International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) > Competitions

2011 IDRF Program

Recipients

Ismail Fajrie Alatas

University of Michigan, Joint Doctoral Program in Anthropology & History

Traditional Bodies: Sufism, Knowledge Practices and the Making of the Modern Public

[ project summary ]

This project explores the conditions that enable a Sufi tradition with its spiritual legacy and original institutional form rooted in pre-modern societies, to thrive in modernizing urban settings. It attempts to address such a challenge by examining the Ba'alawi sayyids; a group of migrants in Indonesia from the Hadramaut valley of South Yemen, who has been acknowledged as descendants of Prophet Muhammad. It tries to understand how Ba’alawi scholars reconfigure their Sufi tradition, the Tariqa ‘Alawiyya through their interaction with Indonesian nationhood and Islamic reformism, which necessitated the observation of embodied practices involving Ba'alawi scholars and their students in the transmission of knowledge through time. The aim of this project is therefore (1) to understand how textual knowledge that makes up a religious tradition becomes embodied; and (2) to observe how the embodied knowledge enters into the larger public through other ways of interaction, such as various Sufi rituals that engage broader public. This requires an ethnographic approach that looks at different forms of knowledge practices as sites where the discursive tradition is transmitted, negotiated, transformed, manipulated through the interaction between scholars and students on one side and between them and the broader public on the other.

Benjamin Allen

University of California, Berkeley, Political Science

Implementing Environmental Protection: States, Private Interests, and Conservation in Brazil

[ project summary ]

Under what conditions are environmentally protected areas effectively implemented by subnational governments in Brazil? Despite their varying capacities to implement policies, subnational governments in developing countries such as Brazil have assumed greater responsibilities for environmental governance in recent decades. This leads to different rates of implementation in different regions of Brazil and elsewhere, and may reduce the effectiveness of conservation efforts. My study seeks to explain variation across states in Brazil in patterns of implementation of environmentally protected areas. Through a subnational comparative analysis of the adoption of management institutions and procedures to implement protected areas in six Brazilian states, I argue that the interactions between state agencies and non-state interest groups at subnational levels affect if and how these institutions are adopted, and the potential these institutions have to contribute to effective conservation of natural areas. To assess this argument, I will employ data published by the federal Ministry of the Environment and state agencies in Brazil, process tracing data from interviews with key actors and other observations, and original data that I will gather through a survey of protected area managers in all 26 Brazilian states. To carry out the necessary field work, I will live in Brasília from September, 2010, to September, 2011, and travel multiple times to the states of Amazonas, Bahia, Minas Gerais, Pará, Santa Catarina, and São Paulo. Completion of this study will be facilitated by my institutional affiliation with the University of Brasilia and contacts at regional universities.

Steven Christopher Alley

Columbia University, Sociomedical Sciences

Dengue Fever and Trash Collection in Brazil: Politics of Responsibility in Favelas of Rio de Janeiro

[ project summary ]

Dengue fever epidemics in Brazil are worsening, and are driven by entrenched poverty and political abandonment of the urban poor: inadequate trash removal in slums leads to environmental conditions conducive to dengue's spread. Unlike malaria, which is transmitted by mosquitoes that breed in rural freshwater, dengue is a disease of urban trash because its mosquitoes infest discarded bottles, cans and tires that accumulate in urban slums. An emerging dengue control strategy in Brazil promotes civil-state trash collection partnerships to remove container item refuse in poor neighborhoods. Although the poor are often held responsible for dengue in Brazil, and are criticized for resisting insecticide-spraying campaigns and home inspections that local inhabitants view as intrusive, innovative trash collection partnerships involve the urban poor in dengue control projects that structure new possibilities for public health citizenship. This ethnographic study will integrate theory and methods of public health and medical anthropology to investigate the politics of responsibility for dengue in Brazil within overlapping domains of public health and social activism. The study will answer the following three research questions. First, how does the intersection of structural factors and collective agency shape public health citizenship around dengue control in Brazil? Second, what are the cultural assumptions about the causes of dengue and where do they place responsibility for its eradication? Third, what is the relationship between socially marginal groups that participate in civil-state dengue trash collection programs, and groups that occupy existing power structures, such as state health authorities, NGOs, and international policy makers?

