International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) > Competitions

2008 IDRF Program

Recipients

Matthew Amengual

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Political Science

The Politics of Labor and Environmental Regulation in Argentina: Constructing State-Society Relations for Effective Implementation

[ project summary ]

Under what conditions do governments effectively implement labor and environmental regulations? Exploring sub-national variation in Argentina, I will test the connection between state-society relations and effective regulation. Protecting workers and the environment from the often negative effects of the market economy has, and continues to be, a challenge to both advanced industrialized and developing countries. My hypothesis is that for regulators to be effective, they must have the pressure from groups on both sides—those for and against regulation—and the state must manage this pressure in a way to carve out space for flexible administration of the law. I will examine a two step causal sequence to engendering effective labor regulation. The first stage of the causal sequence is the way bureaucracies and civil society associations are structured, which are the roots of variation in state-society relations. In the second stage of causation, I will then test how different constellations of state-society relations affect policy implementation. To test these causal relationships, I will conduct matched pair comparisons of provinces that share similar industries but vary in the structure of associations and bureaucracies. In addition to this small-N comparison, which is necessary due to the paucity of data and for identifying causal mechanisms, I will conduct written surveys of front line bureaucrats and associations in a large number of provinces to determine if the relationships found in the matched pair comparisons hold broadly. Finally, I will tie these relationships to actual outcomes on working conditions (such as accidents) and environmental pollution, determining which constellations of state-society relations are conducive to better social and environmental protection. Ultimately, this research will contribute to scholarly understanding of the politics of policy implementation and offer lessons for designing institutions to lead to more effective environ

Alessandro Angelini

City University of New York Graduate Center, Anthropology

The Production of Urban "Knowledges:" The Favelas of Rio de Janeiro as Sites of Intervention

[ project summary ]

This field research project explores the interface between favelas, or shantytowns, and a range of state, civil-society, and private actors in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. How does residents’ knowledge figure into that of experts? How do these brokers translate knowledge into politics? How do representations of favelas figure into a vision of Rio and cities more generally? The two phases of my research are trans-regional in different, complementary ways. The first phase, while intensively situated in place, aims nonetheless to speak to how local experience becomes a transnational, and often commodified, form of knowledge. I will learn the rules and imaginative contours of a role-playing game enacted by favela children in a miniature world of their own making. In so doing, I may better evaluate the interface between their experiences and the representations that NGO workers, visual media producers, and tourists construct of them. In the second phase, my work will center on knowledge transmission in a transnational context. The Favela-Bairro slum-upgrading project involves a massive production of knowledge about favelas, but I will suggest that this expertise does not travel exclusively ‘up’ the bureaucratic hierarchy to the project’s patron sponsor, the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington. Instead, I will trace the relational linkages and disjunctures in an abandoned venture between a Rio architect and developers in Dharavi, the largest slum in Mumbai. The objective of this research is to explore the gaps and unrealized possibilities within the process of knowledge circulation and thereby unsettle normative assumptions about transnationalization as a fluid and inevitable progression towards integration. Taken together, the two components of my research will problematize and seek to temper the increasingly declarative tones of both alarmist and rehabilitative discourses about urban slums today.

Avraham Astor

University of Michigan, Sociology

Multicultural Celebration or Unwelcome Intrusion? The Politics of Mosque Construction in Spain

[ project summary ]

This study analyzes the processes leading to the presence or absence of opposition to mosque construction in Spain. Specifically, it seeks to explain why there has been such strong opposition to mosque construction in the northeast region of Catalunya relative to other regions. I examine this question through four in-depth case studies, two of which concern recent failed attempts to establish mosques in the province of Barcelona, Catalunya, and two of which concern recent successes with establishing mosques in the province of Malaga, Andalucia. I utilize semi-structured interviews and written materials to gather data on these cases, and I employ discourse and relational analyses to explain the variation in outcomes in my settings of focus. Discourse analysis allows me to illuminate the dominant categories and tropes that characterize mosque debates, while relational analysis allows me to situate such debates within the broader social contexts and institutional matrices in which they operate. I also plan to devote specific attention to how public debates have shifted with key events, such as the Madrid bombings, which have altered current understandings of mosques, and Muslim presence more generally. This study makes an important contribution to our understanding of the integration of Muslims in Spain, and in Europe more generally, as well as broader debates on multiculturalism, immigrant incorporation, and the construction and maintenance of symbolic boundaries.

Felicity Aulino

Harvard University, Anthropology

Transforming Death, Transforming Society: Palliative Caregiving Networks in Thailand

[ project summary ]

The burgeoning Thai palliative care movement brings to the fore medical, moral, and political issues at stake locally and globally. Currently coalescing in the domain of palliative care in Thailand are hospital accreditation demands, growing dissatisfaction with the overuse of heroic technologies at the end of life, and an activist “Engaged Buddhist” network that takes end-of-life as a tool for enhancing individual spirituality and sparking overarching social change. How is it that end-of-life has become a vehicle for political action? What lies behind these coalitions? How does this movement crystallize new sensibilities and/or transform the experience of caregivers? And how does this remarkable palliative care movement in Thailand both reflect and contribute to significant changes in subjectivity in Thailand? The proposed project integrates the methods of social and visual anthropology to explore what constitutes end-of-life caregiving in different contexts and how formal and informal networks of care for the dying might help us understand emergence and transformation on both individual and societal scales. Forms of Buddhism, social science, and civil society provide provocative backdrops for this study, with great promise for contemporary Thai studies, as well as the general investigation of subjectivity and social networks in socio-cultural and medical anthropology at large.

Brenda C. Baletti

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Geography

Paving Paradise? Property Rights and Social Mobilization along an Amazonian Highway

[ project summary ]

This project will analyze the struggle for property rights along Brazilian Amazonian highway, BR-163. This research is especially important at this particular conjuncture, when a long history of land conflict along the road has been exacerbated by the arrival of soy farmers into the region, the subsequent plan to pave the road, and the implementation of new government land reform programs. Taking as its point of departure the argument that that property is not a thing, but a relationship constituted through competing claims to resources, hierarchical power dynamics and diverse world views, this research seeks to answer the question—how do understandings of property rights along BR-163 contribute to and become formed through land conflict? I argue that because land access and use is mediated through relationships of property, understanding how people conceive, enact, and mobilize for their property rights is essential to understanding land conflict. Situated along a road, this research, which will combine policy analysis, mapping, and ethnography is necessarily multi-sited, and the results will speak not only to issues in particular places, but also to the wider processes that link them.

Emily Bruderle Baran

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, History

Faith on the Margins: Jehovah's Witnesses in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia, 1945-Present

[ project summary ]

My dissertation will explore Soviet religious policy and religious life after World War II and its transformation in the post-Soviet period through a case study of the Jehovah's Witnesses. I seek to answer two fundamental questions: How does the study of one marginal religious organization shed light on larger issues in postwar Soviet and Russian history? In particular, what do the Witnesses tell us about the boundaries of religious pluralism, personal autonomy, and democracy both in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia? The history of the Jehovah’s Witnesses provides a unique perspective on the shifting boundaries of religious toleration in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. In the Soviet Union, the Witnesses distinguished themselves from other religious organizations by actively recruiting new members, by refusing to serve in the military or to vote, and by maintaining underground communication with their compatriots abroad. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Witnesses emerged as one of region’s fastest growing religions, while court battles over their right to practice in Russia placed the Witnesses at the center of a legal debate over the proper boundaries of religious freedom. My dissertation will focus on understanding why the Soviet and Russian states responded as they did to the Witnesses, and how the organization and its members negotiated their own place within society in light of both their beliefs and changing social and political conditions. To answer these questions, my project will draw on archival materials and published sources from Russia, and from Moldova and Ukraine, the two regions of the Soviet Union with the highest concentration of Witnesses. By combining materials from three countries, my dissertation will address both official state policy and its reception by local officials and Witness communities.

Leandro D. Benmergui

University of Maryland College Park, History

Housing Development: Housing Policy, Slums, and Squatter Settlements in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, 1948-1973

[ project summary ]

This research project explores the contested experiences of housing policy and development in Latin America in the era of modernization. During those years, a new transnational sociological and urbanist understanding of the urban home appeared as an organizer of urban space and as an instrument of political and social intervention to a number of different actors across national and international borders. Over the chronological course of this study, I will explore how the modern Latin American city--particularly Buenos Aires, Argentina and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil—came to be marked by extreme income disparities because of, rather than in spite of, public housing initiatives. This dissertation seeks to show that, ultimately, the planning and building of the modern residence did not solve the problem of underdevelopment. Rather, I argue, housing itself built poverty. In other words, at the historical juncture of populism, interamerican development aid, and the Cold War in the Americas, the urbanists' plans and hopes for modernity through housing may have been partially fulfilled, but a poverty of housing became a thoroughly modern part of the Latin American urban landscape. In light of this, I hypothesize that the history of housing was one of the constitutive elements in the history of (under)development and modernization of the Third World city.

Gavril K. Bilev

Brown University, Political Science

89 Russias: Centralization and Political Contestation

[ project summary ]

How does abolishing the direct election of regional governors affect the prospects for democratization in semi-authoritarian federations? This dissertation project assesses the implications for democracy and accountability of political centralization, more specifically the elimination of direct elections of governors. The analysis is situated in the 89 regions of the Russian Federation. I explore the factors that explain the wide variation among regions in terms of political competition through on-site research in five provinces and the federal center. The project also calls for compiling an original dataset with measures of the contestation present in all units of the federation in order to test the applicability of the argument. While it has become conventional wisdom to consider abolishing elections at any level of government a step away from democracy, I argue that important exceptions to the general logic exist. The new policy of central appointment may have the unintended consequence of increasing accountability to the regional electorate by opening up previously unavailable avenues of influence via the federal center. Paradoxically, the elimination of regional elections may have the unintended consequence of producing a political opening and improving the prospects for further liberalization. This counter-intuitive scenario unfolds when the center uproots a consolidated hegemonic regional regime founded upon a collusive relationship between the executive and the local business elite. Through this project I aim to specify the exact conditions under which this sequence of events unfolds. I will also explore the factors that lead to a diametrically opposite outcome: the further retrenchment of semi-dictatorial regional regimes. Quantitative analysis will offer an insight as to the general patterns of contestation across the entire federation.

Bethany Rochelle Bloomston

Syracuse University, Anthropology

Uneven Mobilization: Gender, Land and Social Movements in Maranhao, Brazil

[ project summary ]

Soon after the assassination of female rural leader Maria Margarida Alves in 1983, land justice movements in Brazil staged large marches and demonstrations to protest the rampant human rights abuses in the countryside. By 2000, however, the focus had partially shifted and female leaders began explicitly invoking Margarida’s martyrdom as a call for greater gender equality. Since the millennium, the Marcha das Margaridas has come to symbolize the struggle against gender inequalities and the demand for alternatives to “top-down” rural development schemes. My dissertation project investigates the contours of the gender agenda emerging through this historic shift. I will explore how the recent arrival of international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and “green” enterprises that promote gender-in-development discourses may alter the ways in which different social movement leaders and participants have come to imagine and instantiate land and gender struggle. Most importantly, I will explore and identify how, in their everyday lives, different women in Brazil’s land justice movements, relate to, think about, and/or take-up these newly emergent gender discourses, and in the process, shape dynamic narratives of self and community.

Alex F. Borucki

Emory University, History

From Shipmates to Soldiers: Emerging Black Identites in Montevideo, 1770-1850

[ project summary ]

This project provides a new route to addressing one of the central preoccupations in the literature on slavery in the Atlantic World. How did slavery reshape the identity of slaves, how did slaves develop collective ties within the confines of slavery, and how did this intersect with the origins of black culture? Colonial and early independent Montevideo –the capital of present-day Uruguay- provides an ideal environment in which to explore this central issue. In most parts of the Americas, the period from beginnings of slavery to abolition spans centuries. In Montevideo, the rise and fall of the slave trade and slavery stretches over a period of just eight decades (1770-1850). My provisional hypothesis is that social bonds arose from three elements of the black experience, shared African origins, shared experiences in the slave trade, and shared developments in the New World, and that these reinforced rather than conflicted with each other in the formation of black identity. I will analyze to what degree the earliest networks created by slaves were shaped more by the intra-American slave trade than by the trans-Atlantic passage. I will then examine how free and enslaved blacks engaged in new forms of social ties such as the participation in African-based associations and networks stemming from membership of free-colored colonial militias and black battalions of the War of Independence. To answer these questions, I will analyze sources as diverse as customs records of the transatlantic slave trade, marriage applications of slaves, censuses, military files, police and judicial records, local newspapers, and the papers of a free black who lived in the region from the late 1770s to the late 1830s –Jacinto Ventura de Molina– whose three-volume manuscripts –unknown until today- are one of the very few works making up the black nineteenth-century literarily canon in Latin America.

