Faculty Spotlight: Q&A with Abigail Stepnitz

The USD College of Arts and Sciences (the college) hired 14 new faculty members in three distinctive themes – Borders and Social Justice, Technology and the Human Experience and Climate Change and Environmental Justice – this past fall. As part of the university's commitment to academic excellence, the college endeavored to assemble a cohort of teacher-scholars who offer a strong contribution to the diversity and excellence of USD through teaching, scholarship, service and collaboration.

This spring semester, the college is featuring each new faculty member with a Q&A series every week. Each spotlight highlights their professional journeys, academic expertise, research and their goals for fostering academic and personal growth within the USD community.

Learn more about Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations Abigail Stepnitz, PhD, her background and her passion for research and teaching in the Q&A below. 

Cluster-Themes: Climate Change and Environmental Justice and Borders and Social Justice

Q: Please share your name, title, department and the subjects or courses you will be teaching at USD.

A: My name is Abigail Stepnitz, and I am an assistant professor of political science. I teach Constitutional Law as well as law-focused courses about immigration and climate change.

Q: What key experiences have shaped your career and where you are today? 

A: I worked with refugees and asylum seekers in Europe for about a decade before I went back to school to get my PhD. This experience of working with people whose lives are so deeply and permanently shaped by laws and legal realities has helped me always to center questions of power, access and violence in my pedagogy and research. Law is a powerful tool, but it is not a neutral one. While it can be used to create immense good, it can also be used to strip rights, deny participation and shorten or end lives. We must keep those risks and benefits at the forefront of our minds. I strive to bring the experiences and memories of those who have faced legal violence to my teaching and writing. 

Q: What sparked your interest in the Climate Change and Environmental Justice and Borders and Social Justice cluster-themes, and what drew you to this particular focus? How are you contributing to that focus in your work here?

A: My real-world legal work was certainly important in bringing me to questions of law broadly and specifically to immigration and climate. However, there are other important aspects of these fields that are important to me. I am particularly fascinated by how we use language and stories to create and understand the world around us. Many legal interactions begin when more than one person has more than one story about a given question, conflict or idea. We use stories to organize our thoughts and to make sense of our experiences and preferences, and the law is no exception. I recently completed a project titled “Storied Pasts: Credibility and Evolving Norms in Asylum Narratives 1989–2018.” It examines how asylum seekers in the United States construct legal narratives when seeking protection. This was a fascinating look into the ways that people fleeing danger build stories about their lives and experiences in ways that satisfy not only the legal but also the narrative expectations of the state.

Q: What aspects of joining the University of San Diego community are you most excited about?

A: I am excited to join a community of scholars, faculty and students alike, who are so evidently committed to facing and responding to the big questions we face. My time at USD has already shown me how dedicated the faculty is to building classrooms that make space for inquiry, challenge and growth. Every day (yes, even on Fridays), I am greeted by students who are eager and excited to dig into the material and ask hard questions. 

I also love how alive and engaged the campus feels. There always seems to be a talk, event or something to keep us all learning, somewhere on campus. 

Q: How do you envision your course curriculum contributing to the academic and personal growth of USD students?

A: All of my classes focus on the law to a large extent, and I feel strongly that understanding where law comes from, the way it shapes our lives and how we can shape and resist is important for everyone. We live in legally complex times, and helping people navigate and understand our legal system is essential for preserving rights and democracy. I also enjoy assisting students in addressing the question of whether to pursue law school. Going to law school and being a lawyer can be an excellent, interesting and fulfilling personal and professional path, but there are also other important ways that students can center law in their future educational and career endeavors. I take pride in supporting students as they explore how to leverage their interest in law and politics to build the lives and careers they envision. 

Q: What current research projects are you working on or interested in, and how do they align with your cluster theme?

A: My primary project is my first book, Making Law for the End of the World: People, Planet and the Politics of What Comes Next. The book is about this broader cultural, political and social process of making, living with and resisting law in the face of the climate crisis. The book has two parts: the first part offers a discussion of how the law is failing to provide protection and, in some cases, actively denying protection to those whose futures are acutely imperiled. The second part looks at ways the elite are mobilizing law to avoid and mitigate harm for themselves, even if doing so accelerates the crisis for the majority of the world's population.

I am also working on a smaller project analyzing the way the U.S. Supreme Court's approach to questions about immigrants and immigration law has changed from the earliest cases of the Chinese Exclusion Era to a recent Supreme Court case called Patel v Garland. In this project, I am particularly keen to consider how the question of credible storytelling has changed over time and what that means for the rights of immigrants. 

Both of these projects engage with themes from the Borders and Social Justice and Climate Change and Environmental Justice clusters. As Dean Norton articulated when discussing the development of these themes, they are designed to help us identify, understand and respond to the "difficult social, environmental and political issues facing our nation and the world." I certainly hope that my work can be part of the record that shows we did all we could in the face of climate catastrophe and increasing anti-immigrant rhetoric in the U.S. and globally. 

Q: What’s an interesting or unique fact about yourself that others might not know?

A: A few years ago, I worked on a family history project as part of a holiday gift for my parents. In doing that research, I learned that I have a relative from the Revolutionary War era who personally carried George Washington's tent! I like to think that keeping Washington warm and dry was probably pretty important. If he'd gotten pneumonia and died, someone else would be on the $1 bill now!