Samuel M. Anderson

University of California, Los Angeles, World Arts and Cultures

Celebrity, Violence, and the Mystic Arts in Postwar Sierra Leone

[ project summary ]

This cross-disciplinary study explores and critiques the tactics of cultural entrepreneurs appropriating militaristic mystic arts for the cultural and spiritual reconstruction of post-conflict Sierra Leone. The 1991-2002 civil war brought a decade of chaos that challenged many vital local spiritual practices, whether through desecration of sacred space, criminal acts perpetrated in the name of secret societies, or fatalities of ritually protected combatants. Hassan Jalloh, former military commander and devout Muslim, has emerged as an unlikely champion of religious and cultural heritage by rehabilitating his troops as performers of mystic arts. Channeling fame won in war, Jalloh now commands audiences through spectacles that blend messages of peace with both the titillation and the trauma of past violence. Using ethnography, critical videography, and archival research, this project illuminates how these performances mediate local religious practice, international war crimes law, a burgeoning media infrastructure, and the country’s painful memories.

Elizabeth Angell

Columbia University, Anthropology

The Seismic Cityscape: Earthquake Anticipation in Istanbul

[ project summary ]

My project asks how the expectation of a major natural disaster affects human-landscape relationships, and approaches this question through the lens of earthquake anticipation in Istanbul, Turkey--a city of some 13-15 million people located in an active fault zone with a history of devastating earthquakes. On August 17, 1999, a 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck the eastern edge of the Marmara Sea, about 80 kilometers away, killing tens of thousands of people and underscoring Istanbul’s vulnerability to a similar disaster. Through twelve months of ethnographic and documentary research, I propose to trace the contours and effects of earthquake anticipation in Istanbul, both as a technopolitical process that seeks to mold landscapes, buildings, and bodies into a state of preparedness, and as an affective relationship to time and space generated by the experience of dwelling in a seismically active landscape. The project will investigate how earthquake risk is produced as an object of knowledge by experts like seismologists, engineers and actuaries, but also through rumor, faith, and superstition; how earthquake anticipation gains material and political effect through the activities of municipal officials, architects, activists, and other residents; and how the imagination of disaster shapes the everyday experience of life in the seismic cityscape. It will shed light on the role of earthquakes and earthquake anticipation in shaping the city of Istanbul's built environment and urban imaginary. Drawing on approaches from anthropology, archaeology, and science and technology studies, this project will contribute to the interdisciplinary study of disaster and the anthropology of contemporary Turkey.

Emily Lauren Baum

University of California, San Diego, History

Spit, Chains, and Hospital Beds: A History of Insanity in Modern China, 1898-1949

[ project summary ]

This project will investigate changing conceptions of mental illness in early twentieth century China. Beginning in the 1900s, Western missionaries introduced the first insane asylums to China, and the advent of this new institution was accompanied by evolving notions about the proper care and treatment for the insane, legal rights for mentally ill criminals, and the potential societal causes that had led to the psychological incapacitation of the individual. While previous studies on historical psychology in China have tended to stress the reasons why China’s experience with madness diverged from that of the West, my research will highlight the unique Chinese perspective on insanity as it evolved from the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. Through an investigation of police records, medical documents, textbooks, and other related archival materials, this project will seek to understand what “mental illness” meant to the Chinese of the early twentieth century—and how its attempted eradication fit into China’s modernization and national strengthening project.