Virginia Claire Breedlove

Johns Hopkins University, History

Landscape and Livelihood in the Lake Chad Basin: Climate Change, Pastoral Production and the Politics of Groundwater Management on a Saharan Frontier

[ project summary ]

As the effects of global warming and climate change have become apparent over the past forty years, the Lake Chad Basin, perched precariously on the southern edge of the Sahara desert, has been among the most harshly affected places in the world. Lake Chad has shrunk by over 95% since the 1968-1973 Sahelian drought, and scholars and development organizations have raised serious concerns about the viability of pastoral communities in the southern Sahara and Sahel in the face of such rapid desertification. Contrary to these doomsday predictions about the sustainability of pastoral livelihoods, the highly transhumant trade in camels between eastern Niger and Libya is larger and more lucrative today than it was before Lake Chad receded, largely replacing the cattle trade south to Nigeria. This study will explore the transition from cattle to camel herding and the associated reorientation of trade from Nigeria to Libya to better understand the impact of climate change on pastoralists in the Lake Chad Basin. It asks first how pastoralists have made changes in livelihood and modes of capital accumulation in response to rapid environmental transformations and technical innovation. I then ask how shifts in pastoral livelihood strategies have interacted with changes in the organization of local government under the auspices of decentralization in Niger, and with conflicts about the status of migrants, refugees, smugglers, and rebels in the greater Chad Basin. The study will connect household-level decision-making about herd management and patterns of spending, investment, and accumulation to the broader political and economic dynamics of commercial activity in the Chad Basin.

Adam Paul Bronson

Columbia University, History

Democracy, Science, and Everyday Life: Science of Thought and Postwar Japan, 1946-1996

[ project summary ]

Following World War II, intellectual elites in many countries looked to systematic modernization to provide a solution to problems as different as flawed democracy, world hunger, and household chores. In Occupied Japan, dozens of new journals and study groups celebrated science and democracy in a chorus that observers compared to the modernizing slogan "Civilization and Enlightenment" of the 1870s. The "Institute for the Science of Thought" (Shisô no kagaku kenkyûkai), the subject of my dissertation, was one of the most influential associations engaged in rethinking modernity in the years after fascism and defeat. It was founded in Tokyo in January 1946 by an interdisciplinary group of seven young scholars - ranging from nuclear physicists to economists to philosophers. More than a scholarly forum, Science of Thought self-consciously proclaimed a new popular movement that sought to uproot anti-democratic patterns of thought and promote new ways of thinking informed by scientific rationality. The study group and its bimonthly journal represented one of a wide spectrum of efforts by Japanese intellectuals to seize the opportunities created in the immediate postwar years by a democratizing American-led occupation. My project takes Science of Thought as a lens through which to investigate both the radical potential and the historical limits of postwar scientific modernism. Why optimism toward science immediately after the atomic bombs and the Holocaust? What is the legacy of postwar enthusiasm toward science? To what extent did Science of Thought’s vision of scientific modernity actually shape Japan’s postwar democracy? In answering these questions through a close study of Science of Thought from its inception in 1946 until its post-Cold War dissolution five decades later, my project explores a phenomenon in the twentieth-century history of Japan, and indeed of the world, that continues to resonate today.

Filipe L. Calvao

University of Chicago, Anthropology

The Rough and the Cut: Extracting the State and Trading in Value in a Postcolonial Mining Complex

[ project summary ]

Based in Angola’s mining complex, this ethnographic project examines how diamonds, in the material and symbolic process of extraction, exchange, and expenditure, conceal and deploy contradictory notions of crisis and wealth. It considers the social location of this commodity, through practices of circulation, in constituting Angola’s postcolonial present as a refraction of a violent past and the anticipated hope in the future. This research project takes on the opportunity to conduct ethnographic work on the conditions of mineral extraction in Angola to raise the social instantiations of a post-war diamond economy in its inner dynamics of sovereignty and privatization, illegality and order. What are the sediments of the State’s exercise of rule and its interaction with local orders of social organization? And what forms of symbolic and material appropriation do diamonds call for, and how does it paradoxically consolidate and threaten the project of statehood in Angola? As symbolic material in its own right, diamonds may help understand the contemporary conditions of State formation, law and the status of postcolonial subjects. By participant observation of diamond trading, I will analyze the relations and forms of political exercise that cross and move beyond the borders of enclave territories of mining extraction. Trough interviews, life-stories, and an ethnographic observation of spaces of social interaction, I hope to detail the terms by which a local currency is extracted and locally translated as a global commodity, and the practices and discursive formations whereby these objects are reinscribed as icons of wealth in cosmologies of value creation and expenditure. By means of careful archival research, I will examine the historical continuities with colonial mining systems.

Ana Maria Candela

University of California, Santa Cruz, History

Nations and Migrations in the Pacific: Peruvian Chinese Contributions to Nationalism and Nation-Building in China and Peru

[ project summary ]

For my dissertation project, I will undertake an historical and ethnographic examination of Chinese in Peru from 1847 to World War II in order to explore Chinese Peruvian identity formation and their contributions to the making of modern Chinese nationalisms. My project involves three histories: of Peru, of China, and of the translocal interactions that brought the two together. These histories are part of a Pacific formation emerging in the mid-19th century, a period that some scholars have viewed as part of an earlier phase in the globalization of capitalism through imperialism and colonialism. Through their labor and capital, Chinese Peruvians contributed significantly to this earlier phase of Pacific formation and globalization. Using interstate treaties, state documents, periodicals, Peruvian Chinese community organization documents, and personal archival materials produced by migrants, I will analyze two distinct phases of Chinese migrations to Peru in order to explore Chinese Peruvian contributions to the making of modern Chinese nationalisms, to the emergence of China and Peru as modern nation-states, and to the formation of East Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific as modern geo-political and economic regions whose origins are inextricably entangled.

Kerry Ryan Chance

University of Chicago, Anthropology

Living Politics: New Practices and Protests of the "Poor" in Democratic South Africa

[ project summary ]

My dissertation examines new practices and protests by the “poor” in South Africa over a decade after the fall of apartheid. Through twelve months of multi-sited ethnographic research in South African townships and shack settlements, I will consider how the “poor” come to inhabit political roles and practice politics under a liberal democratic state. I will study how residents collectively identify with each other, how they articulate their demands as political, and how this emerging understanding of politics is transforming long-standing relationships between civic organizations and the state. The methodology for this research has three primary components: (1) participant observation of events, activities and everyday life with residents of townships and shack settlements; (2) interviews with residents, state officials and professionals in non-governmental organizations (3) analysis of documents, including relevant news media, legislation and government reports, as well as texts produced by residents. My research will draw from three bodies of literature: democratic theory, studies of global slums and research on ‘new’ social movements. At the nexus of these interdisciplinary literatures, my research in South Africa will contribute to a reexamination of slums, as sites that illuminate the relationship between the liberal democratic state and its citizenry. A study of how and under what conditions “the political” is demarcated around slums in a developing democracy like South Africa will contribute critical insights into theories of popular sovereignty, democratic governance and state transition.

Haydon Leslie Cherry

Yale University, History

Down and Out in Saigon: The Social History of the Urban Poor, 1880-1954

[ project summary ]

During the colonial period Saigon was increasingly integrated into the world economy. In times of uncertainty, dearth, and disaster the urban poor drew upon on a variety of social relationships to buffer themselves from harm. I contend that when want was met and calamity avoided the Vietnamese social order was powerfully reinforced. This social order was comprised of a hierarchy of relationships of mutuality and obligation: between governor and governed, landlord and tenant, master and servant, clergy and layman, among others. These relationships gave both credibility to the prevailing understanding of the social order and authority to those who ruled. I suggest, therefore, that the plight of the urban poor could sometimes fortify rather than erode the structure of Vietnamese society. My dissertation explains not why the urban poor took part in occasional outbreaks of disorder in colonial Saigon, but rather why they took part in so few. And in explaining how social order was maintained in colonial Saigon even in times of dearth, I also explain, at least in part, how the French were able to govern there for almost a century. My dissertation will draw upon a wide variety of sources in French and Vietnamese in Vietnamese archives and libraries. I will examine records of the exports of the city, chiefly rice and rubber, and the imports, such as manufactured textiles, to trace the economic integration of the city into the world economy. I will use contemporary descriptions in newspapers, literature, and in letters by the poor themselves to describe their understanding of the social order. Finally I will reconstruct the social relationships of the urban poor in times of trial using colonial studies of urban poverty, and sources that inadvertently describe the poor such as police and judicial records, public health reports, and pawnshop records.

Hae Yeon Choo

University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology

Citizenship at the Margins: Filipina Migrant Women and the Negotiation of National Boundaries in South Korea

[ project summary ]

This project examines the interactive process of boundary-making between citizens and non-citizens where gender plays a central role. By conceptualizing citizenship as a relational process, I look at how this boundary is negotiated and contested through discourse and everyday interaction among locally grounded actors in the margins of the state. My ethnography specifically focuses on variations in citizenship claims as framed by three different groups of Filipina migrant women living at the margins of a global city -- Seoul, South Korea. Through an examination of the experiences of “labor migrants” working in a factory town in the female-dominated light manufacturing industry, “marriage migrants” living in rural communities with their South Korean husbands, and “entertainers” working at bars and clubs on an American military base, this dissertation asks (1) what discursive frames are being utilized by the state and NGO actors in their integration efforts for migrant women; (2) how do migrant women themselves reproduce, challenge and resist these frames; and (3) how do the differences in gendered notions of respectability and citizenship affect the negotiations over boundaries between citizens and non-citizens in practice across these three sites.

Lawrence Chua

Cornell University, Art History/Architecture

Modern Leisure Architecture in Thailand, 1911-1976: 'Public Space,' National Identity and Modernity

[ project summary ]

My project investigates the dynamic role that leisure architecture played in the creation of public space, national identity and modernity in Thailand from 1911 to 1976. During this period, the creation of a national identity through architectural spaces of leisure became a major focus of the Thai state. Sites like the Yellow Rose club (Bangkok, ca. 1911), Lumpini Park (Bangkok, 1925), Suan Mokkh (Surat Thani, 1932), the Sala Chaloem Krung movie theatre (Bangkok, 1933), Rachadamnoen Boxing Stadium (Bangkok, 1941), and the Dusit Thani Hotel (Bangkok, 1970) were central to that process. Initiated by royal, religious, military, and commercial agents, they were used as public spaces where sometimes violently competing members of an emergent “imagined community” gathered to assert a more unruly public identity than the one promoted by the state. By using these sites as case studies and researching the design, construction, and uses of these sites, I show the political properties of public space and its role in developing national identity and belonging in twentieth-century Thailand.

Lynette J. Chua

University of California, Berkeley, Jurisprudence & Social Policy

How Does Law Matter in Gay Activism? A Case Study of Singapore

[ project summary ]

“Under what conditions do social movements choose strategies and tactics that use the language of law and rights? Under what conditions does such use of the language of law and rights de-radicalize (or radicalize) the social movement?” My dissertation will address these two questions by drawing upon original empirical data on gay activist social movement organizations in the city-state of Singapore, and engaging the interdisciplinary scholarship of Law & Society and the sociological study of social movements. Gay activism in Singapore is an important case study situated at two major crossroads: (i) Where the domestic and the international meet – My research is an opportunity to investigate empirically how activist organizations in a society that inherited Western laws, developed them locally, and nurtured its own legal culture, and, one that is also exposed by globalization to external legal norms, such as “human rights, “gay rights,” “sexual rights,” use the law in their strategies and tactics, interact with these external legal norms, and translate or modify them for local advocacy. (ii) Where communitarian values, and individual rights, identity and self-expression collide, and fight over the power to (re)shape culture. Through examining how law-related strategies and tactics of these activists play out in a society that has less entrenched individual rights than Western democracies, and the outcomes they produce, my research helps us to understand what democracy means to a society in transition, and its aptitude for democracy. At a more general level, my dissertation contributes to our understanding of power – how legal power operates in a non-Western democratic society in the context of collective resistance, an arena in which power relations are being contested and renegotiated. The empirical research will be interpretive and qualitative, relying on in-depth interviews, field observations and analysis of primary documents.

