About

Koulflo, a.k.a. Robert Koulish

email: rkoulish@gmail.com

The blog photo above is of the beautiful women in my life, Steph and Olivia, enjoying the carnival ride in Central Park. Little brother Julian was watching nearby.

I am an interdisciplinary and experiential political scientist– Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  I recently landed back in Philadelphia (my old undergraduate haunts) to embark on a new challenge as Associate Professor of Law and Society at Philadelphia University.  I am founding chair of the school’s  Law and Society Program and Major (and soon to be Minor), a flagship in its growing liberal arts division.   As someone whose work has focused on law and society since graduate school, I am really thrilled to be doing this.

I have been writing about immigration and the border, community-based media, learning, and non-profits for about fifteen years. I come to these topics from a politically progressive viewpoint and with an intellectual curiosity about contested public spaces, law, privatization, and borders.

At the moment,  I am writing the manuscript for my book, Immigration and American Democracy: Subverting the Rule of Law, to be published by Routledge Press later this year.  My focus is on sovereignty, risk management and the privatization of immigration control.

Over the years, my research has been eclectic but always comes back to the contested space that impedes the every day activities of marginalized people. In 2000-2001, I was lead investigator for a research project I designed in Hungary (2000-2001). I examined Roma (aka Gypsy) minority rights and self governance. My research was housed at the Budapest University Economic Sciences (BUES) and at the NGO Partners Hungary.

Before that I conducted research at the US-Mexican Border with immigrant victims of human rights abuses and political asylum applicants.  My first publication was a law review article in the NYU Review Law & Social Change documenting asylum applicant’s struggle against a byzantine immigration system (see Systemic Deterrence of Asylum Seekers).  Since then, I have written about 20 articles and book chapters, including a book chapter about citizenship service-learning where immigrants teach college students about citizenship. I recently penned three recent pieces about the privatization of immigration control, in the Baltimore Sun (see Corporate Takeover of American Borders) the online Monthly Review (zine) (see Privatizing the Leviathan Immigration State), and more extensive articles focusing on privatization and the plenary powers and state action doctrines in the Journal of Refugee and Migration Issues (JRMI), and the St. Thomas Law Review (forthcoming).

Other related research interests include the privatization of the First Amendment, and commercialization of public life. An article on Bono and the commodification of free speech is forthcoming in the Pepperdine Journal of Business  Entrepreneurship and Law (JBEL).

I also have been also interested in experiential and community based teaching and learning.  In Baltimore, during the past five years, I was cofounder of a youth-based media and education collaborative called co-lab, and a micro-radio coalition called Baltimore Community Radio Coalition (BCRC),  BCRC installs radio transmitters and antennas at local schools and non profits as well as a bare bones radio studio at the sites. This and other projects I have been involved with aim to create and amplify community voices, neighborhood by neighborhood.