Daniel Blocq

University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology

Formation of Armed Self-Defense Groups

[ project summary ]

How do rural communities respond to threats of insurgent violence during civil wars? In certain conflicts, insurgents employ indiscriminate violence against rural communities (Downes 2006; Humphreys & Weinstein 2006; Metelits 2010; Mkandawire 2002). In response to such violence, some communities create armed self-defense groups. By an armed self-defense group, I mean an armed group that is set up by community members on a voluntary basis to provide protection to their community against insurgent violence. The formation of armed self-defense groups is not uncommon in civil wars. Examples of conflicts in which armed self-defense group emerged include the civil wars in Algeria (Martinez 2000, p. 151), Peru (Kay 2001, pp. 751-752; Degregori 1999; Starn 1995), Sierra Leone (Hoffman 2007, p. 647) and Sudan (Young 2003, p 430). Within these wars, formation of armed self-defense groups has been uneven: some communities formed armed self-defense groups and others did not. In this project, I will investigate variation in the formation of armed self-defense groups within civil wars. I will conduct a comparative analysis of four communities located in the same province in South Sudan. During the civil war in South Sudan (1983-2005) all four communities experienced insurgent threats and low levels of government protection. Yet only two of the four communities decided to create armed self-defense groups.

Ariel Bookman

Northwestern University, English

Kenyan Fiction and Consumer Culture

[ project summary ]

Consumer culture now more than ever frames the experience of reading in the Global South. The ubiquity of advertising language, the increasing role of consumer products in self-definition, the demand for accessible entertainment, and the pressure of free market competition dramatically shape the status that the literary arts will have in Africa's future. The consequences to date have been both negative – as American bestsellers and self-help guides have squeezed African novelists out of local and international markets – and positive – as innovative publishers like Chimurenga (South Africa) and Storymoja (Kenya) have embraced new social media and marketing to transform African literary culture. Yet even as the United States, the UN, and NGOs like BookAid pour millions of dollars into literacy in developing countries, there is no clear understanding of how consumer culture affects the intimate tangle of relationships between author, reader and text. Without such understanding it is impossible to take advantage of consumer culture to secure a place for literature in Africa's future. Using Kenyan literature as my case study, my project will investigate how Kenyan authors, publishers, and readers creatively engage consumption in the process of making meaning from literature. I will conduct short surveys of book buyers in Nairobi, Kisumu, Eldoret, and Mombasa; longer interviews with Kenyan authors, publishers, and booksellers; and archival research on letters and memos in publishers' files. In particular, my research will examine the perceptions, habits, and associations that structure the consumption of literature. For instance, who buys books in Kenya and how do they shop for and consume them? How do publishers conceptualize the literary market? This study will produce needed data about book consumption and will help authors and publishers connect with potential readers more effectively.

Santiago Bucaram

University of California, Davis, Agricultural and Resource Economics

Modeling Policy Options for the Galapagos Fisheries: The Case of the Red Spiny Lobster

[ project summary ]

This dissertation will be focused in the development and calibration of an integrated bioeconomic model of the nearshore Galapagos fishing sector. This model will analyze the complex interactions between policy options, the economic incentives they generate, the decisions motivated by those economic incentives, and the effects of those decisions on the biological health of the marine resources of the Galapagos Marine Reserve (GMR). First, the model will structure what is known about the marine systems of the GMR, and also will help identify those components which are less understood. Second, the model will help comprehend the consequences of uncertainty over the marine resources and the effects of that uncertainty over policy choices. Finally, the model will be used to to evaluate the effects of different management frameworks taking into account spatial considerations, including impacts of policies aimed at one fishery that have spillover effects on others. Hence the main goal of this research is to design a flexible instrument that permits to analyze both a range of policies and design options so that stakeholders of the Galapagos Marine Reserve (GMR) can contemplate a wider spectrum of possibilities and have a basis from which to engage in policy discussions.

Ricardo Valente Cardoso

University of California, Berkeley, Urban Planning

The Crude Urban Revolution: Finance, Planning and Petro-Capitalism in Luanda, Angola

[ project summary ]

