Yi-Hsuan Huang (2024)

Yi-Hsuan Huang is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill who specializes in normative democratic theory and feminist theory. Her research focuses on how democracy can legitimately employ exclusionary mechanisms to limit what she calls “harmful political participation”—the kind of political participation that endangers important democratic values of equality, self-rule, and collective governance.

In her dissertation, she draws on lustration law as one example. Commonly employed by post-democratized, lustration mandates the removal of individuals who have been complicit with past state-sponsored atrocities from public institutions to promote transitional justice. Looking at the case of Taiwan, the 2024 NISS Dissertation Grant will support archival studies for this study, allowing an investigation of how the absence of lustration impacts democratic politics.

Yi-Hsuan holds a B.A. in diplomacy from the University of National Chengchi University, Taiwan, a master’s in political theory from the London School of Economics, UK, and an M.A. in political science from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.