Date April 22, 2025

Alumni Spotlight: Amienne Spencer-Blume ’23

By Meg Coss

Driven by a curiosity to push our collective spatial imaginaries, Amienne Spencer-Blume, a 2023 graduate of Watson's International and Public Affairs (IAPA) concentration and current sociology Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins University, is researching how the configuration of space, at the micro- and macro-scales, impacts social structures and politics.

"What if the Maryland legislature met in the forest?" asked Amienne Spencer-Blume, a 2023 graduate of Watson's International and Public Affairs (IAPA) program. “What if it met in an elementary school? What if it met in a type of space that we haven't even conceived of yet? Why do we revert to these ingrained and, hence, comfortable and familiar spatial imaginaries? In this sense, very concretely, the literal place in which a floor session happens. Everything begins in relation to the space/place question.”

While at Brown, Spencer-Blume's undergraduate thesis, "Blue Traction: The Datafication of Movement and Bodyfication of Threat in the Rise of Gait and Behavior Recognition Technology," was awarded Watson's Outstanding Thesis Award. Currently, she is a Ph.D. student in sociology at Johns Hopkins University, where she is working on an ethnographic study of the Maryland General Assembly.

Spencer-Blume hopes to gain a deeper understanding of the places where political decisions are made and why. If the 50 U.S. states are laboratories of democracy, why is there no experimentation with regard to space? Why do almost all state capitals and legislative chambers share similar architectural styles? These are the kinds of questions Spencer-Blume hopes to address in her research.

Around the age of one, Spencer-Blume moved from Portland, Oregon, to Bingen, Germany, a small town along the Rhine River about an hour west of Frankfurt. Her mother and father are part-time teachers and freelance musicians. When Spencer-Blume was young, they brought her and her brother to their performances. She spent time traveling to shows, growing up amidst a backdrop of recital halls and practice rooms, watching her parents perform and rehearse onstage and backstage. In time, Spencer-Blume developed a broad curiosity about the all-consuming, ever-present thing called space.

"I spent a lot of time as a kid in these weird spaces. When I was 12, I didn't think about it like this, but in hindsight, I realized a lot of people do totally different things in different spaces," she said. “If you're a performer, you know that space matters; how the stage is set up matters. But when we think about political science and politics, we lose sight of the importance of space, or at least it's not as embedded in our thinking.”

When it came time to apply to college, Spencer-Blume applied to schools in the U.S. as a means of experimenting with what she calls her “second half.”

"My mom put a lot of time and energy into helping my brother and me feel as American as possible growing up in a German town. I always had the sense of having two very different but connected sides. I wanted to apply to colleges in the U.S. experimentally to explore that second half of myself."

If you're a performer, you know that space matters; how the stage is set up matters. But when we think about political science and politics, we lose sight of the importance of space.

Amienne Spencer-Blume IAPA Class of 2023

Upon arrival at Brown, Spencer-Blume's innate sense of curiosity was piqued by the University's multi-disciplinary learning environment. She took courses in and outside of IAPS, including classes in theater arts and performance, environmental sciences, Africana studies, and religious studies. However, regardless of the academic discipline, each course led to a new understanding of the importance of space and place.

In a class with the Director of Brown Arts Institute, Sydney Skybetter, Spencer-Blume interacted with art professionals, creating installations that facilitate immersive experiences. "Working with Professor Skybetter made me think a lot about robotics, AI, and what Meta is doing with various immersive virtual experiences that go beyond the 2D and the screen," she said.

A class with Omer Bartov titled War, Tyranny, and Peace in Modern Europe led to Spencer-Blume's first concrete research project addressing human perception, social relations, and the meaning people imbue into a space. Between her sophomore and junior years, she worked as a research assistant for Bartov. She conducted interviews across Germany with Christian Germans who lived in Israel in the early years of the state's existence. She interviewed the children of people who had violent entanglements with the Third Reich. Through her interviews, she sought to understand how they, as Germans, perceived relationships between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians.

"[The interviewees'] stories were so grounded in place, and their answers included much more than their thoughts and feelings. They felt I could not understand what they were saying unless I understood the place," said Spencer-Blume. "The Israel-Palestine question is almost an apex example of the symbolic meaning of place, not just space, in that it's replicable or even replaceable. But in the case of place, people's ties are to a specific place and that place only. If you sever those ties by changing the place, then those ties are gone. There is something very rich and deep about asking people about their life experiences and perceptions and relationships through the prism of space."

In Michael Kennedy's Martial Arts, Culture, and Society class, Spencer-Blume examined how martial arts practices travel across time and place and how specific spaces and contexts influence not only what is permissible but also what is possible.

"There are a lot of spatial constraints that allow you to practice a martial art or not. This can range from the type of mats that are in the space to questions specific to how you interact with your teacher, for example, bowing or certain rituals that only happen the second you step on the mat," explains Spencer-Bume. "We talked a lot about the ritualistic aspects of space and how certain actions make sense in a given space but not in another, and how that influences not only whether you can do a certain thing, such as practice a martial art, but also the relationships that foster between people."

In her research at Johns Hopkins, the multi-disciplinary skills Spencer-Blume honed during her time at Brown remain central to her work. Earlier this year, she and her current advisor, Andrew Perrin, submitted an article to the journal Theory and Social Inquiry that applies the multiplicity hypothesis to voting blocs and political opinion. She is also part of a collaborative project with fellow sociologists, political scientists and professors from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine about civic engagement and health outcomes.

"People who are curious make me curious," she said. To Spencer-Blume, curiosity is like "a door" that provides access to spaces where investigation, learning, and understanding take place. She said she thinks of her research as "a pastiche of inspiration" funneled through an analytic lens and turned into purposeful, clearly communicated language.