Katelyn Shepardson

Katelyn Shepardson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Her fields are Political Theory and Comparative Politics. Katelyn's research interests include: comparative theories of empire, settler colonialism, citizenship, democratic theory, territoriality and the politics of place-making.

At the University of Minnesota, Katelyn's dissertation titled The Settler's Hearth: Settler Domesticity and the Cultivation of White Citizenship theorizes how the everyday material practices of homemaking bind together whiteness, settlement, and citizenship. The project argues that settler domesticity is not the expression of an existing coherent domestic ideal but rather a historically contingent process where local material practices of labor, consumption and spatial ordering circulate and consolidate into racial-political norms. The project traces localized efforts by settlers during the nineteenth century U.S. territorial expansion to stabilize what counted as a 'proper' home and who, by extension could be understood as a legitimate racial-political subject (ie. a citizen). Emphasizing the material constitution of settler domesticity, the project contributes a new framework for understanding how settler societies naturalize whiteness, occupation, and political-personhood through everyday practices rather than solely through legal and institutional mechanisms. As a result, the project demonstrates that settler political orders emerge from ordinary forms of social reproduction and provides insights into their persistence today. 

Katelyn received her MSc. in Migration, Mobility & Development Studies from the University of London - SOAS and her BSc. in Biology & Political Science from the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse. Prior to coming to the University of Minnesota, Katelyn taught high school social studies and worked as an academic advisor at the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire.