International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) > Competitions

2007 IDRF Program

Recipients

Nikhil Anand

Stanford University, Anthropology

The Social Life of Water: The Limits of the Commodity and its Neoliberal State

[ project summary ]

Why is it so difficult to privatize water distribution in India? Through ethnographic research among two water poor communities in Mumbai India, this research will examine why public water works projects proliferate in India even as state policies profess a commitment to neoliberalism. When operationalized in postcolonial states that do not have a history of substantive citizen rights, the effects of neoliberal policies are as yet unknown. Ethnographic attention to how the poor access water in Mumbai complicates the distinctions of the public and private, long central to political economy. Through participant observation among the urban poor, institutional ethnography and archival study, this research seeks to understand the boundaries of citizenship and markets in the neoliberal state. First, by following how the poor access water, I hope to show how formal citizenship articulates with other kinds of political claims among the urban poor. Second, I am interested learning why water is difficult to commoditize when other basic needs (like food) are distributed through market mechanisms. What do these difficulties reveal about commodification itself? An attention to the social life of water could reveal new insights into the contingency of citizenship and the limits of neoliberal projects.

Kitana Siv Ananda

Columbia University, Anthropology

Politics After a Ceasefire: Becoming Tamil Subjects in Diaspora

[ project summary ]

My project explores how diasporic Sri Lankan Tamils create new modes of belonging and citizenship by engaging with a world of suffering “back home,” through public performances of solidarity with, grief for, and commemoration of, their relatives in Sri Lanka. Over a period of eighteen months, I will carry out ethnographic research among Tamils living in Toronto, Chennai (Madras) and Colombo to track how the circulation of Tamil political and cultural forms, and their embedding in these interconnected, national and urban sites, produces new citizen-subjects in diaspora. Even as Tamil political movements employ a globalizing rhetoric that seeks to transcend particular places, they are oriented and addressed to affective relations, national publics, and state power. My research engages with critical literatures inside and outside anthropology in South Asian studies, diaspora studies, citizenship, and public ritual, in order to trace the formation of new social and political subjects. I suggest that the study of these transnational political practices uniquely articulates 1) how political ritual, understood as a technology of social mediation, binds (and is bound by) subjects into new forms of public belonging and 2) the normative and pragmatic claims of diaspora and its ‘homelands’ in securing rights, obligations, and recognition within pluralist and multicultural states.

Hannah Chadeayne Appel

Stanford University, Anthropology

Crude Fictions: Oil and the Making of Modularity in Equatorial Guinea

[ project summary ]

At the center of the petroleum industry’s ‘new Persian Gulf,’ the central African micro-state of Equatorial Guinea has seen over 10 billion dollars in petroleum-related capital investment over the last six years, and is now Africa’s third largest oil producer. While some scholarship suggests that Equatorial Guinea will now join a class of typical oil states that includes Nigeria, Venezuela, Kuwait, etc., anthropology finds this narrative of ‘typicality’ reductionist, and points instead to contingent realities unique to particular sites like Equatorial Guinea. My project starts from a dissatisfaction with this opposition, and asks instead, what cultural work is required to produce and maintain typicality, replication, and modularity? If, in attempting to recreate a specific environment, the petroleum industry requires that certain things be erased and others created, what are those erasures and creations in Equatorial Guinea? Through an institutional ethnography of a major oil company and participant observation in a colossal, oil-funded public works project, this study aims to illuminate the twin processes of transformation and reproduction in Equatorial Guinea. My research will be the first ethnographic project in this country by an American scholar, and will contribute to ongoing anthropological discussions on how situated ethnographic work can produce results at a scale that might effectively participate in larger debates.

Elif Muyesser Babul

Stanford University, Cultural and Social Anthropology

The Making of Human Rights in Turkey

[ project summary ]

My research explores human rights training programs for state officials in Turkey, where academics and human rights activists teach human rights sensibility to various social and political actors involved in Turkey’s governance (the police, mayors, judges, prison administrators social workers etc.). The implementation of a comprehensive national human rights policy is increasingly viewed as an essential requirement for Turkey’s membership in the EU. Uncomfortable with many of its provisions, nationalists both within and outside the state bureaucracy in Turkey view EU’s human rights policy as part of foreign/Western impositions on Turkey. For many state officials, human rights secure “rights for terrorists” and threaten national security and sovereignty. Both the EU and human rights circles in Turkey put great emphasis on the human rights education of state officials, viewed as the primary human rights violators in the country. Training programs serve as critical sites to study the interpretation, translation, modification, contestation and re-articulation of what universal human rights come to mean in the Turkish governmental context. Studying how different actors address the issue during the training reveals how human rights discourse interacts with the ideas of national polity in Turkey. My project aspires to move beyond the normative framework in studying human rights in a non-Western context, articulated within the binary of the country’s accomplishment versus failure in implementing those rights. It aspires to explore what human rights do in a liminal setting where the term occupies a controversial position. Studying "the making of" human rights assumes that “failures” in implementing human rights do not correspond to passive moments of doing nothing. Rather, they are productive instances of doing something else. My research aspires to find out what the failures in implementing human rights in Turkey’s governmental realm actually end up producing.

On Barak

New York University, History and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies

Temporality, Personhood and the Techno-Political Making of Egyptian Society, 1869-1939

[ project summary ]

Comparing the locations of news articles from al-Ahram, the first private Egyptian paper, with a list of railway destinations in 1876 reveals a remarkable overlap. Within Egypt, the newspaper covered only places that were connected to the railroad. In other words, the “Egypt” that the newspaper (re) presented was that of the railway map. The dissertation-project for which I seek an SSRC-IDRF Fellowship will, like the above exercise, re-fuse the “social” and “political” (which newspapers supposedly reflect and shape) with technologies of transportation and communication that have so far been absent from the historiographical picture. While many historians label their work "social history," very few studies actually deal with the appearance of "society" in historically specific settings. This dissertation explores this question in Egypt, a key point of passing-through to India, between 1869 and 1939. Egypt's location amplified the importance of transportation, communication and other technological dimensions of the encounter between Egyptians and the British. In this colonial setting, the dissertation examines how three time-regulating technologies – the railway, telegraphy and the periodical press – introduced a new synchronicity and helped shape not only how Egyptians experienced time, but also what they came to call "Egypt" and "Egyptian society". Specifically, the project traces the emergence of novel notions such as al-Gumhur ("the public") and al-Mugtama' ("society"), alongside these new interfacing webs of transportation, communication and representation. This dissertation thus uniquely examines the relations between technology, timekeeping practices and distinctive types of horizontal connectedness which have so far been uncritically taken for granted as generic manifestations of a preexisting "social sphere".

Crystal Lynn Biruk

University of Pennsylvania, Anthropology

The Politics of Knowledge Production in Collaborative AIDS Research in Malawi

[ project summary ]

While working on a collaborative AIDS research project in Malawi in 2005, I was struck by the noticeable differences in how the risk of contracting AIDS was interpreted by members of the research team, despite their sharing of the same research agenda, protocols, and directives. What this suggested to me was not simply that scientific inquiry is inherently social but rather how collaboration is inevitably paradoxical. Collaborative research entails a central contradiction between the need for a unified agenda and the panoply of cultural viewpoints that aspire to be incorporated. This contradiction points to a question central to this particular project and to the conduct of collaborative research more generally: In the face of contrasting and possibly discordant presuppositions concerning the central focus of research, how does one (or more) of them gain legitimacy? Critiques of top-down AIDS research in sub-Saharan Africa gave rise to collaborative research in the 1990s. Donors and national governments increasingly insist that research be collaborative and culturally relevant, yet they lack detailed knowledge of how different understandings of culture, and especially in the case of AIDS, different understandings of risk, are negotiated in the context of research practice. While collaborative research may begin with varying interpretations across collaborators, during the research process certain interpretive explanations are taken as authoritative. My research considers how different constructions of risk are produced and communicated among various levels of international AIDS research in Malawi. How are diverse theories and perspectives of risk produced, challenged or confirmed as authoritative knowledge in the interactions among actors located within four levels of the research infrastructure in Malawi?

Andy Richard Bruno

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, History

An Environmental History of Russian and Soviet Modernization Efforts, 1861-1941

[ project summary ]

This project will offer an ecological interpretation of modernization efforts in late imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union. It will examine physical landscapes, interactions between humans and the environment, and conceptions of nature in order to enlighten our understanding of Russian and Soviet environmental history during a period of major economic, social, and political change. In order to interrogate how agricultural and industrial projects affected humans and the natural world, this dissertation will entail a comparative case study involving three diverse regions and different branches of economic change in them: forestry in the Moscow Province, animal husbandry in the Orenburg region, and metal and chemical production on the Kola Peninsula. The research will include analysis of geographical scholarship, local newspapers, regional literature, diaries, memoirs, and archival documentation pertaining to each local industry. Through the combination of focusing on material changes in the environment and transformed human/nature interaction and on a cultural examination of different peoples’ understanding of the natural world, this project will point to new ways to think about modernity and modernization. Specifically, an ecological interpretation will scrutinize the impact of the ideology of Russian “backwardness” and compare the treatment of the natural world under different political regimes.