Leena Dallasheh

New York University, History & Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies

Nazarenes in the Tide of Turbulent Citizenships: Nazareth from 1940-1966

[ project summary ]

The dissertation research project for which I am seeking an International Dissertation Research Fellowship is a social and political history of Nazareth from 1940 to 1966. By tracing local politics and identity formation in this Arab urban center, I explore the complicated and understudied ways that Palestinians made bids for citizenship in both the British colonial state and the Israeli state. The period this study considers corresponds to the appearance of a broad range of social and political shifts in British policy in Palestine as a result of World War II until the military administration imposed by Israel on Palestinian citizens in 1948 was formally terminated. Bridging the rupture of 1948, my research will contribute a rethinking of Palestinian history that attends to Palestinian experience in both mandatory Palestine and Israel. The critical study of local politics and identity formation and their continuities and ruptures before and after 1948 disrupts the prevailing but oversimplified dichotomy between collaboration and resistance in understanding Palestinian history. My focus on Nazareth facilitates the exploration of how the social and political life of a prominent pre-1948 urban center sustained, shifted and adapted as Palestinian Arabs became a minority in a self-defined Jewish state. My research focuses on two aspects of social, political and economic Nazarene life. First, I will explore how the municipality of Nazareth, as an agent, utilized specific language and practices to engage with both the state and its Palestinian population in shaping identity and citizenship, and trace how bids for citizenship changed from British to Israeli rule. Second, since Nazareth became a primary locality for internal refugees after 1948, I explore the understudied roles that class and status played within the daily-life of the Palestinian community.

Michael W. Dean

University of California, Berkeley, History

Czech America and the National Movement in Bohemia

[ project summary ]

My dissertation examines the contribution of Czech America to the national movement in Bohemia. Of central importance are the themes of displacement and return. I analyze a series of pilgrimages to and from the homeland during the 1880s and 1890s in order to demonstrate that the movement of people and ideas between Bohemia and America significantly affected the conceptual boundaries of Czechness. Czechs in the United States adopted and adapted historical materials from the homeland in order to forge an American ethnicity. At the same time, Czechs in Bohemia were employing similar historical imagery so as to foster a mass national movement. My work, therefore, explores the ways in which the parallel movements of ethnicization and nation building intersected and diverged. The encounters taking place at moments of national significance (such as the opening of the Bohemian National Theater, a mass gymnastic meets and two national fairs) reveal the ways in which the boundaries of nationality were imagined by social elites as well as working-class Czechs. This cultural history contributes to recent debates about nationalism and migration. Sources for my study include periodicals, police records, municipal records, memoirs, letters and photography held at the Naprstek Museum, the State Regional Archive and the State Central Archive in the Czech Republic as well as the Archive of Czechs and Slovaks Abroad at the University of Chicago.

Matthew Allen Derrick

University of Oregon, Geography

Defining Territory, Shaping Faith: Islam and the Changing Landscape of Kazan's Old Tatar Quarter

[ project summary ]

Tatarstan, a region of Russia populated by equal numbers of Muslim Tatars and Christian Russians, is site to an Islamic revival. Officials in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, promote a progressive form of Islam known as Jadidism as a factor in maintaining interethnic harmony. The primacy of Jadidism, however, is contested by the growing presence of conservative strains of Islam that have been implicated in acts of extremism in Tatarstan. Though this revival is framed in cultural terms, as localized traditionalism threatened by globalizing fundamentalism, the situation is not merely a question of culture. Rather, it is driven by political-territorial circumstances within and beyond Tatarstan. In the 1990s, the religious aspect of Tatar ethnic identity was cultivated by the Kazan-based government as part of its sovereignty drive. Today, amid a recentralization of the federation, Moscow seeks rapprochement with Tatarstan, and its other Muslim regions, while simultaneously developing closer ties with a broader Muslim world. Thus, center-region politics combine with geopolitics to influence Islam’s expression at a locale. These developments are part of a historical pattern, but largely elided in contemporary discussions about Islam in Tatarstan. To understand the implications of this religious revival, my research moves beyond the notion that Islam is simply a cultural phenomenon and explains how it has been shaped and altered by political-territorial circumstances. Specifically, my research addresses these questions: How has the historical competition between Kazan and Moscow for influence and control over territory affected the social expression of Islam in Kazan? Why, and to what extent, have conservative or fundamentalist versions of Islam become established in Kazan? I will seek answers to these questions in Kazan’s Old Tatar Quarter. Using qualitative methods and GIS spatial analysis, I will show how Islam is embedded in the Quarter’s changing landscape.

Rossen Lilianov Djagalov

Yale University, Comparative Literature

Imagining Socialist Internationalism in the Age of Three Worlds

[ project summary ]

This project will offer a history of the imagined community of international socialism in the Cold War era. To write that history is to write a history of its literary field, comprising writers as its key symbolic figures and texts as the common material sustaining that community. The project will identify the three international leftist writers’ formations during that period and in each case focus on two prominent and representative members of that formation: the Soviet novelist Ilya Ehrenburg and his American counterpart Howard Fast, who participated in the attempt to revive the Popular-Front alliance between Soviet and First-World artists at the 1948 Stalingrad International Writers’ Congress; the Soviet guitar poet Vladimir Vysotsky and the German Wolf Biermann, both emblematic figures for the Second-World “socialism with a human face” in the 1960s, who found it increasingly difficult to sustain their internationalist engagement in the ‘70s; and finally, the Kyrgyz writer Chinghiz Aitmatov and the Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiongo, whose joint stardom at the 1973 Afro-Asian conference in Alma-Ata marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet cultural alliance with the Third World. After situating the pair of writers in the cultural context of their moment, each part of this project will identify the aesthetic forms of internationalism as represented in their work of that period. The reception of these texts will be then reconstructed, providing us not merely with a snapshot of the readers’ understanding of internationalism at the time, but also with clues as to how that literature shaped its audience’s understanding of socialist internationalism. In the process of recovering the now forgotten web of exchanges and solidarities that once constituted socialist internationalism, this project will also identify many of its artifacts in contemporary transnational culture.

Rosa E. Ficek

University of California, Santa Cruz, Anthropology

The Pan American Highway: An Ethnography of Latin American Integration

[ project summary ]

A network of roads meant to connect Canada to Argentina, the Pan American Highway is the material expression of early 20th century dreams of an emergent Latin America. This highway continues to be a key figure in debates over the contested meanings of Latin America. Projects to extend and expand the highway in Panama’s eastern frontier and the Texas-Mexico borderlands reorganize social and natural landscapes, suggesting emergent forms of integration. My research investigates the ways old Pan American Highway dreams are taken up in relation to new visions of Latin America. What histories are encoded in the mid-20th century Pan American Highway project? How does current highway construction dismantle and build off of these older tropes of integration? By investigating how people constructed their everyday lives around la Panamericana, and by tracking the changing meanings and uses of the highway, this project will assess the extent to which the current context of multiculturalism and neoliberalism transforms ways people address questions of integration in the frontiers and borders of Latin America. I propose a twenty-month ethnographic study of the Pan American Highway as a material and symbolic figure. Archival research on the Pan American Highway’s planning and construction will analyze the highway’s role in the 20th century modernization of Latin America. These stories of integration will be further elaborated through ethnographic investigation of activities located in the Texas-Mexico border, and Darien, Panama, two points of controversy on the Pan American Highway currently. My study will compare integration at these two sites.

George F. Flaherty

University of California, Santa Barbara, Art History/Architecture

Mediating the Third Culture at Tlatelolco, Mexico City '68

[ project summary ]

English and Spanish-language scholars have generally narrated the state-sponsored massacre of several hundred people at the Plaza of the Three Cultures and the adjacent Nonoalco-Tlatelolco public housing complex in Mexico City on October 2, 1968 as a historical rupture, estranged from its spatiotemporal location due to its grave violence or limited to the finite span of the 1968 student movement, which was its target. However, evocations of Nonoalco-Tlatelolco’s modernist architecture figure prominently in the film and literature which emerged in the massacre’s aftermath, offering a site-specific mode of interpretation and historical narration. This dissertation investigates the Plaza and Nonoalco-Tlatelolco as built and discursive environment to further the spatial understanding of the massacre and to explain the site-specificity of its representation in Mexican popular culture, which circulates and constitutes the massacre in the present.

Jeremy Scott Friedman

Princeton University, History

The Fate of the Left: The Sino-Soviet Split and the Third World

[ project summary ]

This dissertation attempts to explore the political and ideological competition for supremacy in the socialist world, leadership of so-called "leftist" forces, and ownership over the very concept of "revolution" itself between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China as it played out in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, I have chosen Chile and Angola as two geographically, chronologically, and ideologically disparate case studies in which to examine Soviet and Chinese aid projects and competition for influence. Chile in the early 1970s, as the one real example of the democratic election of a socialist president, represented a tremendously important alternative to armed struggle and was seen especially by the Soviets as a possibly model for Latin American and Western Europe. Angola represented the final stage of the de-colonial struggle in Southern Africa, as well as the battle against racism and apartheid, due in part to the involvement of South Africa, and as such was seen by both Moscow and Beijing as crucial to achieving the mantle of the true leader of progressive forces in the world. This dissertation seeks to achieve two major syntheses. The first is an attempt to connect arguably the two most important global structures of the second half of the twentieth century, namely the Cold War and decolonization. The second, more methodological synthesis is an attempt to re-integrate the intellectual and political history of the “Left” during what was arguably the period of its greatest flowering as well as its fracturing.

Elizabeth R. Gelber

Columbia University, Anthropology

Exposing the Makings of a Social World: Transnational Workers, Local Residents and Oil Infrastructure in the Niger Delta

[ project summary ]

Too often studies on petroleum extraction locate their analysis within its broader dynamics: processes of commoditization, location of consumption, and the transformation of revenue into state or transnational capital. The social relations and micro-networks that emerge in everyday spaces of production demands further examination. My project is both a historical look at how extraction infrastructure has shaped the socio-political realities of Nigeria’s oil producing Niger Delta region, and an anthropological account of how people construct a way of living within the volatile geography of a transnational petroleum extraction site. Rather than positing the state, multinational corporations, and local indigenous communities as monolithic actors in a resource war, my research examines long-standing infrastructures of petroleum extraction in the Niger Delta for their under-girding social logics. I will study how local residents and oil workers in the Nigerian village of Olomoro and the town of Ughelli—linked together through one of many pipelines running across in the Niger Delta region—are netted into each other’s lives by quotidian encounters at local bars, churches, and marketplaces, as well as by intimate entanglements of family relations, sexual economies, formal and informal fiscal arrangements. I will examine what identities and communities, spaces and movements are generated in this theater of encounter where transnational workers and indigenous residents construct a livelihood amidst the volatile geography of oil extraction. To pursue these interests I propose the following research questions: What are the everyday discourses and practices that allow a repressive and destructive environment to remain a viable space of living? How can the dynamics engendered in these life worlds, be read as part and parcel practices of extraction, rather then merely as evidence of its effects?

Diana Georgescu

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, History

“Ceausescu’s Children:” Ideological Scripts and Remembered Experiences of Childhood in Socialist Romania (1965-1989)

[ project summary ]

Hailed as the future of the socialist nation in official rhetoric, Romanian children born after the state’s banning of abortion were vernacularly called “Ceausescu’s children” or “children of the decree.” Given the centrality of this generation to the socialist regime’s struggle for legitimacy, my dissertation will explore the ideological construction, institutional organization, and lived experiences of childhood during Nicolae Ceausescu’s rule. Juxtaposing state orchestrated representations of socialist childhood against personal recollections, I will provide insights into the emergence of a distinctive socialist identity out of the intersection of ideology with subjective life. My research will combine archival study with oral history in order to revisit the dominant representation of socialist citizens as inhibited liberal subjects in the literature on Eastern European socialist regimes. More specifically, it challenges the assumption that socialist subjects were polarized between a “fake” public persona and a “true” self confined to the private sphere. By comparison, it proposes an analytical focus on the performative character of identity formation, arguing that the dynamic relation between socialist citizens and the state is better described in terms of participation and negotiation than of oppression and manipulation. The larger theoretical thrust of my project is to explore communism as an alternative experience of modernity with a distinctive form of social organization and large-scale experiments in social engineering. The specific context of late Romanian socialism opens the additional possibility of examining the affinities between socialism and nationalism as two specifically modern ideologies seeking to realign the self with the collective. Finally, a fuller understanding of how late socialist regimes shaped the young generation chosen to embody their future would illuminate a series of intriguing post-communist phenomena such as nostalgia f

Kathryn Graber

University of Michigan, Anthropology

Reading Publics: Language and Local Media in Southeastern Siberia

[ project summary ]

Mass media have long been theorized as instrumental in fostering civil society and the ‘free’ exchange necessary for democracy. In post-socialist contexts in particular, developing a ‘free press’ has been treated as one of the primary means by which to restore a healthy public sphere. Yet in practice, a variety of cultural and institutional frameworks pattern the movement of discourses through mass media, calling into question the ‘freedom’ of exchange. What kinds of publics are and are not possible through local media? How exactly do discourses move into, out of, and through the media to affect everyday social practices? This research project will investigate the possible role of media in creating and sustaining minority language publics in post-Soviet Russia. Specifically, it will examine minority-language newspapers as a particular kind of knowledge institution that might instantiate, subvert, or create ideologies about language use in the larger community. Over the past sixteen years, some of the most central and impassioned struggles in post-Soviet society have concerned minority languages and the publics that they mark or create. To follow these struggles as they unfold in contemporary and historical context, I am focusing on the Lake Baikal region of Siberia, where generations of speakers have been shifting to Russian from a native Mongolic language, Buryat. The study will consist of archival, ethnographic, and sociolinguistic research on local media production and consumption in the Republic of Buryatia. Based in the capital, Ulan-Ude, I will investigate the relationship between language in the newsroom of a Buryat-language newspaper and the everyday language of ordinary speakers. By examining the linguistic decisions of media personnel and tracking media circulations in the wider speech community, I hope to discover the specific connections between locally produced and consumed mass media and the everyday linguistic practices of their intended audiences.

