into DRC territory and to extract natural resources. Thus, either directly or indirectly through rebel groups, other states have control over what is theoretically the DRC's sovereign territory," she explains.

"In traditional political theory, sovereignty is tied to the territorial integrity of the state," she says, "and a situation like the one in the DRC might simply be characterized as chaos. But there is order there; there are structures of power. If we break sovereignty and the state apart — if, for instance, we understand it as the bare power over life and death in a given situation — we may be able to shed light on what is happening in situations that we might otherwise just dismiss as anomalous."

The Fulbright Program, an international educational exchange sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, was established by legislation introduced by former Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas in 1946 to "increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries." Fulbright grantees are chosen for their academic merit and leadership potential.

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