Yoon Sung Choi

University of California, Irvine, Anthropology

Fandom, Science, and Nationalism: South Korea's Stem Cell Scandal

[ project summary ]

In February, 2006, a South Korean truck driver lit his body on fire in front of a historic statue in the center of Seoul. Little is known about the man, except that he was a member of an online chat cafe called the 'I Love Hwang Woo Suk' Fanclub. Just before his death, he left behind an Internet memo calling on Hwang's supporters to gather in Seoul. He spent his last hours distributing leaflets professing the innocence of disgranced stem cell scientist Hwang Woo Suk. Desiring Hwang's exoneration and the continuation of his research, this 'fan' sacrificed his life. Using the recent Korean stem cell controversy as an entry point, this project explores the relationship between 1) the central role of science and technology in Korea's contemporary economic/social development and national imagination and 2) the emergence of 'fans' as a dynamic and unique social constituency with increasing capability to shape Korean society. How does 'scientist' as the particular object of fandom distinguish it from other groups in Korea that use fandom as a mode to express their patriotic fervor and achieve specific goals? This project examines the anxieties and antagonisms scientific fandom revealed, and the reason science was regarded as the cure to the ills of Korean society. How are both the potential impact of this fanclub on Korea's social and political landscape, as well as interpretations of fandom, contingent upon the ability of Hwang's fans to exonerate him so that Korea may re-enter the race to scientific fandom?

Dadi Darmadi

Harvard University, Anthropology

The Hajj, Reinvented: Pilgrimage, Mobility and Inter-state Organizations in Saudi Arabia and Indonesia

[ project summary ]

In recent years, enthusiasm for globalization has been tempered by greater critical scrutiny of the international behavior of states and their consequences, such as in international law and governance. In that spirit, my research asks: how does inter-state organization of the movement of people shape a world religion: their religious experience, their ritual practice, their religious beliefs, their demography? Through multi-sited ethnographic field research, this project addresses the question by examining the consequences of state-to-state organization of Muslim pilgrimage between Indonesia (which sends one of the largest contingents) and Saudi Arabia (the host). Since 1987, the unprecedented imposition of country-based quotas on the number of hajj pilgrims has been followed by dramatic developments: 1) a construction boom in pilgrimage sites; 2) a burgeoning pilgrimage bureaucracy in Saudi Arabia and the sending countries; 3) a new oligopoly of private tour companies; and 4) an increased circulation of pilgrimage literature. What drives this increase despite the problems? By focusing on Saudi and Indonesian state pilgrimage agencies, this research seeks to develop an anthropological understanding of how ritual has become a significant part of state performance and why adherents continue to draw meaning and motivation from world religions despite the ever-tighter organization of religion and population movements by worldly bureaucracies and markets on a global scale.

Isabelle Maria de Rezende

University of Michigan, History

A Visual History of the Congo: From Ngongo Leteta to Patrice Lumumba

[ project summary ]

My dissertation will be a history of colonial visuality and of Congolese "seeing" in the Congo from the 1880s through the 1960s. I will approach the study of visual history in the Congo through five key "moments," beginning during the imperial wars of conquest and concluding with Patrice Lumumba’s era and the Simba rebellions of the mid-1960s. I will first reconstruct an archive of visual materials in Belgium for each of these “moments” of Congolese history, particularly within the "Tetela" (also “Batetela”) cultural zone. Second, I will take parts of the visual archive for each of these "moments" to the field, bringing it into conversation with the memories of living Congolese, adding specifically Congolese layers of knowledge about visual history. study represents a new departure in imperial and Congolese history by foregrounding the visual. Not only will the production of colonial visualities be at its core, but this study will explore whether and how the "key moments" I identify in the archives are known and remembered in the Tetela cultural zone. Secondly, this study will rethink how visuality, which I hypothesize was essential to the production of ethnicity in colonialism, "fixed" ethnicity in colonial imaginations, through visual conceits. Thirdly, this study will further understanding of the production of colonial modernities through the mechanisms of production, consumption, and circulation of visuality.

Joshua S. Dimon

University of California, Berkeley, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

Strategic Institutions and Collaborative Extractives? A Paradox of Fossil Fuel Development and Community Based Natural Resource Management in Mozambique

[ project summary ]

There is a paradox emerging in coastal Mozambique between oil and gas development, a highly centralized decision-making process with highly decentralized social and environmental impacts, and decentralized community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) Within a highly centralized and centralizing fossil fuel development system, the state decentralizes management of the renewable resources most subject to deterioration from fossil fuel production, to local, often ill-defined and historically disempowered 'communities'. However, it is precisely the paradox within these divergent policies in Mozambique that may allow the ‘frontier’ extractive state to avoid the socioeconomic and environmental pitfalls which have befallen other Sub-Saharan African oil producers by opening political spaces for local voices. It is my hypothesis that coastal conservation systems with CBNRM components create sets of overlapping, redundant and nested institutions that can provide strategic opportunities for local actors to make claims on the larger fossil fuel development decision-making process. I will test this hypothesis by answering the following questions: What constraints does the structure of extractive industry-state relations in ‘frontier’ areas create for local access to political space? How do the institutions of CBNRM incorporate and/or interact with local livelihood institutions and the overlapping set of actors in extractive zones? How, and for whom do institutions of CBNRM increase or decrease access to state decision-making?

Chad Elias

Northwestern University, Art History/Architecture

Conflicting Visions: Contemporary Art in Post-Civil War Lebanon

[ project summary ]

In the years following the civil war (1975-90), Lebanon has been split between two opposing attitudes to the past: on the one hand, the desire to obliterate the memory of an ugly and unresolved conflict and, on the other, the effort to commemorate it. While the latter is increasingly expressed in efforts to revive communal solidarities and preserve the cultural heritage of the nation, the former most often takes the form of a nostalgic return to a mythical pre-war past. Working across different media (photography, video and performance) and disciplines, this dissertation considers the problem of creating a national image during a period when Lebanese identity, and the visual representations used to figure it, have been systematically weakened and destroyed. In particular, it seeks to provide a historical framework for understanding the social conditions and larger stakes of cultural production in the post-civil war era. For artists such as Lamia Joreige, Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari, the challenge is not simply to document the past or preserve what remains of it, but rather to create an alternative public sphere in which a series of unresolved issues—the legacy of the civil war, the curtailment of civil liberties, continuing sectarian divisions, changing attitudes towards the “other,” the social cost of reconstruction, border security—can be articulated. Drawing on unpublished archival sources, my project addresses two overlapping aspects of image making in Lebanon. I consider on one level the reappropriation of existing images as a means to challenge the authority of divisive and violent political discourses propagated in the media and institutional apparatuses of the state, and on another level, the production of new images that aim to provide representation for individuals and communities excluded from the dominant articulations of nationhood.

Felipe Gaitan-Ammann

Columbia University, Anthropology

Daring Traffic: An Archaeology of Slavers and Slaves in Early Colonial Panama (1662-1671)

[ project summary ]

This research project delves into both archaeological evidence and firsthand written sources to address the material constitution of slavers’ life experiences in early colonial Panama. It draws on the premise that African-born captives held an ambiguous role in local society, both as precious objects of exchange and as threatening cultural subjects exerting a disruptive influence over their captors’ social life. Focusing on the cultural vulnerability of slavers rather than in expressions of cultural resistance among African captives is an innovative way to highlight the transforming role played by slaves as social agents within every sector of colonial society in the Spanish Empire. As many colonial transcripts suggest, being a slave-trader in 17th-century Panama was a risky choice to make and my project looks into the rationale of this decision-making. Who were these people who made a living out of buying and selling human lives as if they were any other sort of good? How were their existences shaped by their experience of others’ captivity? How did they express their choices in their own logics of material consumption? How did those choices represent their own conceptions of freedom and social success? Without any doubt, the ruins of the humming colonial port-city of Panama, in which the ephemeral fortune of a few was conspicuously built upon the misery of others, constitute an ideal setting where to address these important issues in an archaeology of the modern world.

Maria Cristina Garcia

University of Texas at Austin, Anthropology

The Stolen Hour: Meeting Time, Talk and Social Cohesion in an Ixil Mayan Community

[ project summary ]

I will take an ethnography of speaking, discourse analytic approach to understanding the social processes through which the Grupo de Mujeres por la Paz, a community based organization of Ixil Mayan women in Guatemala, is constructing cohesion among its members. As long hours spent talking during meetings are the main activity that constitute this group, I will focus my analysis on the various types of talk occurring at these meetings. This study will contribute much needed understanding of how communities remake themselves after periods of genocide. Much has been written about the process of genocide as one which aims to destroy not only individuals but communities as well, but little work has been done examining the process of social reconstruction after the violence has lessened. Such an account would contribute not only to our general understanding of such social processes but would also challenge the dominant narrative within Guatemala that state sponsored violence has destroyed Mayan potential for building community. To the contrary, this work will show a Mayan community using a perceived shared history of violence as a basis of social cohesion as expressed through collective narratives told during group meetings. As such, this study adds a much needed data based, linguistic anthropological analysis to current literature examining the construction of historic memory. Through this project, I will demonstrate the application of the tools of the ethnography of speaking to questions of broader theoretical significance in anthropology rather than as primarily ethnographic and descriptive. As a result, this project will contribute not only to theoretical advancement in linguistic anthropology which can be applied to a wide array of social situations, but it will also deepen understandings of social processes underway in Guatemala.

James David Gibbon

Princeton University, Sociology

Sermons of the State: Religious Regulation and Islamic Sermons in Turkey

[ project summary ]

My dissertation will examine Islamic sermons in Turkey, where the avowedly secular government runs all public religious matters, from the training of imams to the management of more than 77,000 mosques. The state also produces the weekly sermons that are read nationwide during Friday prayers, with topics ranging from fasting to worship, from personal hygiene to human rights. My research aims to answer three main questions: (1) How does a country with a deeply entrenched secular ideology incorporate and propagate religion? (2) What expectations regarding citizenship, morality, and economic activity has the Turkish state communicated through its sermons, and how have these messages changed over time? (3) What factors determine whose interests get represented in the sermons? Drawing on textual analysis of sermons that span the history of the Turkish republic, interviews with state religious officials, and observations of sermon production committees, I aim to clarify the evolving relationship between religious and political spheres in modern Turkey.

Victor Goldgel Carballo

University of California, Berkeley, Literature

The Experience of the New: Argentine, Chile, and Cuba in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

[ project summary ]

The myriad of economic, political, and cultural transformations that took place in Latin American during the first decades of the nineteenth century have a trait in common that has not been studied in a systematic way: the fact that they were perceived as new. In other words, what kind of experience developed in tandem with these transformations? What were the conditions under which something could be perceived and represented as new? My project aims at an exploration of this experience of the new in two different contexts: the Southern Cone and Cuba. On the one hand, I will focus on texts produced by the “New Generation” (or “Generation of 1837”) in the River Plate and Chile. On the other hand, I will tackle the writings of those Cuban authors who gathered around the figure of Domingo del Monte in the decades of 1820 and 1830. I argue that their writings contain the clearest local precedents of a kind of modern experience that would gain weight and extension throughout the nineteenth century. In quantitatively and qualitatively different ways, these elites of the ’20s,’30s, and ’40s began to look away from the colonial, Christian, and Hispanic tradition in order to embrace patterns of thought and behavior that were characteristic of the ascending European bourgeoisies and their discourse of “progress”. Comparing these two regions, I will address, among others, the following problem: How are we to explain the fact that the liberal elite articulated a moderate discourse in relation to novelty in the more economically “modernized” territory of Cuba, whereas the young liberals of the Southern Cone –a comparatively “underdeveloped” region– produced texts characterized by a strong and open celebration of the new?

Joao Felipe Goncalves

University of Chicago, Anthropology

Nationalism and the City: Havana and Miami, 1959-1990

[ project summary ]

This project examines the intricate relationships between Cuban nationalism and the cityscapes of Havana and Miami in the three decades following the Cuban Revolution. In order to understand how the polarized conflict over the Cuban regime has been framed as a conflict between two cities – the “capital of the Revolution” and the “capital of the diaspora” – my project comparatively investigates how the revolutionary state and its supporters have inscribed their nationalistic project in Havana, how powerful groups of the Cuban diaspora have inscribed theirs in Miami, and how this process has constituted not only urban places, but also these nationalistic projects. To accomplish this, I will examine nationalistic practices and objects in both cities, divided into six categories: 1) monuments; 2) museums; 3) visual interventions (like murals, posters, billboards); 4) names of public spaces; 5) civic rituals; and 6) protests and manifestations. I will consider their transformation of the landscape, their relation to the urban environment, the ways in which they symbolically represent and narrate the Cuban nation, their sociological basis and relationship to hegemonic projects in both cities. This will be a multi-sited historical ethnography based on archival research, semi-structured interviews, and symbolic analysis of the urban landscape in both Havana and Miami. I will not only compare these cities, but understand them as part of one single field of conflict, since their nationalists constantly address and refer to each other and play a central role in the construction of each other’s identity. My work will use the Havana and Miami cases to help illuminate the understudied relationship between urban places and nationalism, by critically drawing from and putting into dialogue the interdisciplinary fields of urban studies and nationalism studies.

Miriam D. Gross

University of California, San Diego, History

Chasing Snails: Anti-Schistosomiasis Campaigns in the People's Republic of China

[ project summary ]

Using a case study approach, this study will unearth what really happened in the model 1956-59 Anti-Schistosomiasis campaign and determine its implications for current health crises. In addition, the repeated smaller schistosomiasis campaigns from 1959 to the present will also be explored to examine the trajectory of rural public health efforts from their height during the Mao Zedong era, to their increasing neglect in the current profit-oriented health system. The role science played through “scientific planning”, standardization, quantification, and attempts at instilling an experimental culture at the bottom level, and the wider issue of introducing and enacting modern science and Western health among a naive rural population will be the study’s primary focus.

Atreyee Gupta

University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Art History/Architecture

The Making of a Postcolonial Avant-Garde: Silpi Chakra and the Politics of Modern Art in India

[ project summary ]

Most studies on modern Indian art focus on artists’ oeuvres, isolating art from its larger social and cultural context. Seen through this framework, avant-garde art appears to be an esoteric, almost narcissistic, practice. In contrast, I argue that the avant-garde was so integral to the cultural politics of the Indian nation-state that an understanding of India’s post-Independence cultural modernity remains incomplete without an engagement with avant-garde art practices. Using the Silpi Chakra, a Delhi-based artists’ collective (established in 1948), as a lens, my dissertation will study the processes through which the avant-garde intervened in devising a cultural politics for post-Independence India while participating in the state’s politics of “non-alignment” during the Cold War. The Chakra is an ideal site for my research. The artists of this collective had originally been part of an anti-colonial art group in Lahore. With Partition in 1947, the Hindu artists of this group migrated to Delhi and subsequently formed the Chakra. Almost immediately, these artists actively involved themselves in building cultural institutions for the new nation-state. These activities will become a discursive site through which I aim to trace the development of institutions for the production, exhibition, and dissemination of art. This study will not only allow for an understanding of the extent to which avant-garde artists participated in nation-making but will also offer a history of the larger postcolonial public sphere within which the art collective operated. Simultaneously, the Chakra’s origin in Lahore will make it possible to explore the shared, but ignored, history of modern art in India and Pakistan. Opening my research to questions regarding nationality, citizenship, and identity, my dissertation will locate a nuanced genealogy of India’s postcolonial avant-garde. My dissertation will end with the disintegration of the collective in 1970s.

Laura-Zoe Anne Humphreys

University of Chicago, Anthropology and The Committee on Cinema and Media Studies

Films that Make you Think and the Return of Hollywood: Cuban Cinema Between the Socialist State and the Global Market

[ project summary ]

Revolutionary cinema is critical cinema: this has been the claim of Cuban film workers since the 1959 revolution. In the Enlightenment tradition, however, the social critic must be autonomous and self-determining. The autonomy of Cuban film workers has always been circumscribed by the socialist state. Article 39 of the Cuban constitution forbids artwork with counter-revolutionary content. All films must be approved for production and exhibition by the state’s cinema institution. But since the 1989 collapse of the Soviet bloc, Cuban film workers must also compete in the global market. They now depend on foreign revenues and producers for funding. The proposed research asks how Cuban film workers grapple with their lack of autonomy from both state and market. I ask how they define and experience the role of the intellectual in socialism, and how this is changing under the pressure of their new dependence on the market. This research will investigate how the social role and identity of Cuban film workers are shaped through their engagements with the socialist state and the global market, the changing values and beliefs of the professional Cuban film community, and the transition in Cuban film style from political modernism to stylistic features associated with Hollywood. I will participate in and observe film production, the training of film students, debates at official and informal gatherings of Cuban film workers, and film festival competition. I will interview Cuban film workers and state bureaucrats and conduct archival research of Cuban films. Cuba increasingly incorporates market forms, yet it remains wedded to socialism. My research will shed light on the role of Cuban film workers in shaping this local communist culture adrift in a globalizing world. It will examine how Cuban film workers use film to shape a public sphere of open debate within a socialist context.

Rebecca Carol Johnson

Yale University, Comparative Literature

Oriental and Occidental Tales: A Translational History of the Novel

[ project summary ]

This dissertation uses archival sources to bring two previously marginalized bodies of literature—the Oriental Tale in English and the novels of the Translation Movement in Arabic—to the center of their respective traditions and reads them together to create a transnational history of the novel. While most studies of the novel in Europe and the Middle East focus on their role in consolidating a national literature or domestic imaginary, this study instead centers on widely popular yet critically overlooked early novels that think and imagine beyond the nation: English novels that imagine the East and Arabic novels that imagine the West. That these early novels in both traditions were interested in foreignness should lead us to question the importance of the domestic in the constitution of the novel. Thus, this dissertation seeks to examine the function of foreignness, as both a trope and a structural necessity of the novel. By placing translation, circulation, and exchange at its methodological and analytical center, in both their figurative and material senses, this study will examine the ways in which the incorporation of foreign characters, settings, and narrative modes helped the novel to imagine not merely national communities but what one might call “translated” sympathetic and textual communities beyond these borders. These first novels, that is, imagined themselves within a global literary sphere and constructed a global sphere for their readers. This alternative history of the novel, therefore, hopes to emphasize the novel’s transnational origins as integral to its development, examining not just the circulation of the novel as a literary form but more importantly, the novel as a literary form constituted in and by circulation.

Alyson E. Jones

University of Michigan, Ethnomusicology/Music

Gendered Experiences? Assessing Women’s Music Performances in Tunisia

[ project summary ]

My research will focus on how popular and conservatory-trained female professional musicians assess their musical experiences, and on what it means to be a female professional musician in Tunisia today. I will work with female musicians active in popular music festivals and conservatories, the two contexts where they perform most prominently and publicly. Because the music festivals occur in the summer months and the conservatories are open between October and May, I will need to spend a full year in Tunisia: between September 2007 and August 2008. By working with musicians such as the popular singer Shadia Shaabene and Amina Srarfi, who founded and directs a music conservatory and all-female music ensemble, I hope to investigate women’s understandings of their gendered musical performances. My project will contribute to underserved fields of research such as studies of Tunisian popular music, detailed ethnographic studies of Arab women, and studies of women’s affective responses to music and their lived experiences as musicians.

Brent Zachary Kaup

University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology

(Un-)Binding Bolivia? Negotiating with "Nature" in an Age of Neoliberal Globalization

[ project summary ]

In an era of neoliberal globalization, natural resource extraction presents an intriguing paradox. As many of today’s transnational corporations are attempting to free themselves from the constraints of place, the fact that raw materials are held within, upon, and underneath the earth’s subsoil makes firms that extract them dependent upon place. While today’s transnational manufacturing firms are able to seek out the most profitable sites of production, nature’s reproductive capacities do not give extraction firms the same luxury of choice. As a result, firms engaging in processes of resource extraction must negotiate both the biophysical constraints of the resource and the material and social context of the place in which the resource is held. This study has two primary objectives: first, to explain how, in an era of neoliberal globalization, natural resource extraction – in this case of natural gas – affects the places from which it is extracted; and second, to analyze whether and in what ways the place-based aspects of natural resource extraction challenge existing power relations between transnational firms, states, and local communities. In the proposed research, I seek to reconstruct sociological theories of development, natural resource extraction, and neoliberal globalization through an extended case study of a previously unexplored context – the extraction, sale, and distribution of a highly ‘uncooperative’ commodity found in a geographically isolated location. I will analyze the struggles by local, national, regional, and transnational actors in Bolivia to control the benefits of natural gas extraction, exploring how they have worked and are working to restructure the political, economic, material, and environmental regulations governing access to the Bolivian subsoil, the infrastructure necessary to extract, transport, and process the natural gas, and the profits obtained from the natural gas.

Miriam Lynn Kingsberg

University of California, Berkeley, History

"Opium Modernity" in Early Twentieth-Century Dairen

[ project summary ]

My dissertation investigates the impact of the opium trade and culture on urban institution-building and the production of `modernity` in the Manchurian city of Dairen throughout the period of Japanese control (1905-1945). In the early twentieth century, Dairen presented itself as a consummately modern, Japanese colonial capital. Yet the city also constituted the world’s second-largest opium shipping and distribution port, and its residents consumed the highest per-capita volume of opium recorded in history. I seek to deconstruct the ways in which official efforts to both stimulate demand for the drug and conceal its effects influenced municipal and regional politics, the built environment, labor and the legitimate economy, the juridical system, public health and urban culture. I examine Dairen in both the pre-Manchukuo and Manchukuo eras in order to illuminate, through the lens of opium policy, change and continuity in political ideology, the economy, demography and culture. Through this project, I hope to contribute to the growing field of‘Manshu studies,` to highlight the salience of the opium trade in Japanese empire-building, and to return agency to Japanese and Chinese actors in this‘transnational` region. In broader terms, I aspire to increase our understanding of the early twentieth-century city, and to further efforts to integrate the study of the Japanese empire into global history.

Priya Lal

New York University, History

Villagization Revisited: Rural Development in Theory and Practice

[ project summary ]

My project will examine ujamaa villagization in late 1960s-early 1970s Tanzania with the intention of injecting historical contingency, popular agency, and an appreciation for discursive innovation into existing assessments of the program. The primary contribution of my research will be to challenge the notion that villagization was a one-sided, top-down process implemented by an omnipotent authoritarian state; I will show, rather, that rural “objects” of development often engaged with a variety of state actors to use official policy for their own political advancement and material gain. As such my work will contribute to a burgeoning but relatively thin historical literature on development policy and nationalism in postcolonial Africa, as well as offer evidence for a theorization of African state power that highlights process and interaction between multiple actors endowed with agency to influence each other. Furthermore, my project will analyze the creative ideological foundations underpinning villagization as policy, exploring connections between the Tanzanian state and other radical political projects internationally. My research will draw from a variety of sources including interviews with villagers and state officials in the Southeastern districts of Mtwara and Lindi, local and national archival materials, and newspaper accounts.

David M. Lansing

Ohio State University, Geography

Farming Carbon, Sequestering Livelihoods: The Dynamics of Carbon Markets in Costa Rican Indigenous Communities

[ project summary ]

Carbon markets provide a means for farmers to receive payments for practicing sustainable agriculture. As these markets expand into indigenous territories, questions arise as to the impact these markets will have on indigenous livelihoods, which often operate in a non-market context. While research on carbon markets indicates that this juxtaposition of indigenous livelihoods and market based payments is problematic, there has been little systematic research into how these markets are established among indigenous farmers or the changes that carbon sequestration payments catalyze. Using a variety of ethnographic and survey methods, I propose to investigate how indigenous farmers in Costa Rica’s Talamanca Indigenous Reserve were incorporated into a carbon market and the impact that monthly payments for carbon sequestration have on local patterns of property rights, labor relations, and land use. This research will focus on the roles of local and global stakeholders in the process of incorporating indigenous farmers into carbon markets, the forms of knowledge that were necessary for this process to occur, and the resulting changes in local social relations of production. This study will link issues of political ecology, a field concerned with the political economy of access to and distribution of resources to issues of technology, knowledge, and power that typifies research in science and technology studies. This will unify recent geographic research on the politics of nature, with more traditional concerns about the processes and extent of agrarian change.

Konrad Mitchell Lawson

Harvard University, History

Treason and the Reconstruction of Nation in East Asia, 1937-1951

[ project summary ]

My dissertation explores the processes of judicial, administrative, and extralegal political retribution against traitors in East Asia from 1937-1951 and the battles to define, delimit and control the bounds of treason in order to determine what role these struggles played in the reconstruction of nation in the aftermath of World War II. My project takes a comparative and transnational approach incorporating China, Korea and, in a much shorter contrastive epilogue, Japan. Through the use of representative case studies at the national, local, and historiographical level, I will attempt to show how the issue of treason came to play several highly important but often contradictory roles in the early postwar political struggles, influence competing conceptions of national identity, and build a historical narrative of the immediate past which attempted to account for the harrowing years of wartime and colonial occupation. In this way my dissertation will contribute to a growing body of research on political retribution in the aftermath of World War II in Europe, to our understanding of the huge social and political changes and conflicts in transwar and early postwar East Asia, as well as the continuing legacies of this issue in China and Korea today.