Luanda, the capital of Angola, is going through processes of intense urban transformation largely backed by oil revenues. Engaging in an in-depth analysis of this case, my project investigates the production of space in contemporary African cities, while scrutinizing the urban dimensions of Angolan petro-capitalism. The central argument is that processes of urban restructuring in Luanda mark the distinctive character of Angolan petro-capitalism, while defining the particular logic through which relations between economy, state and society are increasingly articulated in the production of urban space. Luanda's current processes of restructuring comprise what I call Angola’s crude urban revolution. Signifying the multiple ways in which Luanda is perceived, conceived and lived as a city shaped and transformed by crude oil, this notion evokes the proliferation of oil-backed investments throughout the city while considering the escalating unevenness of its bourgeoning urban society. In this project, I argue that finance and planning have emerged as two crucial dimensions of such paradoxical processes of urban restructuring. Moreover, I contend that these emergent urban dynamics reshape formations of inequality in contemporary Luanda. I pose three driving hypotheses. First, I hypothesize that reconstruction and urban development in contemporary Luanda have been made possible by a reinvigorated financing apparatus fundamentally backed by rising levels of oil extraction. Secondly and connectedly, I suggest that intense urbanization has been allowed and promoted by state reform, regulatory normalization and the internationalization of practices within an increasingly sophisticated urban planning apparatus. Finally, I argue that transformations in the apparatuses of finance and planning generate new forms of exclusion and segregation. In Luanda, inequality shapes and is shaped by new forms of producing urban space.

Constanza Castro Benavides

Columbia University, History

“As a Citizen of this City”: The Popular Political Culture of Urbanization, Bogotá 1880-1910

[ project summary ]

My dissertation investigates the political culture of the urban lower classes –mostly rural immigrants— that took form during Bogotá’s urbanization process. I am interested in understanding how a new popular political culture was shaped in Bogota by the very process of urbanization as well as by the political transformations brought about by the ascent to power of the conservative Regeneration Regime at the end of the 19th Century. I argue that the urbanization process, linked to the take-off of the agro-export economy and the simultaneous ascent of the Regeneration Regime, resulted in the profound transformation of the political culture of rural-urban immigrants, and had in turn, a dramatic impact on State institutions and practices. Historians have not examined the effects that the political regime and the persistence of rural and colonial discourses and practices had on the production of urban space. Nor have they studied how disputes over access to urban land and housing influenced the process of State formation. What was the popular conception of citizenship in Bogotá at the turn of the 20th century? Did colonial and republican political vocabularies continue to shape rural immigrants consiousness and actions during the urbanization process? How were ideas of honor, landownership, or the household tied to this conception? This project explores the links between material claims over the city, and political claims over citizenship, and how they met in a critical period in which political citizenship and property were inexorably linked, and when access to public space and citizenship was severely limited.

Hilary Chart

Stanford University, Anthropology

Improvising Capitalism: Emergent and Contested Forms of Entrepreneurship in Urban Botswana

[ project summary ]

This 12-month ethnographic project explores the wide-ranging and highly contested claims about who is and isn’t a “real” business person in urban Botswana today, as well as the diverse forms of entrepreneurial practice that proliferate here. As the government’s extensive micro enterprise (ME) promotion programs further restrict their definition of “proper” business, men and women across social strata who undertake very different activities nevertheless eagerly describe themselves as business people. By starting from these claims, I draw attention to the powerful forms of being associated with business in Gaborone, and expand understanding of doing business to include not only economic activities, but all practices supporting such claims. I ask what meaning business-related claims carry, what practices accompany these claims, and what effects—social, spatial, and temporal—these claims and practices ultimately entail. I answer these questions by organizing my research around three sets of social actors—ME promoters, “promotees” and other entrepreneurs, and street vendors—all of whom “do business,” but in very different ways. I employ a mixed methodology that involves institutional ethnography in ME promotion offices; in-depth semi-structured interviews with promoters, entrepreneurs and street vendors; Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and socio-spatial mapping of outdoor commercial activity in designated regions of the city; and participant observation with street vendors. Ultimately, I suggest that emergent forms of entrepreneurial identity and practice have made “business” into a meaningful category that organizes social life, urban space, and the way time is spent in Botswana’s capital city today. My project aims to broaden understandings of capitalism by attending to its socially meaningful forms of identification and material practices (above and beyond evaluation of economic outcomes), and by recognizing alternative capitalisms in the Global South.

