Alesha Porisky, PhD

I am an Assistant Professor in Political Science at Northern Illinois University where I teach comparative politics courses, including Introduction to Comparative Politics, Women and Politics and African Politics. I am also a Faculty Associate with the Centre for Nonprofit and NGO (NNGO) Studies.

In 2025, I was a Visiting Scholar in the International Development Department (IDD) at the University of Birmingham. In 2022 I was a Fellow with the Governance and Local Development (GLD) Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden (now located at Cornell University). Prior to starting at Northern Illinois University, I was a Visiting Scholar at the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University and I worked as a Researcher with the Effective States and Inclusive Development (ESID) Research Centre at Global Development Institute (GDI) at the University of Manchester, where I led a multi-county research program in Kenya which examined subnational variations in the implementation of social policies.

I received my PhD from the University of Toronto, in the Department of Political Science. My research interests are focused on social policies, cash transfers, state-citizen relations, inequality, and the ethics of field research.

My book project, Extending the State, Shaping Citizenship: Cash Transfers and Citizen-State Relations in Rural East Africa, explores the regional uptake of cash transfers in East Africa and how state social assistance policies impact citizens’ perceptions and practices of citizenship.

While conducting research in Tanzania for my PhD, I was a Fellow at the Economic and Social Research Foundation in Dar es Salaam. I also worked at the Global Cities Institute. I was formerly the vice-curator of the Toronto Hub of World Economic Forum’s Global Shaper Community. 

Prior to my starting my PhD I worked as a filmmaker and communications intern with the United Nations Development Program in Egypt and Serbia.