Kristina Marie Lyons

University of California, Davis, Anthropology

Science, Storytelling, and the Politics of Collaboration: Advocacy against Aerial Fumigation in Colombia

[ project summary ]

This research project examines the collaborations among local and translocal actors that focus on the possible negative impacts of aerial fumigation in Colombia. Locating myself in the southern department of Putumayo, I trace the testimonial stories produced by communities, the scientific evidence produced by epidemiologists, toxicologists and public health providers, and the witness narratives produced by humanitarian delegations as they create a field of action that they can share to document concerns about human health and rural landscapes. Recent anthropological work at the interface with science and technology studies examines the ways that information operates as an instrument of power, configuring access to knowledge, managing certainties and uncertainties, and influencing policy and decision making. I extend this analytic to ask how information is produced and mobilized in a context of impossibility where dominant aesthetics of secrecy pervade official realms and daily life. Colombia today is marked by the intense militarization of life and by humanitarian intervention to denounce violence. Among the latter, networks of collaboration are formed where actors, with distinct abilities, converge politically to turn their stories into truths that aim to disrupt official narratives about the harmlessness of fumigation. The capacity of these actors to translate their stories into a language of expertise with global reach is mediated by the interplay of very local and transnational power relations. The objective of this project is to study the relations of collaboration between different narratives and knowledges as they coalesce to produce information about the appearance of illness in bodies and soil. I seek to contribute to current studies that examine how competing global truths are produced and position people to survive the uncertainties of life under precarious conditions.

Lydia Wilson Marshall

University of Virginia, Anthropology

Fugitive Slave Communities: Group Formation and Economic Organization in the Coastal Hinterland of 19th-Century Kenya

[ project summary ]

This project centers on the archaeological investigation of settlements founded in 19th-century Kenya by people escaping slavery. Its goal is to delineate how fugitives’ positions as refugees from enslavement shaped the economic, social, and cultural organization of their villages. Specifically, I intend to contrast the cultural cohesion and economic strategies of fugitive slave groups with those of the local hinterland communities that neighbored them. Most broadly, this project will contribute to cross-disciplinary understandings of communities improvised under shifting power dynamics. By expanding the comparative perspective already fostered by fugitive slave archaeology in Mauritius, Brazil, the Caribbean, and the mainland U.S, this research will also promote cross-cultural understandings of slavery and slave resistance. Finally, like other recent studies of how slavery and the slave trade affected Africans remaining within Africa, my project aligns with a multidisciplinary effort to include the continent within African Diasporic studies.

Katharine Meehan

University of Arizona, Geography

Greywater and the Grid: Analyzing Wastewater Reuse in Tijuana

[ project summary ]

Public-private management of water has become increasingly common in cities around the world. New efforts to commodify and market wastewater, however, raise key questions in institutional change, political economy, and the role of informal wastewater reuse in communities located off the infrastructure grid. This dissertation project will examine how household greywater reuse transforms public-private efforts to reclaim wastewater in Tijuana, Mexico. Using ethnographic and geospatial modeling techniques, I will: 1) analyze the adaptive strategies, institutions, and recycling systems developed in greywater reuse; 2) model the potential reduction of available wastewater flows for public-private reclamation; and 3) examine the ways that greywater reuse provides political autonomy for off-grid communities and reconfigures public-private management. My research will show that greywater reuse constitutes an alternative economy, redefines the institutional dynamics and physical capacity of public-private reclamation, and improves local conditions of urban runoff and water quality. As Tijuana's wastewater transitions from an environmental "bad" into an economic "good," this research will elucidate institutional and equity challenges for public-private water management along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Hope C. Michelson

Cornell University, Appied Economics

Small Farmers and Big Retail: Nicaraguan Producers Operating in New Output Markets

[ project summary ]

My research collects and analyzes a unique household-level data set essential to the study of an important question: the economic impacts on Nicaraguan small farmers of the rapidly expanding market power of supermarket produce buyers. Though these new large-scale purchasers generally offer prices above the spot market, they commonly insist on higher levels of product conformity, quality or processing standards, as well as a higher minimum scale of transaction. In development economics, a prevailing hypothesis holds that the emergence of these new market institutions will raise rural living standards and benefit small farmers by increasing the market value of their agricultural production. Currently, however, there is little research to validate this conjecture. My analysis explores causal relationships between market participation and welfare for the first time, taking into account both the timing and extent of market participation and providing crucial evidence at the critical early stages of development. Building on existing studies by the Nicaraguan government, my project will generate proper longitudinal data matching market participation patterns over time to the evolution of household welfare indicators. These data allow me answer two related questions: First, What are the determinants of individual producer participation in supermarket marketing channels? Second, What impacts does participation have on household assets, incomes, and expenditures over time? This study addresses an issue of central importance in the changing context of world agriculture: can small-scale farmers benefit from new markets evolving amid globalization, or will these producers become casualties in this global process?

Oriol Mirosa

University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology

The Global Water Regime, National Water Policy, and Social Movements in Bolivia and South Africa

[ project summary ]

My research project will explore how what I call the current global water regime - a relatively coherent set of norms and rules about how water should be managed promoted by global institutions – operates. Specifically, it seeks to study the interrelations between the global water regime, national and local water policy, and social movement activity in the water sector, through the analysis of the cases of Bolivia and South Africa. In order to do that, my research will take the form of a multi-sited ethnography (complemented with semi-structured interviews and the analysis of printed materials) which will proceed in three stages of four months each starting in August 2007. The first stage will take me to Bolivia, where I will investigate the implementation of new water policies congruent with the global water regime by a government committed to neoliberal reforms, as well as the massive social movement protests that opposed these policies. The second stage will take place in South Africa. There, I will analyze how a government committed to the defense of the social and economic rights of its citizens also adopted neoliberal water policies, and how it attempts to make these seemingly contradictory sets of policy compatible. I will also explore the form and functioning of the significant degree of popular opposition to the new water policies in the country, even if they are less widespread than those in Bolivia. Finally, the last stage of my research will explore the inner workings of the global water regime itself. In this stage I will study the main actors in the global water regime, including international organizations, transnational corporations, and international NGOs. Due to the geographical dispersion of these actors, this phase will entail telephone and internet interviews, as well as in person meetings and attendance to conferences whenever possible.

Laura M. Moulton

Brown University, History

The Cultural and Political Legacies of the Anglo-Irish War in England, 1916-1939

[ project summary ]

My dissertation will examine the variety of ramifications of the Anglo-Irish War and Irish independence on British and especially English society and culture throughout the 1920s and 1930s. I contend that this episode should be interpreted as the first decolonization and that it sheds light on the debate over the impact of empire on Britain. Using a variety of personal and organizational papers as well as memoirs, testimony, and published sources, I will investigate how the breaking off of Ireland fits into the construction of a new model of English self-sufficiency. My project will focus on four key groups--English activists, Irish immigrant nationalists, English soldiers, and tourists--and will center on the following questions: How was Ireland transformed from a battleground into a pastoral ideal for English tourists, and how did that ideal fit with the contemporary romanticizatioon of English rural life? What lasting impressions did ordinary English soldiers bring back with them from service in Ireland? Why did English and Anglo-Irish people become involved in Irish pressure groups and how did that commitment affect their later careers? To what extent did nationalist and republican organizations active in England provide a focus for immigrant culture and politicization, and how did that minority culture fit into the larger society? Through these complicated human stories, located at various points along the fissure opening up between Britain and Ireland, I argue that it is possible to demonstrate the intimate connection between these two countries and the very personal violence of their political dissolution. Furthermore, I hypothesize that the political and culture patterns set by that dissolution are essential to understanding the strange mixture of violence abroad and apathy at home that characterized so much of Britain's post-1945 decolonizing experience.

Alexander M. Nading

University of Wisconsin, Madison, Anthropology

Dengue in the Landscape: Waste Management and Disease Ecologies in Urban Nicaragua

[ project summary ]

In the past year, public health authorities in Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua have begun using dump trucks and megaphones to stop the spread of dengue fever. In targeted campaigns, doctors, garbage collectors, and community members exhort homeowners to discard the piles of garbage in their homes. They warn that dengue-carrying mosquitoes breed in the pools of rainwater that form in these piles, adding that there is neither a cure nor an effective vaccine for dengue. The anti-dengue campaigns have brought waste and the urban landscape to the forefront of local health discourse. But although they were conceived by local people, the campaigns have not created a consensus among the residents about how to stop dengue from spreading. Instead, they have aggravated social divisions among health workers, city garbage collectors, and the garbage scavengers who survive by collecting items in streets and neighborhood dumps and selling them to recycling companies. These divisions have arisen not over how to define disease, but over how to foster community participation in public health, how to manage space, and how to balance resources and hazards on the landscape. In short, they are about the human role in disease ecology. Halting the spread of infectious diseases is now a major international health priority, but there exist few studies of how people in marginalized urban communities exchange and deploy knowledge about these diseases. My study of waste management in Ciudad Sandino will ask how actors explain disease ecology by drawing not only on biomedical categories but also on everyday experiences with dengue in the landscape. This research will provide a practice-based study of how citizens blend biomedical and experiential knowledge into historically and politically situated disease ecologies.