Julia Chuang

University of California, Berkeley, Sociology

Scandals of the Absent: Migration, Morality, and the Politics of Departure in Rural China

[ project summary ]

In China, deepening market reforms have sanctioned the mass migration of 210 million peasants to cities, the largest single migration in world history. However, it is not those who move, but those left behind as others move around them, that make labor migration both possible and profitable. Since migrants lack substantive rights to cities, their mobility is underwritten by the affective support and agricultural earnings of left-behind spouses and kin. Seen from the standpoint of the immobile, departure is a site saturated with normativity surrounding migrants’ obligations to those left behind. Interactions between the mobile and the immobile produce a politics of departure, negotiating conditions of departure around logics of progress and obligation, and framing decisions to “leave to earn” or to “return with fidelity.” This politics of departure transforms migration into a moral project, making mobility for some a debt to be repaid, for others a project of self-improvement with failure in return. In impoverished Butuo County in southwest China, scandal surrounds the absent. A local myth told among left-behind kin concerns village men who are said to have sold their own kin into bonded labor for profit. Blame for a growing number of unmarriageable bachelors tied to the land of their fathers is assigned to exogamous brides marrying out. Meanwhile, in nearby, prosperous Qianwei County, gossip focuses on prematurely returned migrants who have returned home after “failed” migrations. Villagers valorize the absent, and scorn those returned who are seen as freeloading off their elderly farming kin at home. Through a comparative ethnography of the politics of departure in Qianwei and Butuo, this dissertation provides an analysis of the political economy of migration from the standpoint of those left behind, and reveals migration to be irrevocably shaped by the moral debts, expectations, and obligations which make departures possible.

Dale June Correa

New York University, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies

Testifying Beyond Experience: A Diachronic Study of Tawatur in Islamic Legal Theory and Theology, 10th-14th Centuries

[ project summary ]

My dissertation will use understudied manuscript materials in Tashkent, Bukhara, and Samarkand, Uzbekistan, and in Istanbul, Turkey, to explore how medieval Muslim scholars constructed a uniquely Islamic theory of knowledge. This epistemology resulted in the unquestionable historical validity of the Qur'an and statements from the Prophet Muhammad. It is exemplified by the development of the testimonial concept "tawatur," which describes the transmission of a statement by a sufficient number of agents over time and space so as to preclude error and agreement on a lie, and guarantees knowledge for the recipient of the statement. For this research project, I will examine works of Islamic legal theory and theology for theoretical debates about tawatur, and Qur'an commentaries, histories, and belles-lettres for doctrinal applications of tawatur. This project will complement research I have undertaken in the past year at the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul, Turkey, that aims to construct a more coherent picture of the intellectual relationships among medieval Muslim scholarly networks inside and outside of the region known as Transoxania (present-day Uzbekistan). My work on intellectual and scholarly networks will allow me to trace the development of tawatur as an epistemological concept, and to examine the influence of Transoxanian Islamic thought in more central Islamic areas such as Iran and Iraq. By utilizing my Arabic and Persian language abilities and experience in reading manuscripts, and by studying Transoxania within a framework that recognizes the area as geographically peripheral but intellectually central, I intend to begin to fill the gap that is pre-modern Transoxania created by Russian Studies and Middle Eastern Studies scholarship. Concurrently, my project will bring in novel approaches to epistemology and testimony from the field of philosophy, contributing to the development of an Islamic Studies conception of "verstehen."

Lauren Coyle

University of Chicago, Anthropology

Dual Sovereignties in the Golden Twilight: Law, Land, and Labor in Ghana

[ project summary ]

How does the colonial legacy of two parallel legal systems – one ostensibly customary, the other under the jurisdiction of the state – frame contemporary nationhood in Ghana, and, in particular, the often violent conflicts over property regimes that govern the ownership and extraction of resources in its neoliberal economy? How does that legacy register tensions and aspirations in postcolonial citizenship, sovereign government, environmental politics, and law in this African postcolony? I will address these questions through an ethnographic investigation in selected communities affected by large-scale surface-mining for gold in the heavily affected areas of Tarkwa, Kenyasi, and Obuasi. Each of these locations is undergoing profound transformations in kinship structures, modes of labor, and patterns of political authority amidst intensifying conflict and an apparent lack of political and legal redress – through traditional or state venues. I also will study the activities of relevant governmental bodies (principally, commissions and courts) and related civil society groups. In so doing, I aim to draw upon and contribute to seminal work on land and labor in Ghana; the larger literature on mining and social transformation in Africa; and the growing body of anthropological and social theoretical scholarship on the uneasy relationship between the legal/illegal and licit/illicit, particularly in postcolonial settings.