Dahlia El-Tayeb M. Gubara

Columbia University, History

Trajectories of Learning and the Everyday Life of Ideas: Al-Azhar in the Eighteenth Century

[ project summary ]

My dissertation casts the intellectual and social history of the eighteenth-century Islamic world in an original light, combining a genealogical method with a microhistorical approach to the study of al-Azhar in Cairo. Despite its assumed centrality in Islam, al-Azhar mosque and seminary has elicited little critical study, either in the Arab or indeed in the Western academies. The existing literature relies on colonial-nationalist categories that chart a linear narrative of greatness-decline-modernization and reify culturalist geographies. Questioning the spatial and temporal parameters of Orientalist taxonomies, I seek to historicize al-Azhar, capitalizing on recent breakthroughs in the historiography of Islam in Africa and in the conceptualizations of the eighteenth century in the larger Ottoman and Arab-Islamic worlds. By retracing the trajectories of three different but connected scholars who defy the dichotomies which conventionally governed the study of the Islamic world such as Arab/African, orthodox/heterodox, normative/performative, I explore the everyday life of ideas in and around al-Azhar, re-imagined not as a central institution from which Islamic thought and practices were emitted but rather as a dynamic space of circulation of persons and influences coming from as far afield as South Asia, Yemen and Northern Nigeria. My research contributes not only to enriching the historiography of the eighteenth-century, but also, more fundamentally, to a rethinking of the very categories used to study history. Its innovative engagement with its primary site of research, al-Azhar library, invites future scholars to approach this collection not simply as a repository of manuscripts but as an actively constructed archive with institutional memory and normative purpose. Its relevance to contemporary realities is significant, as it also historicizes the racial and cultural discourses that animate conflicts such as that in Darfur.

Alberto A. Harambour Ross

State University of New York at Stony Brook, History

Borderland Sovereignties: Race, Class, and Nation in Patagonia’s Nation-State Building, Argentina and Chile, 1840-1925

[ project summary ]

This research engages the (re)configuration of popular identities in the making of Argentinean and Chilean Patagonia. Triple frontier (‘civilizational’, internal and international), it was occupied and then populated by Chilote indigenous and European seasonal and permanent settlers following the native’s genocide. This project maintains that borderlands constitute a ‘revolutionary space’ where the cultural revolution state-making implies resulted from the emergence of multiple, contested sovereignties -not just territorial, but social. Thus, I will analyze the changing hierarchies that local racial, class and national categorizations and identities experienced in their relation with the centralizing and homogenizing policies of the competing States. Dealing with a wide variety of sources this research avoids metropolitan-centered approaches to nation-State building, focusing on the historical experiences of multiethnic subjects and the peripherical exchanges pervading the states’ social boundary making. My dissertation aims to provide the first transnational and comparative social history of nation-State formation in the Southern Cone, analyzing eight interrelated processes: 1) the racial and geopolitical considerations involved in the decision-making process regarding Patagonia’s occupation since 1840; 2) the relation between racialization of the native population and land property regimes furthered by both Argentina and Chile; 3) the formation of the local, transnational oligopoly in/and its relation with the metropolitan elites; 4) the policies and networks of migration, the formation of regional identities across ‘racial’ and national lines and the prevalence of class groupings in front of the politics of Chileanization and Argentinization; 5) the racializations deployed by metropolitan travelers regarding the ‘ever incomplete’ project of ‘national races’ building in Patagonia; 6) the racial, class and national subtexts inscribed in the judiciary positivism;

Angelia Haro

Duke University, Anthropology and Literature

Developing Utopias: An Ethnography of Millennium Development

[ project summary ]

My dissertation examines the competing utopian social phenomena at play in new global development practices that are defined by the Millennium Development Goals and the promise of the end of global poverty by 2015. I take the Millennium Villages Project, as the most visible Millennium Development initiative, for my research domain. The rural communities in Africa chosen as Millennium Villages to demonstrate the eradication of poverty provide ideal sites for observing how a global utopian vision lands in actual development contexts and how local communities and individuals struggle over the situated coordinates of present possibility as they attempt to actualize it in their own contingent lives. The present project builds on previous discourse analysis and institutional ethnography in which I analyze the key terms of hope and utopian imagination that enable the Millennium Villages to work as utopian symbols in the global imagination in ways that support disciplinary strategies of enclosing global hope within a particular neoliberal logic. I now shift my focus to the lived actualities of development in the Millennium Villages by doing two ethnographic case studies and accumulating comparative survey data from four additional Millennium Village sites. My research objective will be to observe the specific practices, ways of thinking and social formations through which different actors attempt to transform present conditions to fit the Millennium Development vision. I concentrate on how activities oriented toward instrumental ends like clean water, roads and health care become sites in which different actors struggle over the ideal social conditions through which to actualize them. My research should show how such paradoxical utopian tendencies (pragmatic interventions securing grand promises of global salvation) operate in Millennium Development practices and how communities rework them, within the constraints of great power asymmetries.

Daniel Bernardo Hershenzon

University of Michigan, History

Captives and Renegades: Forging Community and Identity in Early-Modern Spanish

[ project summary ]

On October 7 1571 the Habsburg Empire defeated its Ottoman rival off Lepanto, in the largest battle fought in Mediterranean waters during the early-modern period. While the victory marked a shift in the direction of Spain’s expansion away from the Mediterranean and North Africa and toward continental Europe and the New World, the Maghrib and the Mediterranean continued to shape Spain’s religious and political imagination in important ways. In the following two centuries more than one million Europeans, the majority of them Spaniards, were captured and enslaved in the Ottoman Maghrib and slavery, thus, became the central interface between the Habsburg and the Ottoman empires. This dissertation examines the ways in which homogeneous ideas of early-modern Spanish community and identity emerged out of encounters between captives, renegades, and their relatives on the one hand and crown and church magistrates on the other between Lepanto (1571) and the fall of Oran, Spain’s last stronghold in the Maghrib (1710). Encounters between these liminal figures and official magistrates took place in a variety of institutional discursive domains: the Spanish Inquisition, the Orders of Redemption charged with liberating Europeans from the Maghrib, crown magistracies, which dealt with relatives of enslaved Spaniards, and the intellectual fields. In each of these domains, categories encompassing cautivo, esclavo, prisionero, renegado, apostate, redención, rescate, and conversión articulated the movements of enslaved Spanish captives across the Mediterranean. I will demonstrate how such categories, which at first articulated the presence of Spaniards in North Africa in contrasting and complementary terms – political-belligerent, religious-redemptive or social-relational phenomena – gradually gave way to a reified and homogenized concept of Spanishness.

Nur Amali Ibrahim

New York University, Anthropology

Producing Believers, Contesting Islam: Conservative and Liberal Youths in Post-New Order Indonesia

[ project summary ]

Muslims are intensely contesting Islamism, or the idea that Islam should not function merely as a religion but should also provide the legal and political framework in society. These struggles can be observed clearly in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, where conservative and liberal youths compete to determine the model of Islam society should embrace. Conservative youths call for the establishment of an Islamic state in Indonesia, while liberal youths reject this Islamism vision. Few works theorize these contestations among Muslims; yet doing so is crucial because they shape and are in turn shaped by Islam. My dissertation research examines the socialization of believers in a context of competing religious ideologies and asks: How do youth believers become attached to different religious orientations? Instead of conceptualizing the reproduction of young conservatives and liberals as separate processes, this study analyzes how young conservative and liberal Muslims co-constitute one another’s subject positions, and how interactions between them reveals battles over Islamism in concrete, everyday contexts. This project will be conducted in Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital city and the site of intense conservative-liberal debates. By examining how Islam gets shaped by relations of power and socialization processes occurring in specific historical moments, this study proposes a way of thinking about Islam and religion without reifying them. Given that youths are instrumental in social movements globally, my analysis of how they come to support a religiously-based movement provides greater insight on how social and political struggles transpire around the world.

Brannon D. Ingram

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Religion

Sufism and the Deoband Movement in South Asia and Beyond: Genealogy of a Polemic

[ project summary ]

My dissertation examines the Deoband madrasa (Islamic school) of North India, whose curriculum has been copied and adapted by Islamic schools all over the world. Despite the media attention that Deoband has received in recent years, due to the revelation that some Taliban studied in Deobandi madrasas in Pakistan, this extremely important institution has been the subject of only one academic monograph in English and a small number of articles, most of which touch on Deoband only tangentially. Based on my previous research in the study of South Asian Sufism, or Islamic mysticism, my project takes as its point of departure the contentious relation between Deobandis and Sufis from the mid-19th century to the present. My research thus addresses larger problems in the field of religious studies regarding the nature of intra-religious polemic and dialogue. My dissertation research has two goals: first, through archival research at the original Deoband madrasa in India, it examines an ambivalence in how the founders of Deoband at once derived so much of their personal understanding of Islam from Sufism, and yet embarked on a systematic and trenchant critique of Sufi practices; second, through fieldwork and participant-observation in South Africa, it follows these critiques to discern how they travel in the South Asian diaspora and how contemporary Deobandis adapt, modify and/or contest these critiques. My archival work in India examines the first part of this ambivalence – Deoband’s Sufi roots – and my fieldwork in South Africa examines the second part – the trajectory of their anti-Sufi stance in the contemporary world.

Susan N. Johnson-Roehr

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Art History/Architecture

Space, Time and Architecture: The Spatialization of Knowledge and Power at the Astronomical Observatories of Sawai Jai Singh II, 1721-1743

[ project summary ]

My dissertation will analyze the spatialization of knowledge systems in eighteenth-century scientific landscapes of northern India as embodied by five observatories built under the patronage of the Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II (1688-1743). Drawing together disparate strands of astronomical knowledge through the acquisition of both human advisors and written texts, Jai Singh implemented a major building program outside the walls of Shahjahanabad (present-day New Delhi), the center of Mughal power during the reign of Muhammad Shah. The inauguration of the Delhi observatory (c. 1721) was soon followed by an expanded building program, culminating in the construction of four additional observatories in Mathura, Varanasi, Ujjain and Jaipur. Although usually studied by historians as discrete monuments, I argue the observatories should be interpreted as part of a larger system of knowledge, spatial and temporal control. That is, while each observatory can be read within the context of local building and cultural practices, the complexes were not designed to operate as solitary observational nodes, but rather as dynamic locations of information production and exchange. Expanding upon previous models of knowledge mapping, I will argue for a new reading of the sites that emphasizes their role in the creation and privileging of certain forms of knowledge as part of a transcontinental network of science. In the work of Jai Singh and his advisors, knowledge, space and time were mapped multidimensionally through the construction and subsequent control of a network of local work spaces dedicated to the production of universal knowledge.

