Faculty Profile

Yuna Blajer de la Garza

About

Professor Blajer’s research and teaching focus on contemporary political theory. She studies inequalities in democracies by examining how democratic institutions are translated (or distorted) into everyday practices and norms. She is interested in debates of democratic and critical theory, relational egalitarianism, citizenship, nationalism, and the “side-effects” of otherwise desirable formal institutions, among other things. Methodologically, she combines normative political theory and ethnographic methods; and has carried out research in Mexico and France. Her research has been published or is forthcoming in the Journal of Politics, Politics and Society and the European Journal of Political Theory, among others. In 2022, she received the Carlo Argenton Memorial Prize for the best research article published in the EJPT that year. Alongside Dr. Condon and Dr. Schmidt (from the School of Education), she is co-PI for Speak Up Democracy, a multi-year project sponsored by a generous grant from the Teagle Foundation. She is currently working on a book on belonging and citizenship in contemporary democracies. Before joining Loyola, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford University. 

Degrees

Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2019