Felipe Fernandes Cruz

University of Texas at Austin, History

Flight of the Steel Toucan: Culture and Technology in the Brazilian Airspace

[ project summary ]

This project is a history of aviation throughout twentieth century Brazil. It spans from 1906, when a Brazilian national claimed to have invented heavier than air flight, to the present, where Embraer, a Brazilian aircraft manufacturer, has come to be one of the largest companies in the aerospace market. It will simultaneously explore the history of aviation technology, culture and state policy. In doing so it will illuminate the larger processes of territorialization, industrialization, state building and technological innovation in a developing nation. In exploring the history of technology, this project challenges some basic assumptions about technology in Latin America. For instance, unlike a lot of the literature on the technology and aviation which assumes that developing nations always import technology, my project historicizes technical innovation and the generation of new technologies in Brazil. On the cultural front, it explores early aviation as a gentlemanly sport and leisure activity, and its popularization due to extensive efforts by the state. It will show how aviation culture played an important role in the development of Brazilian aviation. Here it will also make an incisive new contribution, showing how social circles involved in promoting aviation throughout the Brazilian countryside actually influenced state policy and even technological research itself. Finally, this dissertation will also explore how the state has used aviation to control its airspace. A country with vast and sparsely populated frontiers, Brazil was a late industrializer that lacked any substantial transportation networks. Much of its process of territorialization (the mapping, controlling and settling of territories) was done by air rather than rail. This dissertation will analyze how such aerial conquest of the frontiers differed from other cases, and how it affected people previously living beyond the reach of the federal state.

Aryo Danusiri

Harvard University, Anthropology

Arab Saints and Sufi Bikers: Urban Circulatory Forms of A New Islamic Movement in Indonesia

[ project summary ]

A striking new phenomenon in Indonesia since the fall of President Suharto (1998) is the heightened public visibility of different Islamic groups, which vie with each other for attention in the national capital, Jakarta, and elsewhere with increasing boldness. Of particular interest are the Sufi-oriented voluntary study groups led by young scholars of Arab Hadrami sayyid descent. Since 2006, these groups have weekly unleashed lavish multimedia performances on Jakarta’s streets, taking advantage of the perpetual traffic jams by engaging passers-by and halting cars. These motorcades move across and around Jakarta’s roadways, parks, and other public places, as well as mosques and tombs, attracting tens of thousands of young adherents. The followers of this movement are highly mobile, using motorbikes, communication technologies, and Internet. Remarkably, these weekly events celebrate mawlid or the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, which, until recently, was an annual event sponsored by the State and celebrated through a range of vernacular religious rituals. It unsettles the secular status of urban public spaces and worries many self-identifying secularist Indonesians. By focusing on the critical practices of these Islamic youth groups in assembling various circulatory forms, I will examine the ways in which these groups invoke their ‘right to the city,’ remaking urban-sacred networks and cultivating new subjectivities. How do these practices of circulation shape religious experience and address the political interests of the participants? What tactics do study groups utilize to navigate the spatial, social, and political landscapes of Jakarta? What kind of local, national and transnational networks do they have to support this strategy of preaching? By posing mobility as an interface of urban tactics, moral discipline and citizen formation, I contribute to the emerging theorization of religion, new media, the urban and Islamic youth movement in the global south.