Nathan Paul Jones

City University of New York Graduate Center, Anthropology

From Perestroika to the Polka: The Politicization and Everyday Life of “Germanness” in Kazakhstan

[ project summary ]

Residing throughout Kazakhstan is a population of nearly 300,000 Germans whose ancestors either immigrated there in the 19th and 20th centuries, or were deported there from western Russia during World War II. Since the USSR’s collapse, many of them have left Kazakhstan for their purported ancestral homeland, but once there other Germans perceive them as Russians or Asians, devoid of “Germanness.” Alarmed by this lack, German-funded NGOs such as the Technical Cooperation Society (GTZ) have deployed personnel and money to Kazakhstan with the belief that language and cultural education can reconnect these erstwhile Germans to their ethnic roots and stem their need to seek the same in Germany. Kazakhstan’s government officially sanctioned this effort by authorizing a similar indigenous organization known as “Rebirth” and establishing the Assembly of the Peoples of Kazakhstan, which promotes multiculturalism in cooperation with the GTZ and Rebirth. The GTZ believes it can moderate the desire for migration by providing authentic ethnic identity for Germans, while Kazakhstan’s government expects this increasingly ethnicized minority to contribute to its multicultural political image. My research considers how these institutions create and implement ethnic-based projects and how their ethnicized subjects react to them. In doing so, I will examine how ethnic Germans might utilize alternatives to ethnic identity, such as non-ethnicized subjectivities to accomplish objectives that have little to do with Germanness, political or otherwise. I will therefore question the prevalence of ethnicity, nationalism, and identity posited by a multitude of anthropological literature designating identity as a facilitator of political projects. I ultimately seek to understand the limits of ethnicity as political action and the alternative objectives of acting ethnic.

Ozan Karaman

University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Geography

Building a "World City:" Urban Entrepreneurialism and the Politics of Segregation in Istanbul

[ project summary ]

In its attempts to market Istanbul as a ‘world city’ and attract international business, the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality is spearheading an ambitious campaign of ‘urban transformation’. While the Municipality promotes ‘urban transformation’ as beneficial for all citizens, tensions between the city’s poorest squatter neighborhoods and its proliferating affluent ‘gated communities’ are escalating. These tensions are most visible around the Municipality’s mass housing evictions and the residents’ challenges for rights to their neighborhoods located on valuable lands along the northern shores of the Bosphorus and the historic city center. These dynamics are a powerful testament to the growing politics of disenfranchisement fostered by the Municipality 's agenda of ‘transforming’ the face of Istanbul. To the Municipality, the ‘squatter’ settlements are 'eyesores’ actively undercutting Istanbul's natural status as a ‘global city’. Hence, the enforced gentrifications of the city center and the clearance of squatter areas for lucrative re-development along the Bosphorus are seen as necessary for the future of Istanbul. Evoking the “Urban Renewal Law” the Municipality targets dilapidated historic neighborhoods for redevelopment as high-end housing. I will investigate these two processes as lenses into the politics of urban segregation in Istanbul, concentrating on the dynamics of grassroots contestations of the Municipality’s entrepreneurial agenda. My ethnographic fieldwork focuses on two neighborhoods: Fatih Sultan Mehmet (FSM), a site of squatter redevelopment project located at the north-western shore of the Bosphorus; and Sulukule, a neighborhood at the city center inhabited by the Roma minority for more than a thousand years which was recently declared a site of ‘urgent expropriation’. My research will utilize mixed methods strategy combining textual analysis, archival work, expert-interviews and ethnography with geographical information systems (GIS).

Sebastian Karcher

Northwestern University, Political Science

Liberalization, Segmentation, Informalization. The Politics of Labor Market Adaptation

[ project summary ]

Under pressure from a changing global economy, countries have adapted their labor markets. This project develops a framework to describe and explain these adaptations. I argue against the conventional wisdom that globalization leads to a ‘race to the bottom’ deregulation of the labor market. Instead, I hypothesize that countries have followed three distinct paths of labor-market adaptation, depending on their political and labor market institutions. Liberal Market Economies, exemplified by the United States, have followed a strategy of liberalization. Coordinated Market Economies such as Germany have pursued segmentation, while Hierarchical Market Economies like Argentina went on a path of informalization. Using large-n quantitative evidence as well as in-depth case studies of the United States, Germany, and Argentina, I test three alternative hypotheses about the mechanisms driving adaptation, based respectively on labor unions, employer interests, and administrative structure. Through the exploration of these questions, I address the critical but mostly neglected topic of the political underpinnings of labor market adjustment in the global economy. I do so by building on a sociological literature – largely ignored by political scientists – that takes seriously ‘marginalized workers’ in informal and non-standard jobs. Moreover, I bring together separate literatures on the political economy of advanced and developing industrialized countries, helping to bridge hardened and increasingly artificial regional boundaries within political science.

Jaeeun Kim

University of California, Los Angeles, Sociology

Transborder National Membership Politics in Korea

[ project summary ]

This project aims to analyze transborder national membership politics in Korea over the course of the twentieth century. By transborder national membership politics, I mean the contestations over the membership status of those who have long resided outside the territory of the state, do not possess the citizenship of the state, yet are represented as belonging to the nation, and are understood as having a substantial claim on the state. The project examines the contestations over the membership status of colonial-era ethnic Korean migrants to Japan and northeast China and their descendants. Using archival and ethnographic data as well as secondary literature, I will compare three cases of contentious transborder national membership politics in the colonial, Cold War and post-Cold War eras. The century-long span of this study and the distinctiveness of the case—involving both a sustained period of colonial rule and a period of belated and divided nation-state building interwoven with the Cold War—will highlight the crucial importance of three factors which have been neglected in existing literature on transborder membership politics: (1) the dynamically evolving macro-regional context, which has shaped transborder national membership politics in the region in distinctive ways; (2) the essentially political, performative, and constitutive nature of transborder nation-building; and (3) the documentary techniques of the modern state, the durable traces of which have constituted official individual identities and have thereby mediated the encounters between the “homeland state” and its “transborder nation.”

Larisa Kurtovic

University of California, Berkeley, Anthropology

"Think" Future! Postsocialist Hope in Bosnia-Herzegovina

[ project summary ]

My dissertation examines the emergent forms of social imagination and political action in contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina that articulate visions of more desirable and more meaningful political futures as a way of challenging the dominance of nationalism and ethnic divisions. During the socialist era, the idea of future symbolized progress, denoting a temporal horizon on which a new and more equitable socialist society would be built. The catastrophic collapse of socialism seriously disrupted this powerful narrative, especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which bore the largest brunt of violence and displacement from the Yugoslav wars of succession. In the Bosnian political present, “future” has come to represent both a collective problem in need of concrete solutions and the abstract location of hope, where Bosnians—Serbs, Croats and Muslims—might be able to build a better society. The dimensions of this desirable future nevertheless are not yet fully defined or agreed upon. My project foregrounds the ethnographic sites where such viable futures are being defined in explicitly anti-nationalist terms. How are these new anxieties and aspirations about the future in contemporary Bosnia related to the ways future was thought about in the communist era? More precisely, how is a new social imagination being shaped by the lived experiences and political values of Yugoslav socialism, while simultaneously being transformed by Bosnia’s post-socialist and post-war experiences? I pursue these questions ethnographically through study of media campaigns, the work of civic organization and NGOs, and personal narratives of the residents of Jajce, Bosnian town with a special socialist history and an experience of total social displacement.

Darien Lamen

University of Pennsylvania, Ethnomusicology/Music

Negotiating Place: Forró, Regionalism, and Circum-Caribbean Connectedness

[ project summary ]

This dissertation research project examines the relationship between discourses of Brazilian regionalism and recent stylistic developments in the accordion-based popular music known as forró. Following widespread national and international popularization, forró has begun a process of “re-regionalization,” but not, as perhaps might be expected, through a reclaiming of traditional musical aesthetics or a search for “roots.” Rather, since the early 1990s artists and audiences in both the Northeastern and Northern regions of Brazil have embraced a style of forró that incorporates commercial popular musics from the neighboring circum-Caribbean (most prominently reggae, soca, and calypso in the form of musical style, lyrics, and band names) in service of what I believe to be a transregional politics of difference. Through a comparative multi-site ethnography of listening and production in the Northeastern city of Salvador da Bahia and the Northern city of Belém do Pará, I will investigate the following two related questions: 1) How do audiences and artists relate to notions of “Caribbeanness,” “Northeasternness,” and “Northernness” as transmitted through contemporary forró music and 2) How are existing discourses of regionalism complicated and reconfigured by the “Caribbeanization” of forró? Do listeners in these two cities still consider forró an expression of “Northeastern” regional identity, or is this music being resignified as an expression of transregional or class-based identity? In short, this project attempts to uncover the affective links between the Northeast and the North that are articulated through forró music.

Jody Marie LaPorte

University of California, Berkeley, Political Science

Institutionalizing Autocracy: Protest and Response in Post-Communist Eurasia

[ project summary ]

Why do some non-democratic regimes tolerate mass protest, while others do not? I investigate this question through a study of state response to protest in Azerbaijan and Belarus between 2002 and 2004. I argue that Azerbaijan’s toleration and Belarus’ limiting of public dissent reflect different strategies for maintaining political stability. This project develops a theory of protest toleration in non-democratic regimes, suggesting that authoritarian regimes can tolerate protest in order to gather information on citizens’ true policy preferences. I then draw from literature on international and domestic influences on non-democratic rule to hypothesize several factors that shape the relative costs and benefits of tolerating versus limiting protest. These hypotheses will be tested using an original dataset of protest events and archival and interview research conducted in the field between August 2008 and May 2009.

Kirsten C. Leng

University of Michigan, History

Contesting the “Laws of Life:” Science, Politics and Feminism in Germany and Britain, 1890-1914

[ project summary ]

Taking the fascinating ‘scientization of the social’ in ‘modernizing’ Europe as its context, my dissertation examines the texts and activism of German-speaking and British feminists during the years 1890-1914 to investigate how hegemonic scientific theories of gender, sexuality, and the body informed feminist claims for civil rights, citizenship, and social transformation. Additionally, I explore the arguments of scientific experts themselves, which served as the bases of feminist engagement. In so doing, I address three central questions: In what ways did claims of science enable feminists to advance claims for civil rights and social transformation? How and why did this discourse become available to them? How were feminist deployments of science shaped by the discourses in circulation, the historically specific contexts of their deployment, women’s social status and access to institutions of education and communication, and women’s gendered and sexed subjectivity? Within this study, Germany will serve as the primary case, with Britain as a comparative case. Germany is a particularly apt case, given its historical interconnections between scientific conceptions of gender and sexuality, political contestation, and state planning. Britain, home of Darwin and Galton--the two most influential scientific thinkers of the period—provides a good comparative case as claims legitimated by ‘science’ here were tempered by the political and social embededness of liberalism, despite a similar turn to science. In undertaking this project, I hope to broaden existing suppositions regarding women’s relationship to science beyond that of victim and opponent; to study of the ways in which scientific theories of gender and sexuality become politicized and popularized; and to construct an intellectual heritage for twenty-first century feminist scientific scholarship that biologically deconstructs the meanings of gender, sexuality, and the body.

Shervin Malekzadeh

Georgetown University, Political Science

Ambiguous Spaces: Classrooms and the Politics of Schooling and Identity Formation in Postrevolutionary Iran

[ project summary ]

Nearly three decades of postrevolutionary education in Iran has produced a generation of dissidents opposed to clerical rule, despite the intent to foster loyalty to the Islamic regime. Were the seeds of resistance being planted in the public school system itself? To explain the diversity of outcomes observed amongst Iran’s “children of the revolution,” this project focuses explicitly on the ways in which teachers, students, and parents differentially understand and negotiate a state curriculum geared towards production of the “New Islamic Citizen.” I argue that schools, designated by the regime as arenas for securing the Islamic Republic by remolding people’s own definition of themselves, are in fact “ambiguous spaces” that facilitate both compliance and resistance to the regime. I hypothesize that postrevolutionary cultural identity in Iran consists not of outright conformity to the regime, nor wholesale rejection of “Islamic values,” but rather is the product of localized interpretations of official conceptions of citizenship, largely based upon people’s lived experiences. Education is one aspect of this experience. Contemporary accounts of education in Iran present an image of schools as assembly lines, quietly churning out fully-formed citizens. Rather than presuming a linear relationship between state designs and outcomes, I utilize a state-in-society approach to explain the ways in which interactions between state and society results in their mutual and continuing transformation.

