The Adaljiza Sosa-Riddell Mentor Award is presented annually by the APSA Committee on the Status of Latinos y Latinas in the Profession to recognize the exemplary mentoring of Latino y Latina students and junior faculty each year. The award is named in honor of Adaljiza Sosa-Riddell, the first Latina to earn a PhD in political science. APSA was deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Dr. Sosa-Riddell in August 2023. The Committee on the Status of Latinos y Latinas honored her legacy and contributions to both the Latino/a community and the discipline as a whole at the 2024 APSA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Drs. Ricardo Ramirez and Jesse Acevedo were awarded for exemplary mentoring of undergraduate students. Dr. Andrea Silva was awarded for exemplary mentoring of graduate students. Drs. Ines Valdez and Tony Carey were awarded for exemplary mentoring of junior faculty.
Inés Valdez is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Her research is on the tradition of Latinx and Latin American Political Thought, the thought of W. E. B. Du Bois, and on Kant and neo-Kantian cosmopolitanism. Thematically, she works on transnationalism, capitalism, ecology, migration, and empire. Her award-winning work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Kantian Review, and Perspectives on Politics, among other outlets. Her last book, Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and the Reproduction of Capitalism, was published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press and received an honourable mention from the Sussex International Theory Prize. The book relies on the Black radical tradition to analyze the imperial roots of popular sovereignty and self-determination—i.e., its reliance on the extraction of labor of racialized others and their land. The book theorizes Latinx families as both central for the sustenance of privileged subjects and decimated by this role. Moreover, Valdez argues that we ought to understand the devaluation of manual labore and nature as twin processes secured by ideologies of technoracism. The book proposes an anti-imperial ecological popular sovereignty to oppose these structures of domination.
Her first book Transnational Cosmopolitanism: Kant, Du Bois, and Justice as a Political Craft was published in 2019 by Cambridge University Press and received the Sussex International Theory Prize. The book reads Immanuel Kant’s cosmopolitanism contextually and questions its usefulness for theorizing global justice, while offering as an alternative W. E. B. Du Bois’s transnational account of political consciousness and action.
“Inés has used her talents and positions to push political science forward by investing in junior Latino scholars and their research. Her mentorship is one that couples serious engagement with the scholarship of junior scholars with system-level efforts to change modes of knowledge production within political science. I have witnessed and directly benefited from the intellectual prowess, institution building, and community-building efforts of Inés,” writes Angie Bautista-Chavez, a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University.
Valdez has received fellowships from the European University Institute, the Princeton University Center for Human Values, the Humboldt Foundation, and Ohio State’s Global Arts and Humanities Society of Fellows. She is currently working on two separate projects. One recovers the Latin American tradition of Dependency Theory to theorize anti-colonialism with more attention to authoritarian postcolonial regimes and insurgent politics. The second project theorizes racialized labor hostility as a systemic tool of labor control within racial capitalism.
Alfredo Gonzalez, a faculty member at the University of California, Santa Barbara shares, “Inés is selfless and incredibly generous with her time, comments, and empathy. She does not have any formal connection to mentoring me. I was never her graduate student, mentee through a professional development program, or a colleague in her department. Yet any time I seek her advice–and there have been many in the past three years–Inés has always met me with patient, graceful, and generative feedback.”
The APSA Committee on the Status of Latinos y Latinas in the Profession once again thanks Dr. Valdez for her tireless dedication to junior faculty members and offers its thanks for her commitment to bettering the political science discipline.