Jocelyn Beth Dautel

University of Chicago, Psychology

The Cost of Conflict: Children’s Reasoning about Ethno-Religious Identity in Northern Ireland

[ project summary ]

Ethnic and religious conflict is an unfortunate, yet prominent, aspect of society. Research on the development of social categorization in childhood can inform our understanding of the nature of social bias in adulthood, and how it may be prevented. I plan to pursue a research program exploring the development of young children’s social reasoning based on ethno-religious identity in Northern Ireland. One series of questions in this research program will assess children’s beliefs about the stability of group membership over time. A second will assess children’s social preferences and behavioral evaluation of others based on their social category membership. The goal of this research is two-fold. First, research on the developmental origins of prejudice may be critical in both understanding and preventing segregation and violence in a society with a long history of conflict. Second, this research will offer theoretical insight into the nature of children’s social group formation and early in-group preferences more generally. I will employ quantitative methods in developmental psychology to draw empirical conclusions about children’s cognitive and social reasoning about category membership and social group division, with an eye towards how such processes may be malleable as a result of exposure to different environments.

Muriam Haleh Davis

New York University, History

Development and Decolonization: European Integration and the Constantine Plan in Algeria, 1958-1962

[ project summary ]

My dissertation studies French development in Algeria from 1958 to 1961 in light of decolonization and European integration. It focuses on the Constantine Plan, which was an attempt to develop Algeria's political, social, and economic capacities. The victory of Keynesian economics and the gospel of industrialization after WWII, along with the beginnings of European integration, necessitated a serious rethinking of France’s role as a colonial power. Yet rather than look at development as a benevolent promise or a thinly veiled program of oppression, my dissertation will connect colonial development to shifts in the political economy of Europe and the creation of the European Economic Community. While the Constantine Plan is often viewed as a failed attempt to raise economic productivity, I will place development in the context of France’s repeated attempts to recast its role as an imperial power, which can be traced back to the creation of the French Union in 1946. Following, my dissertation will look at the ways in which the Constantine Plan helped institute a geographical imaginary that would merge Algeria and France in a common framework known as EurAfrica. The advocates of EurAfrica claimed that material productivity would lead to social harmony as racial distinctions would be softened by the unifying force of the market economy. Thus, development not only altered the distribution of material resources in Algeria, it also produced new understanding of human difference. My dissertation will trace how colonial administrators and local populations engaged with development in order to articulate understandings of racial categories, political legitimacy and economic orthodoxy, all of which played important roles in the decolonization of Algeria. In so doing, it will also shed light on the policies of the independent Algerian nation-state, which adopted elements from the Constantine Plan despite proclaiming an absolute break from the colonial period.

Devon Margaret Dear

Harvard University, Inner Asian and Altaic Studies

Statistics on the Steppe: Illicit trades and Market Governance in a Chinese – Russian borderland, 1860 – 1921

[ project summary ]

My dissertation examines the transformations in the regulation of illicit trade and economic crime across the eastern Mongolian portion of the Russian-Chinese border from the period of 1860 to 1921, during which both were a persistent and widespread concern for the Qing and Russian empires. Although no studies on contraband between these states exist, preliminary research has demonstrated that illicit trades ranged from counterfeiting and illegal money lending to the smuggling of weapons and bio-resources. Disputes over trade and natural resource use forced the various administrations along the frontier - Chinese, Russian, and the semi-autonomous Khalkh-Mongolian and Buryat-Mongolian administrations - into contact with one another, as each negotiated competing conceptions of market regulation. What ensued was the intersection of not only multiple legal regimes, but also of quantitative regimes – the numerical calculation of resources, production, and taxation. Preliminary research has led me to approach regulations in Mongolia as an ecology of economic theories and practices, which converged at key points to produce knowledge about Mongolian trade that was both specifically economic and quantifiable. Therefore, rather than asking how the abstract entities of “state” and “economy” interacted, I examine how the development of new quantitative methods themselves transformed both Russian and Chinese economic practice. The National Archive of the Republic of Buryatia in Russia, to which I have conducted two research trips, contains a wealth of hitherto relevant and unexamined sources. Although economic historians have produced numerous studies of Chinese and Russian economic growth and decline, mine will be the first to explore the relationship between efforts to manage the economy and to make it legible through quantification. By examining this process in a borderland, my project also sheds light on the interconnected histories of economic modernity in Russia and China

Michael Jason Degani

Yale University, Anthropology

The City Electric: Infrastructures and Ingenuity in Dar es Salaam

[ project summary ]

After two decades of pro-market reform, electricity in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania has become less reliable and more expensive than ever. This project examines how residents, bureaucrats, and freelance electricians close the service delivery gap by devising informal channels of electricity distribution and their effects on the everyday rhythms of urban life. Through this study, I will analyze how urban Tanzanians construct a cultural ethic of ingenuity in order to access public goods in the absence of reliable institutions.