Jared Manasek

Columbia University, History

Imperial Population Politics and Refugee Aid in the Balkans, 1875-1878

[ project summary ]

My dissertation studies the creation, care for, and repatriation of late nineteenth-century refugees from Ottoman Bosnia to develop a history of imperial refugee policy and to rethink the nationally-based narratives that dominate the European historiography of the refugee. I argue that the Balkans saw two divergent models of refugee management. Incipient nation-states separated populations and exploited refugee crises to further their nation-building projects, while empires sought to limit mobility and maintain the integrity of existing multi-ethnic societies. Working with Habsburg and Ottoman documents, local sources, journalism and memoirs, I examine the nature of late imperial co-operation and refugee aid policy. My work develops a history of state-run refugee aid programs and the processes of resettlement and return that could only happen within the context of imperial co-operation and increasingly centralized state control of populations. By looking at the flight of refugees from Bosnia during 1875-1878 in the light of a simultaneous refugee crisis in Bulgaria, I argue that faced with national mobilization, empires sought to develop a logic and practice of humanitarianism that could counter pan-Slavist and nationalist movements.

Devorah S. Manekin

University of California, Los Angeles, Political Science

The Good, the Bad, and the Ordinary: Patterns of Soldier Violence and Resistance in the Second Intifada

[ project summary ]

What accounts for the variation in violence against civilians perpetrated by combatants in conflict? Why do some individuals act violently against civilians, while others witness violence but do nothing to perpetuate or stop it, and still others renounce violence altogether? Why are some units noticeably more violent than others? And what accounts for temporal variations in violence and resistance? These are the primary questions I pose in my dissertation project, which studies patterns of political violence and resistance through a case study of Israeli soldiers in the second Palestinian Intifada, 2000-2005. While theories on sources of violence abound, both in political science and in social psychology, few studies attempt to evaluate these theories based on solid, disaggregated empirical evidence, often due to the difficulty of gathering data in the midst of violent conflict. Israel presents a unique case as soldiers are free to speak about their military experiences. It is therefore possible to study both violent acts against Palestinian civilians and acts of soldier resistance and refusal, at the individual and unit level. My dissertation draws on theories from political science, international relations, and social psychology to derive five sets of hypotheses that explain violent behavior against civilians. I will investigate the determinants of soldier violence and refusal to commit violence through an ethnographic study of Israeli combat soldiers, as well as through quantitative analysis of a database I will compile on violent events in the Second Intifada. By accessing the voice of perpetrators during violent conflict, I will gain insight into the sources of violence and resistance, and the processes through which they come about.

Alberto Aldo Marchesi

New York University, History

Geographies of Armed Protest: Transnational Cold War, Latin American Internationalism and the New Left in the Southern Cone (1966-1976).

[ project summary ]

In the 1960s, a period characterized by the gradual closing of political space in South America due to the upsurge of authoritarian regimes, New Left armed organizations emerged to embrace political violence and transnational strategies as the only path to achieve social change. My project examines the transnational militant political culture that emerged from this constriction of political space, socio economic crisis and increased social polarization. It argues that leftist political violence can not only be explained merely as a structural response to political and economic constraints; it is also a result of contingent cultural definitions articulated by a new political generation of activists inspired by the emergence of an intellectual New Left and new cultural meanings about youth rebellion held by middle class sectors. By tracking the historical genesis of the political ideas, clandestine practices, cultural affinities, and strong emotions that constituted this political culture, my project seeks to explain how this political generation, which emerged from the increased social mobilization of the sixties, ultimately embraced guerrilla war as the sole means to achieve social change in their countries in the early seventies. My project travels through different national territories and focuses on the participation of militants from different countries, in critical local events, to understand the gradual development of a transnational network of armed organizations and its subsequent political culture. It uses a transnational frame of analysis to examine a topic that has so far been examined exclusively in national or comparative perspectives. Methodologically, my project engages with the inquiries suggested by oral historians regarding the relation between subjective experience and historical events, and with the social movement field regarding explanations for the use of violence by social movements in their conflicts with the state, and the role of emot

Katherine Anne Mason

Harvard University, Anthropology

After SARS: An Ethnography of Public Health Campaigns in South China

[ project summary ]

In the 1950s and 60s, Mao Zedong launched a series of Patriotic Health Campaigns designed to educate the public and control infections through the mass mobilization of citizens. In these campaigns, millions of peasants and workers participated in vaccination and sanitation activities organized by “barefoot doctors” and their urban equivalents – even collecting rats and cleaning waterways by hand. In 2003, Chinese public health professionals revived some of these dramatic methods to contain the SARS outbreak. Global praise of these efforts has led to a resurgence of highly visible public health campaigns in South China since 2003. The proposed 12-month ethnographic study will investigate the lived experiences of public health professionals in the South Chinese cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen who design and implement this new generation of campaigns. I will use the cultural anthropological methods of discourse analysis, semi-structured interviews, life history interviews, participant observation, and event analysis to answer the following research question: how do national and global discourses of moral duty combine with personal career ambition to shape the moral experiences of Chinese public health professionals after SARS? Building on theoretical debates in the anthropology of science, the anthropology of public health, and the medical anthropological literature on moral experience, my research in these two cities is designed to result in the first full-length ethnography dedicated specifically to understanding the lived experiences of Chinese (non-clinical) public health professionals, as well as the first in-depth ethnographic investigation of China’s post-SARS disease control campaigns.

Lindsay Rose Mayka

University of California, Berkeley, Political Science

Designing Democracy: National Participatory Governance Frameworks in Brazil, Peru, and Colombia

[ project summary ]

Since the 1980s, countries throughout Latin America have passed national laws mandating the creation of participatory government councils (PGCs), which are formal institutional arenas that engage representatives from society in designing, approving, and monitoring public policy. PGCs devolve policymaking authority to societal actors and appear to limit the resources of politicians, leading to the fundamental question: why would rational politicians support a national PGC framework? More specifically, why do national politicians elect to establish a national framework for PGCs? And furthermore, in the cases where a PGC framework is established, when do national politicians reproduce this framework by strengthening the authority of PGCs? My project examines the cases of Brazil, Peru, and Colombia, and constitutes the first cross-national comparative study of national PGC frameworks in Latin America. I argue that rational politicians will only support legislation for the production or reproduction of PGCs when doing so benefits them in some way. Therefore, my research will examine the potential rationales that would lead national politicians to support a national PGC framework, and explores why these different rationales are salient in producing and reproducing a national PGC framework in some contexts but not others. My field research will involve three types of data collection: interviews with national legislators, party leaders, and PGC activists; gathering of archival materials on proposed PGC legislation; and collection of quantitative data on electoral politics and PGC implementation in Brazil.

Lena Mhammad Meari

University of California, Davis, Anthropology

Interrogating "Painful" Encounters: The Interrogation Encounter between Palestinian Political Activists and the Shabak

[ project summary ]

I intend to investigate the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from the viewpoint of the interrogation-encounter between Palestinian political activists and the shabak (Israeli General Security Service) during forty years of Israeli occupation to Palestinian territories (1967-2007). Since 1967 more than 650,000 Palestinians have been arrested and interrogated by Israel. This figure constitutes approximately 20% of the total Palestinian population in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and 40% of Palestinian males (Addameer 2007). Therefore, one cannot understand the Palestinian/Israeli relationship without understanding the conceptualizations and practices related to the interrogation-encounter. Based on one year of fieldwork in Jerusalem and Ramallah, this research project examines how the violent interrogation-encounter has shaped -and been re-shaped by- understandings of torture and pain perceived by Palestinian political activists and the Palestinian community they belong to, as well as the shabak and the state of Israel it represents. Specifically, the research examines Palestinian and Israeli conceptualizations of torture and pain, the strategies used to construct these conceptualizations, and their resulting practices within the interrogation-encounter. The interrogation-encounter is a revealing site for analyzing how Palestinians and Israelis have been mutually constituted throughout their conflict. While locally grounded in the historical-political context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the encounter that shapes Palestinians` and Israelis` systems of meaning and practices, this research addresses broader questions concerning violent encounters in colonial settings, the mutual constitution of disciplining and resistance technologies, and the multiplicity of social-cultural and political significations of torture and pain as well as the various agential practices exerted by them.

Marcos Alexander Mendoza

University of Chicago, Anthropology

The Political Ecology of Climate Change in Argentine-Patagonia

[ project summary ]

The proposed project will investigate how scientific discourses of climate change have transformed the social relationships of green capitalism in southwestern Argentine-Patagonia; specifically in Glaciers National Park (GNP) and the surrounding communities of El Calafate and El Chalten. I propose to spend twelve months conducting an ethnographic investigation into how the different social actors and groups comprising the region's green economy rearticulate their ecological practices and risk imaginaries to preempt the deleterious effects associated with climate change. I also examine the epistemic cultures of glaciologists from the Argentine Antarctic Institute (AAI) researching and modeling the mass-balance dynamics of glaciers in the Southern Patagonian Icefield, some of which intersect with GNP. This project forwards anthropological understandings of environmental politics, neoliberal capitalism, and the semiotics of ecological crisis. This project also contributes to scholarly and political debates concerning how climate change portends to disrupt the ongoing development and expansion of carbon-based global capitalism.

Maya Mikdashi

Columbia University, Anthropology

Conversion, the Politics of Secularism, and Personal Status Law in Lebanon

[ project summary ]

Conversion is usually understood as an act of faith. In Lebanon, the right to “change religions” is protected by the state, and citizens can and do convert their personal status in order to change the rights pertaining to their “private lives.” For example, in particular circumstances, citizens will “convert” in order to fall under the purview of a different divorce or inheritance law. Secular activists often read this practice of conversion as an injury to religious subjectivity, even though it might not always be experienced as such by “converts.” Through twelve months of ethnographic and archival research in Beirut, I will study the Lebanese personal status system through this mechanism of conversion, and through a political movement that seeks to add a “secular” personal status law. I suggest that such codification may lay the legal infrastructure for the emergence of a “secular sect” in Lebanon. By studying these Lebanese “conversions,” the religious and secular legal discourses addressing them, and the institutional terrains of the personal status system, I will contribute to theoretical debates on secularism, religion and what I take to be their Lebanese articulation, political sectarianism.

Rossio Motta

University of California, Davis, Anthropology

Translations Of Psychiatric Knowledge-Practices In Lima, Peru

[ project summary ]

This project will examine how bio-psychiatric knowledge travels from North to South and is translated into the practices of diverse actors within the Peruvian mental health system. Over the last three years, international and national groups have been demanding the “deinstitutionalization” of mental health care in Peru, a reform inspired by a “global” biological trend in psychiatry. I see the effects of deinstitutionalization as part of a medical apparatus—what I call the inner-asylum--that locates the control of “mental disorders” within the client’s body through individualized drug consumption. However, the dominant medical apparatus in Peru—from my viewpoint an outer-asylum--exerts external control over the patient’s body and locates it behind the hospital’s walls. I will analyze exchanges of psychiatric knowledge between Peru and the “Euro-American-North”, and their (also internally diverse) medical apparatuses as continuous processes of translation, in which knowledge-practices are constantly transformed and reshaped by the conditions in which they take place. This approach blurs the distinction between “local” and “foreign,” while making visible the changes that occur as a result of the current trend to reform psychiatric practices. Through fieldwork in Peru’s main psychiatric hospital (Hospital Víctor Larco Herrera) and surrounding governmental and non-governmental institutions, I will identify how diverse actors perform these translations, and how histories of previous exchanges and located conditions affect them.

Smoki Musaraj

New School, Anthropology

When and What is Corruption: A Case Study from Postsocialist Albania

[ project summary ]

In recent years, an emerging global anti-corruption campaign has defined corruption as a breach of a universal ethic of impersonal transactions. Albania is defined as one of the world's most corrupt countries; development agencies point to bribery and "cultures of gift and favors" as causes for its slow entry into capitalist markets. But what does "corrupt" mean in a society where informal practices have been considered historically as strategies for both circumventing state power and surviving economies of shortage? When and what is corruption in this former socialist country? This project posits an anthropology of corruption by inquiring into assessments of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of two instances of informal transactions: participation in the pyramid schemes of 1992-1997 and the world of gifts, bribes, and favors. The objectives of this research are to explore a) how notions of legitimacy of market transactions are contested by multiple local actors; and b) how gift and commodity forms of exchange are deployed in the context of postsocialist transition. My hypothesis is two-fold. First, both global discourse and policy with respect to corruption assume a universal framework of market rules whereas assessments of the legitimacy of illicit practices by residents, NGOs and media institutions in Albania suggest that corruption is not a universal language but rather subject to changing political economies. Second, local participation in practices considered by this global discourse as corruption needs to be understood in the specific context of postsocialist transition. Given the political economy of the Albanian continuing "transition," I hypothesize that residents deploy gifts and commodities interchangeably as ways of reclaiming agency in economic and political domains of interaction.