Lisa A. Onaga

Cornell University, Science & Technology Studies

Crafting the Silkworm: Tracing Japan's Science of Selective Breeding

[ project summary ]

This dissertation examines how a biological research organism played an important role scientifically, economically, and culturally in East Asia. Historical analysis of silkworm breeding in Japan allows the study of a critical yet understudied aspect of Japanese experimental biology: the relationship between silk manufacture and the emergence of modern Japanese genetics. I intend to research the development of Japanese genetic expertise concerning the rationalization of silkworm reproduction from the 1880s through the 1920s as silk became one of Japan’s most valuable export products. The silkworm, normally associated with family farms, emerged as an exemplary research organism and site of contestation as craftspeople, industrialists, and scientists sought to improve qualities of silk. As Japanese biologists investigated silkworm heredity, the tendency to explain society with genetics gained currency within their scientific community, adding uniquely to policy discussions, such as critiques of education spent on people with “inferior” heredities, to claims of equal genetic diversity shared by Japanese and American people in order to protest the exclusionary 1924 U.S. immigration act. I will explore how the genetic standardization of silkworm varieties interacted with the household craft of silkworm breeding in Japan and how expertise about heredity was tested and applied not only to silkworms but also to humans. In particular, I aim to reconstruct the history of the scientific manufacture of F1 (first generation) hybrid silkworms, and the social changes surrounding the adoption of hybrid silkworm eggs by silk farmers. The F1 hybrid silkworm is a result of selective breeding experimentation, a technique initially developed by scientist Toyama Kametaro (1867-1918). I will specifically compare the Japanese language technical and non-technical writings of silkworm scientists such as Toyama, along with their English publications.

Kayla Price

University of Texas at Austin, Anthropology

In School but Not of It: Challenging Social Structures through Kuna-Language Education

[ project summary ]

My dissertation project focuses on the development of Kuna – Spanish bilingual education in Panama after government funding was approved for national bilingual education programs in 2005. This research has two foci: the way in which the program is being conceived by educators and community members ideologically, and the way that language use in the classroom is producing and reproducing language ideologies. In order to address these two research questions, I will conduct interviews, do participant-observation and record classroom discourse in three different Kuna schools over the course of 20 months. This research will is supported by theoretical bases from linguistic anthropology, anthropology of education and indigenous cultural politics, and relies on tools offered by conversation analysis, the discourse-centered approach and critical discourse analysis. Utilizing these research strategies, my project seeks to document the process of developing an indigenous language education program in a postcolonial context in order to obtain a complex understanding of how languages ideologies and educational programs work in tandem.

Pilar Karen Rau

New York University, Anthropology

Capitalist Relations: Kinship, Tourist Art, and Trade Networks in an Extended Andean Community

[ project summary ]

Cochas Chico is a Peruvian peasant community whose members want, in their words, to “progress” and “modernize” –but what exactly does that mean? According to some Cochasinos “modernity” has come to Cochas, but occasionally leaves as well. This case is particularly interesting as many Cochasinos want their children to be “professionals” instead of peasants and, as is the case in other Andean communities, vehemently eschew the idea of their indigenousness, a state-of-being they locate in the past; yet their chosen vehicle to capitalist modernity reproduces rural Andean culture through its idealized depictions, collective kin-based mode of production, and link to national folkloric history. This project examines how and why a geographically-dispersed cooperating network of actors who identify as members of a peasant community reproduce their families and peoplehood and pursue their goals of transforming themselves into “modern” people, through the collective production of symbols of rural peasant identity. It also asks how cosmopolitan and national discourses of indigeneity and neoliberalism affect local constructions of collective identity, reproductive strategies, and goals. To investigate these questions, it is necessary to study Cochasinos’ practices of social reproduction, economic strategies, goals and understandings of their activities, and their participation in and understanding of discourses that interpellate peasants and artisans.

Jason Ritchie

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Anthropology

The Logic of the Checkpoint: Queer Palestinians, the Israeli State, and the Politics of Passing

[ project summary ]

I propose to conduct an ethnography of the Israeli state from the perspective of queer Palestinians who live in and travel to Israel, which they experience with a profound sense of ambivalence that challenges the tendency to view the conflict in absolute terms. Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork in Jerusalem, my research will focus specifically on queer Palestinians' encounters with the state, which are marked by complicated processes of reading—and being read against—discourses about who does and does not belong in the nation. In so doing, my research will explore the crucial and sometimes incongruous roles of sexuality and race in the efforts of the state to construct and police the (real and imagined) boundaries that contain its citizens and exclude its “others.” While grounded in the local context of Israel-Palestine, my research will interrogate, not only how we think about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the perceived conflict between “the West” and “the Arab World.” At a moment when the exclusion of Arabs and the inclusion of queers have both become important tools for advancing the myth of Western superiority, the experiences of queer Palestinians in Israel offer a revealing lens onto the fundamental contradictions of liberal nationalism—in Israel and beyond—and the ways in which those contradictions play out in everyday encounters with the state and create opportunities for various actors both to resist and to reproduce the governing logic of nationalism.

Daniel Brett Rood

University of California, Irvine, History

Transnational Industrial Slavery in the Atlantic World, 1835-1868

[ project summary ]

Test My work uncovers a significant, but overlooked feature of the industrial revolution: an industrial slave economy that linked diverse areas of the Atlantic World. Strung together by railroads, steamships, canals, and telegraphs, slave-exploiting industries from Havana, Matanzas and Rio de Janeiro to Richmond, Baltimore and Durham constituted a system of transnational industrial slavery that has not been covered in the scholarship on slavery in the Atlantic world. I analyze this element of the mid-nineteenth-century world economy by looking at the commercial interactions among slave-exploiting industrial concerns such as iron works, flour and sugar mills and tobacco manufacturers in Cuba, the United States and Brazil. In spite of the fact that their respective national historiographies have discussed them in isolation from one another, these slave-exploiting industries were shipping millions of dollars’ worth of milled flour, manufactured tobacco products, steam engines, refined sugar, railroad hardware and other manufactures within a transnational network of slave-centered economies. Thus a seemingly anomalous picture comes into focus: some of the more profitable industrial enterprises of the nineteenth century, tied to the advanced technological apparatus of steam-powered locomotives and ships, exemplify the modernizing mid-nineteenth century global economy. This growth, however, was grounded in slave labor. While examining a number of different, interlocking industries, my study focuses particular attention on the counterpoint between the important slave-operated sectors of the U.S. iron industry and the Cuban sugar/railroad complex. This element of the wider system of transnational industrial slavery constituted a crucial aspect of Cuba’s changing position between empires, and encourages us to rethink the place of slavery in the mid-nineteenth century industrial boom in the Atlantic world.

Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl

Yale University, Political Science

Dynamics of Civil Wars

[ project summary ]

What leads armed groups to continue fighting, even in the face of extensive attempts at negotiated settlements or imposed military solutions? The rich information available on armed group activities in conflicts contrasts with few systematic explanations of this behavior. Yet, systematic models fail to account for the environment in which armed groups operate in explaining their actions. My dissertation proposes a new theory of the dynamics of civil war duration and termination that combines the systemic with in-depth knowledge of conflict. How actors benefit from opportunities that exist only during conflict explains duration and termination of conflict. Actors exploit opportunities during wartime which are unique in that they are outside the set of all possible peacetime allocations. Wars continue when, conditional on survival, actors remain able to exploit these opportunities. I investigate this theory through field research on the Lebanese Civil War, 1975-1990, that gathers information using parallel qualitative and quantitative strategies. I will conduct extensive interviews with leaders and members of armed groups and civilians to assess the theory’s implications about actors’ motivations and beliefs. I will also collect a database on armed groups to use in statistical panel analyses to assess the theory’s ability to explain the dynamics of conflict. I choose to research Lebanon because the multiple dimensions of warfare and political issues at play allow me to examine in one conflict what would researchers would have to explore in many separate conflicts. I also place the Lebanese Civil War within the universe of civil wars so that I can set scope conditions on the empirical results. This research design and its results fit into a larger research program that aims to generate and test a better theory of the dynamics of civil wars that can explain outcomes during conflict and their effects on the post-conflict situation.

