| GLOBAL METROPOLITAN STUDIESFebruary 2026 Newsletter |
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| | | GMS Summer Funding 2026Global Metropolitan Studies (GMS) is pleased to announce a competition for summer research grants of up to $5000 to students at any stage of the PhD currently enrolled in the Designated Emphasis. Applications for the next round of funding will be due on 1 March 2026. Applications for pre-dissertation research are especially encouraged, but all projects will be considered, subject to available funding. Applicants must be enrolled in, or should have already completed, the GMS 200 core course. Apply here.
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| Lincoln Land Institute C. Lowell Harriss Dissertation Fellowship The Lincoln Land Institute has opened its call for the C. Lowell Harriss Dissertation Fellowship for students whose research complements the institute’s interest in property valuation and taxation. Applications are due by March 2.
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| GMS Alum Jennifer Tucker presents new book! Jennifer Tucker, University of New Mexico
February 9, 2026
1:00-2:30 pm
Social Sciences Building Room 291, UC BerkeleyGMS Alum Jennifer Tucker (Associate Professor, University of New Mexico) will present her new book, Outlaw Capital, on Monday, February 9th, 1:00-2:30pm. Social Sciences Building Room 291. No RSVP required. |
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| GMS Alum Jennifer Tucker holds DE student workshop on dissertation-writingJennifer Tucker, University of New Mexico
February 9, 2026
2:30-4:00 pm
Social Sciences Building Room 291, UC BerkeleyGMS Alum Jennifer Tucker (Associate Professor, University of New Mexico) will hold a workshop for DE students on turning fieldwork observations into dissertation chapters on Monday, February 9th, 2:30 - 4:00pm. Social Sciences Building Room 291. RSVP required. |
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| | GMS students Nicholas Shatan and Carlos Guirado |
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| Nick Shatan investigates the institutional dynamics of affordable housing development in New York City, grounded in archival and ethnographic methods. He is currently writing a dissertation, Cruel Math, Slow Grind, that frames the significance of this field in terms of who belongs in the city and how public policy is implemented. The core argument is that urban expertise, calculative devices, professional subjectivities, and the field of local powers shape underwriting, compliance, and project management practices, which in turn are key levers of development. Nick's training in GMS was fundamental to analyzing affordable housing development as an artifact peculiar to New York and locus for the global circulation of capital and ideas, defamiliarizing US-centric norms and discourses about housing affordability.
Carlos Guirado studies how evidence for society-scale transportation interventions (congestion pricing, autonomous vehicle deployment, transit investments) is evaluated when counterfactuals are unobservable: we cannot see what would have happened under the policy not taken, only forecast it. His dissertation combines methods from causal inference, machine learning, and field experiments to estimate intervention effects across different data regimes: simulation when theory and priors are strong, quasi-experimental methods when novel technologies and policies create natural variation, and observational inference when neither is available. The core argument is that validity is not a property of models but a comparative judgment: whether a model outperforms the alternatives for a given decision. This reframes how forecasts gain authority and how urban expertise is credentialed. GMS cultivated the epistemic curiosity behind this work: treating "what counts as evidence?" both as a question about how cities decide as well as how models are built and justified, and grounded this work in San Francisco as a site where metropolitan-scale experiments unfold in real time. |
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