Graham T. Nessler

University of Michigan, History

The Struggle for Freedom in Santo Domingo and Saint-Domingue, 1789-1809

[ project summary ]

As the only successful slave revolution in world history, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) represented a fundamental challenge to colonialism and slavery in the Americas. The slaves and free people of color who destroyed the slaveholding French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue and created the independent nation of Haiti played crucial roles in defining and advancing modern concepts of “freedom” and “citizenship.” Nonetheless, scholars are only beginning to understand how these individuals interpreted and articulated the complex and conflicting political ideologies of the late eighteenth century. How did those who were most abjectly denied any semblance of “liberty” and “equality” themselves understand these concepts? How were these ideas transmitted among both the free and the unfree across colonial and imperial boundaries? In the Haitian Revolution, “emancipation” was not a singular event but rather a complex process that was fraught with ambiguities and contradictions. These conflicts are at the center of my comparative study of Saint-Domingue/Haiti and the neighboring colony of Santo Domingo (the modern Dominican Republic). Santo Domingo and Saint-Domingue were part of an interconnected history in which struggles against slavery in one colony were closely intertwined with similar battles in the other. I will conduct research in three major French and Spanish archives, focusing on two principal types of sources: correspondences composed by and to former slaves who attained positions of leadership in both colonies; and notarial records that document individual struggles to gain and defend freedom during this period. These documents contain invaluable traces of the voices and thought of slaves and former slaves, and I will use them to test my hypothesis that the political ideologies and discourses of slaves and free people of color profoundly shaped the complex and contradictory forms that emancipation took in both Santo Domingo and Saint-Domingue.

Cam Nguyen

University of California, Berkeley, Area and Cultural Studies

Canonizing The Tale of Kieu: The Construction of a Vietnamese Classic

[ project summary ]

My dissertation examines the process whereby Nguyen Du’s pre-modern verse narrative The Tale of Kieu became canonized as the Vietnamese national poem. The Tale of Kieu was moderately popular during the nineteenth century but it was only in the 1920s, during the era of French colonialism, that it came to be “naturalized” as the embodiment of the “Vietnamese soul.” Using methods from the sociology of literature, my dissertation will explore how struggles over the growth of Vietnamese nationalism, the institutional development of a modern education system and the emergence of the field of modern literary history shaped the canonization of the poem. To demonstrate the instability of its “nationalist character,” it analyzes bitter debates over the meaning and significance of the poem during eras marked by colonialism, socialism, American military occupation and post-socialist transition. Finally, the dissertation will consider whether textual features of The Tale of Kieu may, indeed, play some role in its remarkable durability as the “national poem” under radically different Vietnamese political regimes.

James David Nichols

State University of New York at Stony Brook, History

"Afronorteamericanos in Tamaulipas and Coahuila: Informal Empire, Freedom, and Identity in Northern Mexico, 1829-1895"

[ project summary ]

Rapid and jarring changes wracked the frontier states of Tamaulipas and Coahuila y Nuevo León from 1829, the date of Mexican emancipation, until 1895, when the frontier at last became incorporated into both the Mexican state and the transnational economy. My project focuses on the presence of African Americans (Afronorteamericanos) in this area to help us to understand better these changes in the North of Mexico. Their presence is significant for several reasons. First, they made up one part of a larger migration process taking place on the Mexican frontier. In the nineteenth century, this area promised liberty and social fluidity to migrants from both central Mexico and from abroad. Second, the way that Afronorteamericanos integrated into the Mexican nation illuminates the process of ethnic integration in frontier societies. The questions of whether their integration differed from other ethnic minorities at the frontier and whether an Afro-Mexican identity was even possible for these refugees informs a portion of my research. Third, Afronorteamericans were harbingers of an expanding empire of cotton and sugar closing in on the Mexican frontier in the nineteenth century from both the Caribbean and the U.S. South. I want to research how African American freedom in Mexico resisted the expansion of this empire. In my research I shall rely on extensive municipal archives looking at documents that recorded race—particularly army registers, hacienda registers, citizenship archives, baptismal records, and marriage certificates—in order to trace the African American presence in northern Mexico. These documents will also grant me an insight into how these subjects interacted with the Mexican state and local Northern Mexican cultures. We still have very little evidence of the Afronorteamericano’s history at the frontier, although both Mexican and U.S. historians have long known of their existence.

Elayne M. Oliphant

University of Chicago, Anthropology

Signs of an Unmarked Faith: Cultural Practices of Discreet Catholicism in Paris

[ project summary ]

Processes of "dé-Christianisation" have, for some time, been a taken-for-granted fact of modern French social life. In the context of this "disappearance," however, Catholic symbols remain an undeniable characteristic of Paris’ cultural resources, including museums, monuments, markets, homes, streets, and skylines. This paradoxical image of a Catholicism that cannot be found but is everywhere felt forces the question: if the disappearance of Catholic practice in France is a foregone conclusion, how is it that Catholicism remains a significant dimension of social life? I believe Catholicism persists and is reinvented as a category of identification whose religiousness may be deemphasized within the social fabric of the Fifth Republic. I will rely on the native category of “discretion” as a frame through which to explore contemporary practices and experiences of Catholicism in Paris—the historical and contemporary site of production of France’s Republican ideal. Against those who declare the success of de-Christianization, I argue that current trends may be more usefully understood as reflecting a reformulation of the Roman Catholic faith through practices that make this category into an unmarked component of a “Republican” or “French” identity. I will show how this reformulation and unmarking occur by identifying the spaces and times in which Parisians conjure Catholicism or make it disappear in two fields of practice. First, I will chart the marking of Catholic symbols in Paris’ churches, museums, and homes as “cultural” as opposed to “religious,” and explore how these processes produce “cultivated” forms or tastes. Second, I will attempt to clarify what a “discreet” religiosity looks like by observing how Catholicism is expressed within and outside of Paris’ strictly Catholic spaces. Finally, I will show how the “unmarked” may be revealed by investigating what Catholicism means to those who are explicitly situated outside of its identity.

Amrita Pande

University of Massachusetts, Sociology

Commercial Surrogate Mothering In India: Nine Months Of Labor?

[ project summary ]

In this study of surrogate mothers in India, I introduce the concept of “sexualized care work” to describe a new type of reproductive labor emerging in some parts of India – commercial surrogacy – that is similar to existing forms of care-work but is stigmatized, among other reasons, because of its parallels with sex work in public imagination. How do the curious features of this new kind of 'labor' affect the 'laborers'? I use oral histories of the surrogates in a clinic in Anand, a city in the western Indian state of Gujarat, to examine the accounts they give, justifying their work and resisting stigma. Further, through participant observation at the clinic and in-depth interviews with the medical professionals, couples hiring the surrogates and the families of the surrogates I explore the structural inequalities inherent in commercial surrogacy as well as the surrogates' micro-level resistance; whether at the level of discourses and narratives or in their lived-experiences.

Maya K. Peterson

Harvard University, History

Technologies of Rule: Empire, Water and the Modernization of Central Asia, 1860s-1940s

[ project summary ]

My dissertation uses an environmental historical approach, with a focus on water in particular, to investigate efforts by the Russian Empire and Soviet Union in the late-nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries to control Central Asian lands and peoples and develop a modern and civilized society on the frontiers of the empire. Tsarist and Bolshevik officials saw development projects such as canals and dams as a means of bringing civilization through superior European technology to this Asian part of the empire, yet on the ground these projects often embodied the ambivalences and tensions of modernity in the multiethnic Central Asian frontier region. By focusing on the sites of specific projects in the Central Asian landscape, the dissertation aims to illuminate Central Asian history at a regional and local level, rather than the view from Moscow. For this reason I plan to utilize extensively the central state archives of the Central Asian republics of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. Yet my work also engages larger debates in Russian and Soviet history. By bridging the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, often taken as a dividing point, this dissertation will highlight often overlooked continuities between the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, thus contributing to a key debate in the field of Russian history on the imperial nature of the explicitly anti-imperial Soviet Union. It also places the attempt to modernize Central Asia within larger Eurasian and global contexts, emphasizing both Russia's place in an increasingly modern and global world, and Central Asia as a coherent geographical and cultural region that transcends the political boundaries that currently divide the region on both physical and mental maps. It will contribute to studies of Russian and Central Asian history, comparative empire and modernity, and the growing fields of environmental history and water sustainability.

Natalie Hannah Porter

University of Wisconsin, Madison, Anthropology

Threatening Lives: Controlling Avian Flu in Vietnam's Poultry Sector

[ project summary ]

Bird flu threats are provoking global health organizations and the Vietnamese government to standardize poultry production for “biosecurity” purposes, thus reforming an industry historically dominated by small-scale rural farms. My dissertation project will use comparative ethnographic research at three sites of avian influenza management in Vietnam to examine the following research questions: How are expanding global health efforts against avian influenza restructuring poultry economies, while simultaneously creating new boundaries between humans and animals? How do farmers cope with these changes in their everyday production practices, and in dialogue with global health policies and practitioners? This study (1) expands investigations of epidemics by examining emerging pandemics, a recent but increasingly central global health concern, (2) further problematizes the concept of “risk” in social science by attending to its growing role in organizing transnational relationships and local boundaries between nature and culture, and (3) provides a rich ethnographic account of how local human-animal relations impact, and are impacted by, global health and economic patterns. Using participant-observation, interviews, and epidemiological data analysis, I will show how the lived realities of poultry production intersect and collide with national development goals and expanding global efforts against pandemics. This research will address broad issues of anthropological concern surrounding the construction of Self and Other by exploring the intersection of global health governance, the articulation of pandemic risks, and the transformation of human-animal relations.

Danielle Elise Resnick

Cornell University, Government

Encompassing Brokers and Political Entrepreneurs: Party Linkages to the Urban Poor in African Democracies

[ project summary ]

Why and when do opposition parties in sub-Saharan Africa win the electoral support of the urban poor in the continent’s major cities? This question is particularly relevant given that the strength of opposition parties is often a key indicator of democratic consolidation. In Africa, democratization has been accompanied by an explosion in urban population growth and poverty. My dissertation addresses the impact of the urban poor on the region’s democratic landscape through quantitative analyses at the pan-African level and sub-national field work in key cities in Senegal and Zambia. While these are amongst the region’s most urbanized democracies, the main opposition party in each country has exhibited disparate success in appealing to the urban poor. My research questions common claims in comparative and Africanist scholarship that the urban poor are entirely quiescent and that voting patterns purely reflect assessments of economic performance or an ethnic calculus. Rather, I hypothesize that understanding opposition party victories in African cities requires examining the structure of linkages between the urban poor and the existing ruling party. Where there is an organization representing the interests of a majority of the urban poor, a de-facto broker exists to channel this sector’s demands to the ruling party while simultaneously providing the latter with a targeted constituency to whom clientelist benefits can be narrowly distributed in exchange for votes. Where multiple organizations represent the urban poor without a unified voice, a window of opportunity exists for political entrepreneurs and their opposition parties to emerge with a platform oriented to programmatic issues that win over a broader segment of the urban poor during elections. By studying a sector that has received scant attention in African politics and focusing on cities as a unit of analysis, this research helps refine existing understandings of democratic politics in Africa.

Lindsey Jeanne Reynolds

Johns Hopkins University, Public Health

Vulnerability, Eligibility, and the "OVC:" The Local Lives of Policies and Categories

[ project summary ]

As HIV/AIDS has become a foremost public health concern, HIV/AIDS programs as a form of development aid offer entry points to study shifting ideas about eligibility, vulnerability, and risk. Drawing on my combined training in public health and anthropology, I seek to apply a critical perspective to the roles of public health-as-development programs. My research focuses on the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and its decision to restrict funding for "orphans and vulnerable children" to children directly affected by HIV/AIDS. Using ethnographic methods, I will follow policymakers in the U.S. and South Africa, NGO officers, and families claiming entitlements in a community in KwaZulu-Natal to see what becomes of a policy as it travels between Washington and South African communities. My research proceeds from concerns about how a policy decision that defines the ambiguous and contentious category of the "OVC" is articulated, implemented, and co-opted; how the category of "OVC" is constructed; and how it is mapped onto the lives of children and kinship networks. My research is framed around three problematics: technologies of health and development; categories of eligibility based on ideas about orphans, childhood, and kinship; and theoretical trajectories around medicalization and subjectivity. I take the implementation of the PEPFAR policy as a site for examining the politics of the OVC category and how it is shaped by negotiations between forms of knowledge, expert discourses, and local, national, and international politics. I am interested in understanding how, in addition to restricting services, the use of the category re-organizes ideas about vulnerability, family, and childhood. I will also attend to the ways that an ambiguous and changing category is employed by individuals in defining themselves, in coping with illness and loss, and in negotiating access to services.