Perrin A. Selcer

University of Pennsylvania, History & Sociology of Science

Designing a World Community: Science at Unesco, 1946-1973

[ project summary ]

My work explores the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (Unesco) attempt to use technical expertise to construct a peaceful and prosperous world community during the quarter-century following World War II. This was the period in which the institutional structures and functional norms of the modern international community were formed, and I analyze the reciprocal relationship between institutional structures and technical knowledge. My dissertation integrates historical research in archival and published primary sources with a rich interdisciplinary secondary literature to investigate the evolving role of science at Unesco. In the wake of WWII, Unesco’s founders intended the organization to marshal the objectivity of the scientific method to produce universal, value-neutral truths that transcended cultural and geographic boundaries to reveal the unity of mankind and thus provide the cultural foundation for a lasting peace. The pressures of the Cold War, decolonization, and the emergent imperative of international economic development transformed the organization’s mission. I focus on four scientific programs to analyze the effects of decolonization and the Cold War on Unesco’s programs and practices, and to assess how these historical processes shaped science in the international community. I explore how international organizations and experts framed problems so that they required technical intervention from the international community; how the institutional matrix of universities, research institutions, foundations, and state bureaucracies was reconfigured by Unesco’s and the United Nations’ activities; and how science and society were transformed when a traditionally European knowledge system was exported around the world.

Sara Smith

University of Arizona, Geography

Embodied Histories: Women, Religion and Family Decisions in Leh, Ladakh, India

[ project summary ]

The fertility of the female body is at the intersection of electoral democracy and identity politics: when political actors bring demographic competition between “communities” into discussions of political control, do political concerns begin to inform individual and family choices made in regard to family planning? My research examines life histories in India to determine whether such discourses and debates affect personal and family decisions, and whether and in what way decisions are reframed in explicitly political terms in the Leh district of Jammu and Kashmir State, India. The population in Leh district is split between Buddhists and Muslims. In my dissertation research, I will begin from these questions: 1) What marriage and family choices are Ladakhis making, what are the factors behind those choices, and how does this compare with their parents’ and grandparents’ choices? 2) How do private motivations and decisions compare to their public representation? 3) To what degree are families of Buddhists and Muslims actually interrelated, and if so, to an increasing or decreasing degree? I will use a multi-method ethnographic approach to examine how political narratives and changing conceptions of identity and the state affect spouse selection and family planning decisions in Leh. I will combine extensive survey work on marriage and fertility decision-making with in-depth life history interviews on individual choices. My research will culminate in community-based ethnographies incorporating local participation and reflection on historical trends and the community histories embedded in family genealogies. With this three-pronged methodology, I will address the choices being made today (surveys); how those choices are interpreted by individuals reflecting on their own lives (interviews); and how discourses of Buddhist/Muslim interrelatedness and difference are produced and contested (reflexive community-based ethnographies).

Rania Kassab Sweis

Stanford University, Anthropology

Islam and the Gendered Politics of Youth in Contemporary Egypt

[ project summary ]

In recent years, “youth” have emerged as a major social force in new ways in contemporary Egypt. From the state apparatus to religious institutions, to a network of transnational and non-governmental organizations, youth is an ever-expanding domain for competing regimes of power aimed at the normalization of young “lumpen” (Wickham 2002) Egyptians viewed, by some, as a potential socio-political hazard. I research the subtle and complex slippages between “youth at risk” and “youth as a risk” in Egypt from a historical and anthropological perspective. I ask: How are “youth” and “danger” associated with each other in particular socio-political circumstances? In Egypt, danger can take on various forms and embodiments including criminality, unemployment, immorality or "radical" Islam. How and why are youth both “threatened” and “threatening” to the established order? It is this doubling or ambiguous threat and promise associated with “youth” and its social significations in Egypt that this project seeks to understand. I seek to denaturalize the category youth through a historical re-examination of its naturalized boundaries in the context of Egypt. I explore the social dynamics through which specific kinds of youth are produced. I ask how economic circumstances, the family, gender and institutions play a vital role in the emergence of new discourses on youth following Sadat’s open-door (infitah) policies established in the early 1970’s and the successive Islamization or religious radicalization of Egypt’s public domain. Historians of Egypt have shown how strategic demography and the “youth threat” have constituted an ineluctable concern for colonizing powers since the 19th century. This research asks what a robust focus on youth at this moment enables, and for whom. How do current concerns and interventions into youth differ from those of the colonial past?

Eren Murat Tasar

Harvard University, History

Muslim Life in Central Asia, 1943-1985

[ project summary ]

The period from World War II to the rise of Gorbachev witnessed a unique historical interaction between Islam and Soviet Communism in Central Asia. While the nature of state control over religion changed and gradually become more relaxed, political and economic stability improved the quality of life across the region. Many Central Asian Muslims developed bonds of identify and loyalty to the Soviet state and some aspects of Communism. The conditions engendered by Soviet social and political policies created new possibilities for the emergence of a Soviet Central Asian Islamic culture. For this reason, it is necessary to examine the relations between the state on the one hand, and legally registered and illegal networks of Islamic education on the other, within the broader context of the complex interaction of Muslim communities with Soviet Communism. This dissertation will question how the Soviet party-state and Muslim communities engaged one another, and thereby challenge the consensus of much past scholarship that the relationship of Central Asian Muslims to the Soviet state was marked exclusively by resistance.

Tariq Thachil

Cornell University, Government

The Saffron Wave Meets the Silent Revolution: Poor People's Hindu Nationalism in India

[ project summary ]

Under what conditions will a conservative party representing elite interests be able to win the mass support required to succeed in democratic politics? This problem is especially salient in developing regions where because most citizens are poor, conservative parties face the difficult tasks of having to win over low income electorates without alienating their elite support base. In this project, I examine how the party of the Hindu elite in India, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has managed this political balancing act effectively. I challenge wisdom in both comparative party scholarship and South Asian studies, which suggest that vertical patron-client networks and religious nationalism have been the primary mechanisms for parties like the BJP to achieve such success with poor voters. Instead, I employ both statistical and qualitative methodologies to explore the party’s use of an innovative strategy based on linkages with civil society groups working in health and education provision to mobilize support among lower income Hindus. My research design exploits the tremendous variation in the social policy performances of Indian states to test the validity of my argument. My hypothesis expects the BJP to be most successful with poor voters where both the government and autonomous civil society groups have been most negligent in addressing their social needs, creating a void for the BJP and its organizational affiliates to fill. This argument helps problematize previous conceptualizations of civil society groups as distinct from the sphere of partisan politics. Further, both the strategies I argue the BJP employs, and the electoral success it enjoys, are paralleled by the experiences and tactics of political Islamic groups like Hamas. Thus, my project helps to highlight the empirical check the experiences of poor democracies offer to extending the conclusions of studies of industrialized European polities regarding the demise of socially active parties.

Charlotte Marie Walker

Yale University, History

Negotiating the State: Entrepreneurship, Bureaucracy, and Corruption in Late Colonial and Independent Cameroon, 1940-1970.

[ project summary ]

My dissertation examines the growth of the Cameroonian colonial state and the highly complex forms of bureaucratic navigation that emerged in tandem with it through the interactions of local African entrepreneurs with state bureaucracy. This study will investigate the burgeoning power of the state from the late colonial era through independence (1940 to 1970) and bring the increasingly entrepreneurial and persistent African underclass into the history of modern Africa. This project addresses everyday state-building, the formation of a public sphere, and colonial and postcolonial governmentality. It also examines the history of the imposition physical, mental, and moral boundaries on the individual and its role in changing ideas of identity formation, and self-rule. Overall, it is a study of the evolution of corruption and its corollaries in civil and political life. Understanding the evolution, philosophy, and everyday practice of bureaucracy and corruption in developing countries is key to reform. Examining the late colonial period in Cameroon provides background to the development of bureaucratic and administrative hierarchies under imperial rule. Bringing the research into the contemporary period demonstrates the endurance of imperial administrative mechanisms and the transformation of ideas surrounding governance and corruption during independence.

Mari Kathryn Webel

Columbia University, History

Locating the Laboratory: German Tropical Medicine and Sleeping Sickness Research in East Africa, 1898-1914

[ project summary ]

My dissertation explores the history of German tropical medicine in European and African contexts, focusing on sleeping sickness research before WWI. The sleeping sickness epidemic, which began in 1898 and resulted in the deaths of at least 300,000 people in the Lake Victoria basin before the 1914, had a dramatic and irrevocable impact on both the lives of local Africans and the development of imperial public health agendas. I examine how research expeditions in East/Central Africa, jointly sponsored by tropical medicine institutions and European governments, were related according to changing scientific, cultural, and political circumstances. Specifically, I analyze the impact of microbiological laboratory and fieldwork practices, local European and African cultural contexts, and global social and political imperatives on the production of knowledge about sleeping sickness. The project demonstrates the importance of collegiality, collaboration, and rivalry in shaping research agendas, determining investigative practices, and building professional careers. Applying transnational and comparative methodologies to new sources, I examine together sleeping sickness research in Europe and Africa, building on historical analyses of imperial rivalry and cooperation as well as established histories and anthropologies of public health and the life sciences. This project therefore departs from previous historical scholarship that has focused largely on national styles of scientific research, impacts of imperial medicine, isolated scientific biographies, and histories of Africa focused on colonial boundaries to establish a transnational history of public health.