Sarah Anne Reynolds

Cornell University, Economics

Intergenerational Family Dynamics and Transfers in Salvador, Brazil

[ project summary ]

Within the field of economics, intrahousehold allocation is traditionally modeled between a husband and a wife. To make the model more appropriate for the context of the developing world by expanding the intrahousehold bargaining model to an intergenerational level, I analyze the relationship between adolescent mothers and their mothers with respect to transfers directed at improving the welfare of the adolescent's baby. Both women respond to a household survey consisting of personal and consumption data, and an experimental Vickrey auction reveals each individual's valuation of a product for the baby. The bargaining process is directly observed as they re-answer sections of the survey together. Joint valuation is also revealed when the purchasing decision is made collectively. Policy implications relate to the effectiveness of targeting transfers toward a female household head or a teenage mother. The NGOs Associacião Crianca e Familia and Associação de Moradores Joanes Leste will facilitate research in various neighborhoods of Salvador.

Kari L. Shepherdson-Scott

Duke University, Art History/Architecture

Utopia/Dystopia: Japan's Image of the Manchurian Ideal

[ project summary ]

My dissertation expands and enriches the discourse of Japan’s complex colonial relationship with Manchuria in the 1930s through an examination of how Japanese visual cultures produced in and about Manchuria imaged this vital region as a utopian space ripe for Japanese exploitation. I will examine the visual production of a utopian Manchuria through several different media. First, I will investigate the virtual space of photography and graphic magazines, with special emphasis upon renowned pictorialist photographer Fuchigami Hakuyo, his planning and editorial work for the graphic magazine Manshu Gurafu (Pictorial Manchuria), and the romanticized images produced by his colleagues of the Manchuria Photographic Association. Second, I will explore how these visual cultures informed exhibition practices, including Japan’s Manchuria pavilion at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Lastly, I will examine how the material and conceptual space of urban planning became a site where high modernist idealism of influential colonial figures such as Goto Shinpei converged with dystopic imperial practices. Ultimately, I will show how these different visual and spatial images intersected not only with each other and the Japanese imperial project but also with multifarious images of the lebensraum used in European reactionary politics. To expose this complex web of association, I will build upon Henri Lefebvre’s socio-spatial theory which critiques space – graphically produced, built, mapped or lived through associated images and symbols – as an active, material site in the articulation of state power. In the course of my analysis, I will expose the inherent paradox of such cultural production, showing how such images and spaces emerged from a multi-faceted vision of Japan’s idealized colonial relationship with Asia while obfuscating coercive, dystopic practices that accompanied Japanese imperial expansionism.

Richard Jean So

Columbia University, Literature

Coolie Democracy: US-Sino Literary and Social Reform, 1929-1952

[ project summary ]

My dissertation brings to light an unexamined literary network between American and Chinese writers in the early 20th century. I take as my focus two American authors, Nobel Literature Prize winner Pearl S Buck and major proletarian figure Agnes Smedley, and two Chinese writers, Lu Xun and Lin Yutang, two of the most important Chinese intellectuals of the 20th century. These writers, through literary exchange and political collaboration, helped to produce an unprecedented trans-Pacific leftist political and cultural community. This community, which also included figures such as WEB Du Bois and Lao She, spanned both American and Chinese languages and cultures, and created bonds between important social movements, such as the Shanghai-based League of Leftist Writers and American Cultural Front. Specifically, I organize my project around perhaps the most potent idea to emerge from this network of writers: “coolie democracy,” an alternative vision of Western democracy drawn from both American and Chinese cultural traditions. This cohort of intellectuals and their vision of “coolie democracy” powerfully shaped Chinese and American social development in the mid-20th century, rendering the two inseparable.

Michael Benjamin Thorne

Indiana University Bloomington, History

The Traumatic Mirror: Questions of Identity, Romanipe, and Romanianness during the Deportations of Roma under the Antonescu Regime, 1940-1944

[ project summary ]

My dissertation will focus on the deportations of approximately 25,000 Roma (Gypsies) to occupied Transnistria, perpetrated by Ion Antonescu's fascist regime in World War II Romania. A work of cultural history, the project will interrogate constructions of self and "Otherness" created in response to a period of intense trauma, and is based on a variety of sources: government records, police reports, and petitions by Romani deportees, their families, and ordinary Romanians. Research will be conducted principally within the National Archives, the archives of the Ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs (all in Bucharest), as well as briefer visits to regional archives. The National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania is providing me with institutional affiliation.

Rebekah K. Tromble

Indiana University Bloomington, Political Science

Framing Islam: Hizb ut-Tahrir's Transnational Call for a Caliphate

[ project summary ]

This project investigates the process by which the controversial transnational Islamic organization Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) successfully frames its message to resonate in highly diverse social and political contexts. While HT first established its base in the Middle East more than half a century ago, in recent years the organization has expanded its network throughout Western Europe and the former Soviet republics of Central Asia and now uses its network in Great Britain as its primary base for spreading its message across the globe. This ability to successfully build and expand its networks across regional boundaries presents an intriguing puzzle: Despite its tightly controlled and highly uniform ideology, HT has been able to translate its message in ways that resonate within very diverse social and political contexts. Thus, this project examines the process by which Hizb ut-Tahrir frames its message in two very different cultural environments—Britain and Kyrgyzstan. Grounded in scholarly literatures on social movements and collective action framing, I will employ both qualitative and quantitative methods to understand how HT shapes its message in hopes of uniting the global ummah under a single caliphate.

Benjamin Uchiyama

University of Southern California, History

The Culture of National Mobilization in Wartime Japan

[ project summary ]

This project argues that in order to understand the reasons why Japanese society supported the war one must also try to grasp the allure of empire itself in Japanese mass culture in the 1930s – its sense of romance, adventure, and wonder derived from the physical and symbolic violence building and sustaining an increasingly unwieldy imperium. I argue that the interactions in mass culture between the mass media and consumer-subjects as Japan mobilized for total war evolved into a modern-day celebration of carnival – to borrow Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the French medieval folk carnival challenging the official orthodoxy through laughter and grotesquerie. Carnival in wartime Japan was energized by new media genres and by mass consumption stimulated by the return of economic prosperity in the mid-to-late 1930s. There was therefore a double challenge to state orthodoxy in carnival. The first challenge was a silliness, irreverence, and grotesquerie in mass culture that clashed with the serious, moralistic, and forbidding emperor-system ideology. The second challenge was the persistence and even acceleration of mass consumption to the very end of the 1930s, in defiance of increasingly harsh attempts by state and civilian ideologues to impose a life of thrift and austerity. Yet both challenges also glamorized the imperialist project by forging new links between consumer-subjects and empire that, in some respects, bypassed the state as mediator. In this sense, carnival both undermined and reinforced the imperialist project by enriching and diversifying the inward-looking nationalistic rhetoric of total war. Carnival in mass culture, buttressed by technology and mass consumption, articulated a vision of war and empire with erotic-grotesque-nonsense sensibilities that sharply differed from state orthodoxy stressing patriotism, sacrifice, and ultranationalism yet, in the end, helped secure popular support for imperialism.

Tod S. Van Gunten

University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology

The Politics of Monetary Instability

[ project summary ]

The last thirty years of the twentieth century were a period of dramatic global monetary instability. States’ responses have varied widely, particularly in developing countries, resulting in policies that seem improvisatory, experimental and idiosyncratic. This dissertation seeks to explain the varied responses of developing countries to this uncertain environment. Understanding the politics underlying these policies poses an empirical and theoretical puzzle. Monetary and exchange rate policy do not seem to fit the conventional view of politics in which citizens pressure the state for policies that conform to their interests. Central bankers and other monetary decision-makers frequently hold advanced degrees in economics and conduct debates in terms that seem to portray these policies as “technical” issues above the fray of run-of-the-mill politics. On the other hand, monetary and exchange rate decisions can have important effects on the distribution of wealth both within and between countries. Given the high stakes, powerful social actors have every incentive to pressure state monetary institutions to comply with their preferences. Is the claim of economics to offer a science of monetary policy, then, a smokescreen for politics-as-usual? Or does economic knowledge exert an autonomous influence, shaping policy outcomes independently of political pressure? My hypothesis is that different configurations of economic knowledge, embodied in the training and experience that elites accumulate over diverse career paths and expressed in different formal and informal economic models, explain the varied policies that states have used to achieve monetary stability. This view suggests that policies should be seen as the outcome of a problem-solving process in which knowledgeable actors compete to determine the course of action of state institutions. I will compare the cases of Mexico and Argentina, examining the pattern of partial convergence followed by subsequent d

Joseph Wiltberger

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Anthropology

Alternatives to Migration: Place-based Practices in El Salvador

[ project summary ]

This project explores an emerging trend among organizations and rural communities in El Salvador to construct alternative options to migration in response to social conditions arising from the high rate of emigration. Such grassroots and community-based groups practice and advocate for alternatives to migration in diverse ways, such as through the development of community leaders, the positive formation of youth, co-operative productive activities and entrepreneurial ventures, and awareness campaigns about human rights and dignity. This research will investigate how the collective practices of these groups and communities attempt to re-work dominant and state-supported discourses that frame migration as the best viable option for young Salvadorans, and how they contribute to processes of place-making through their work. Using ethnographic methods, this research asks about the ways particular discourses, strategies, and place-based practices and identities are employed by these groups to appeal to young Salvadorans who negotiate their engagement with them in relation to competing discourses and practices. This project contributes to theories of migration, place, and identity in social movements, as well as knowledge about the collective action and migration of people of El Salvador.

Juan Eduardo Wolf

Indiana University Bloomington, Ethnomusicology/Music

Sounding Stereotypes: Musical Styles in the Social Poetics of Arica, Chile

[ project summary ]

The diverse musical practices of the border city of Arica question the stereotype that Chile is an ethnically homogeneous country. Focusing on issues of musical style, I will use ethnographic methods to analyze public performances rooted in the cultures of African, Aymaran, and European descendants. These performances include carnival processions, religious dancing, staged presentations for hire, and cueca competitions. Such displays both challenge and conform to stereotypes about each ethnic group and its national affiliation. Descendants of African slaves are often presumed to be Peruvian, while the Aymara are associated with Bolivia. An effective musical style reaffirms the group’s identity as well as gives these groups greater acceptance as Chileans in the eyes of the local population and the state, resulting in access to more resources. My use of the term ‘style’ draws from definitions in anthropology, musicology, and sociolinguistics that assume style springs from the mechanisms of social interaction in a particular culture. When multiple cultures come into contact, however, styles become multi-faceted, expressing inter-cultural dynamics in addition to intra-cultural ones. At the core of these dynamics are the essentialisms that groups make about one another and themselves. My work focuses on how groups and individuals use these stereotypes to change their musical styles of performance in order to deal with the pressures of nationalism. In demonstrating how nation-building is negotiated through musical performances by individuals, I contest other approaches to nationalism that suggest that only powerful elites are significant in this process. This project will appeal to those interested in the interplay between expressive culture, ethnicity, and nationalism.

Winnie Won Yin Wong

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Art History/Architecture

After the Copy: China, Dafen Village and the Hand-Painted Art Product

[ project summary ]

Since 1989, Dafen village, located outside the border of China's Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, has been transforming itself into the global production center for handmade oil paintings, supplying transnational retail and consumer markets with hand-painted versions of existing works of art, and more recently, original and custom-designed canvases. This dissertation utilizes a case study of Dafen village to historicize shifting conceptions of originality in a transnational frame vis à vis China's post-Mao liberalization. It traces the mobility of the copy in China's 20th century, examining how constructs of originality and copying are formed through a nexus of regulatory regimes and artistic cultures. Detailing its emergence in the transnational hand-painted art industry, the study examines how Dafen village is produced as a space for the mass-production of art, and shows how regulation, migration and export manufacturing operate as key spatial practices of the Chinese regulatory regime. Through analysis of Dafen village's diverse enterprises, networks, organizational structures, labor units, and training programs, I explore the hierarchies, categories, and market formations of artistic skill at Dafen village and show how imitation and innovation are skilled, de-skilled and re-skilled. In tracing transnational modes and markets of the copy, my study questions when and where the layering of origins becomes important to the consumption and production of the work of art in the global frame. Instead of asking what China reproduces, it asks, through what operations and in what conditions is originality made an unfixed, reproducible, and mobile "art product"?

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.