Kirsten A. Weld

Yale University, History

Of Terror, Power, and the Archive: The Implications of Discovering Guatemala's National Police Records

[ project summary ]

My dissertation uses the recent unearthing of Guatemala's long-hidden National Police archives -- at 75 million pages, the largest secret state document discovery in Latin American history -- as an entry point into an examination of the country's postwar politics. I explore how the weak Guatemalan state, barely able to even provide basic survival necessities for much of its population, struggles to manage this unprecedented amount of evidence pertaining to its past abuses, and how popular narratives of the war years are adapted and reconstructed based on this windfall of new information. Concepts like "truth," "memory," and "reconciliation" are highly contested in postbellum Guatemala, and hence these police archives have the potential to destabilize the country's uneasy postwar status quo, wherein war survivors continue to protest the state's amnesiac attitude toward its brutal counterinsurgency efforts and its utter failure to prosecute war criminals. Moreover, existing attempts to grapple with the legacies of the 36-year armed conflict have predominantly focused on the military and the countryside, leaving the urban theatre of the war and the police's surgical, political repression profoundly understudied. I combine historical research on the police with participant observation and ethnographic analysis of the government's archival recovery project, a controversial and much-criticized effort to build publicly accessible archives from the heaps of moldy and disordered papers that currently fill the discovery site. Using a combination of historical and anthropological methods, my dissertation makes two main interventions: it takes some of the first steps toward writing the police and the capital city back into the history of Guatemala's civil war, and it also tracks how Guatemalans themselves fold this new knowledge afforded by the police archives into their local and national understandings of wartime, memory politics, and post-conflict transitions.

Sarah Ann Wells

University of California, Berkeley, Literature

"Modernism and the Problem of History: Brazil, Argentina, and the US in the 1930s"

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This comparative project explores how works by the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges (Evaristo Carriego, Historia universal de la infamia, Ficciones), the Brazilian essayist Gilberto Freyre (Sobrados e mucambos) and the Brazilian novelist Graciliano Ramos (São Bernardo, Angustia) position themselves with respect to contemporaneous debates on history and historiography during the 1930s in Argentina and Brazil. Reading these works as modernist historiographies, I argue that they reflect simultaneously on the content and the form of history writing, examining what happens when history becomes aesthetic. In the context of a volatile decade of political, social and economic crises, these works both share and depart from the reigning imperative to rethink the past, particularly the nineteenth century. At the same time, they warn us against the dangers of simplistic periodizations of the 1930s. Through the comparative study of archival material on historical discourse available in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Recife I will focus my research on the debates over historical interpretation taking place in essays, history books, and journals across the ideological and aesthetic spectrum, including Claridad, El hogar, and La nación (in Argentina); and Lanterna verde, Dom Casmurro, and the Revista Acadêmica (in Brazil). In order to compare these to the fictions and essays of my core group of writers, I will examine key terms on historiography and tropes of historical engagement. In particular, I am interested in how writers figured historical change, rupture, crisis, and tradition, in such a way that might challenge contemporary periodizations. I suggest, therefore, that the problems of historicity and context that preoccupied these writers are also problems the scholar must face when examining their works. My larger dissertation project will also include a third comparative angle, that of the US, and in particular the works of William Faulkner.

James Richard Williams

Johns Hopkins University, Anthropology

Negotiating Patronage: Economic Survival and Comradeship among Former Liberian Child Soldiers in Cape Town

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The project is an ethnographic study of the daily lives of Liberian youth who were participants in the civil war in Liberia and who, following disarmament in 2004, migrated and settled in Cape Town, South Africa. The aim of the project is to examine the nature of their economic activities as migrant youth and their strategies of survival in a fast-changing city recently characterized as hostile to foreign migrants. I focus on their uses and imaginations of resources and relationships to do so, tracing how young Liberians cultivate ties with patrons in Cape Town to secure economic opportunity, and how they share resources among each other to mark connections of loyalty, friendship, and comradeship. Taking seriously the forces that constitute Liberian youth in Cape Town – their pasts as child soldiers, the networks they are tied into that allow them to enter the shadow economy, their alleged association with the occult – I look at the ways Liberian formulations of patron-client relationships, which gained fresh meanings for child combatants in a context of war, are recreated in a different social and economic milieu. My project takes account of the agency of narratives (particularly the crafting of categories of friend, enemy, and comrade within that crucible), structural conditions (of being at an edge of economic success even though that success is denigrated on grounds of a reliance upon occult powers), and a locality (how Liberian youth appear in the eyes of Cape Town, which speaks as much to particularity of Cape Town in the post-Apartheid era as it does to Liberian experiences of it) in which to better theorize children’s agency in situations of political and economic uncertainty. By examining patronage, I will interrogate the conditions of possibility for children’s agency and investigate how lives are lived under the threat of vulnerability.

Yuan Yuan

Duke University, Religion

Religion, Gender, and the Public Sphere: The Revival of Female Buddhist Monasticism in Post-Socialist China--A Case Study of the Pushou Nunnery on Mount Wutai

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In the last two decades, China has experienced a large-scale religious revival, both within the popular religious sphere and within such institutionalized religions as Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, and Islam. One striking aspect of China’s religious boom is the rapid development of a female Buddhist movement. My dissertation project systematically investigates the rise of the female monastic movement in contemporary China by studying a community of nuns and laywomen at the Pushou Nunnery (Nunnery of Universal Life) on the sacred mountain Wutai, an area that has been critically important in the development of Chinese and other Asian Buddhisms, and the site of a contemporary Buddhist revival. The key questions driving this study are: how has the contemporary Buddhist revival in China changed Buddhist women’s role in Chinese society, and how have women simultaneously transformed Buddhism in the process of Buddhist modernization and globalization? In my dissertation, I draw upon Jürgen Habermas’s formulation of the “public sphere,” which he defines as a realm mediating between the state and the conjugal family (Habermas 1989), and at the same time I address the limits of his theory: i.e., he ignores women’s agency and regards religion as a private activity (Fraser 1992; Zaret 1992). I will contend that convents such as the Pushou Nunnery constitute an alternative public sphere, where Chinese women can be free from the discrimination and marginalization they experience in mainstream, male-dominated society, and where they can exercise leadership, develop educational institutions, participate in political debates, and conduct philanthropic work.

Sarah Zukerman Daly

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Political Science

Achieving Post-War Peace: The Internal Politics of Colombia’s Demilitarizing Rebel and Paramilitary Groups

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This project seeks to understand why post-war armed organizations endure, go out of business or shift to a new sector (legal politics, crime) and why ex-combatants either return to violence or successfully reintegrate into civilian life. To explain this variation, Political Science offers macro-level theories and micro-level empirics, but nothing in between. A major advance in the study of conflict and peace would come from filling this gap and theory-building at the organizational level. Through in-depth analysis of demilitarization processes in Colombia, this study aims to develop a theory of the post-war insurgent firm and its ex-combatant employees. It proposes that an individual’s likelihood of reintegration depends not on the variables identified by pre-war recruitment theory, but on the individual's relationship to ex-combatant networks and the post-conflict trajectory of his/her armed group. This trajectory, in turn, is hypothesized to be a function of the armed organization’s endowment, adaptability and preferences. The project will employ a multi-method approach. First, it will conduct in-depth interviews with experts on each Colombian rebel and paramilitary organization. Second, it will field an individual-level survey of 1000 ex-combatants and civilians and third, it will realize ethnographic case studies in Bogotá and Medellín. The study’s organizational focus solves several weaknesses in the macro literature, namely the assumption of semblance between pre- and post-war peace and the methodology of testing sub-national dynamics with country-level data. The organizational focus also solves problems in the micro literature, specifically its treatment of ex-combatants as independent agents, rather than as embedded in a dense web of ex-insurgents and armed institutions which structure their decisions to demobilize and reintegrate.

About the SSRC

The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) is an independent, international, nonprofit organization founded in 1923. It fosters innovative research, nurtures new generations of social scientists, deepens how inquiry is practiced within and across disciplines, and mobilizes necessary knowledge on important public issues.