Anatoly Detwyler

Columbia University, Area and Cultural Studies

Networks of Exchange: Propaganda and Information Society in Modern Chinese Literature

[ project summary ]

In focusing on the emergence of literary propaganda as a central site of information management, my dissertation will explore the development of a modern, transnational information state in China between 1920 and 1960. Along with news media, literature constituted a crucial vector in states' involvement with information. The confrontation between state institutions devoted to managing information (including both censorship and propaganda) on the one hand, and the urban media environments and readerships on the other, precipitated both new literary sensibilities regarding the production, circulation, and exchange of information, as well as new modes and genres of writing, such as socialist realism and the spy novel. A central figure in the linkage of literature to information is the prolific author, Mao Dun (1896-1981), who throughout his career remained keenly aware of new practices involving information. By examining the institutional backdrop to the production and circulation of the works of Mao Dun and other Chinese authors, as well as two key Japanese propagandists in China, I explore how literature simultaneously engaged in and reflected a new paradigm about knowledge work as both a form of labor and a textual object. Historically, such literature represented negotiations between new figures of information labor, embodied by the propagandist working for the Nationalist government’s Propaganda Bureau,, the official censor, or the Japanese authors (J: jugun sakka; C: congjun zuojia) embedded within the imperialist occupying forces in the Chinese mainland. By identifying and following the emergence of information-related practices in modern Chinese propaganda literature, my research will combine disciplines of institutional and sociological historiography, close textual analysis, and new media and print culture studies to contribute to our understanding of the development of a Chinese information state.

Barry Driscoll

University of Wisconsin, Madison, Political Science

Two Chiefs, One Queen: The Politics of State Capacity in Africa

[ project summary ]

State capacity is one of the most important variables in social science. It has been used to explain violence, democracy, and wealth. Although scholars have developed explanations for why capacity varies across states, scholars have been blind to how, in an era of decentralized governance, meaningful variation in the capacity to govern in developing states is often not between states but within them. In African political science in particular, conventional wisdom holds that governments are effective in the center but less so in the periphery. My dissertation illustrates the fallacy of that assumption. Rather than strong in the capital and weak elsewhere, there are in fact pockets of effective government throughout the state in the developing world. Why? My dissertation investigates subnational variation in governing capacity in Ghana. Ghana is an excellent case study because the fact that it is one of the most stable, effective states in Africa makes its own uneven subnational capacity all the more puzzling. Through a mixed methods approach that combines cross-district statistical analysis with four case studies, using qualitative interviewing and quantitative survey methods, I develop and test a theory that grounds the effectiveness of political institutions in the legitimacy of those institutions. I isolate in particular the role boundaries play in structuring the legitimacy of a given district, in some cases producing districts that are not seen as legitimate and thus corruption becomes an available option, while on the other hand producing districts that are seen as legitimate, making corruption less of an available option. My dissertation seeks to advance our understanding of governing capacity in developing countries, shifting our focus from comparisons across states to comparisons within them. This is most appropriate, I argue, as decentralization and deconcentration has shifted many realms of governance downward.

Philippe Eugene Duhart

University of California, Los Angeles, Sociology

Between Bullets and Ballots: The Basque Peace Process in Light of the Northern Irish Experience

[ project summary ]

On a number of key dimensions—the intensity of violence, the military and organizational capacities of insurgents, and the depth of the cultural, social, and political roots of armed rebellion—the conflict in Northern Ireland long appeared more intractable than that in the Basque region of Spain. Yet a negotiated settlement was reached in Northern Ireland, while such attempts to end the Basque conflict have failed over the last decade. My project seeks to explain these divergent outcomes through a comparative investigation of the successful Irish and failed Basque peace processes, focusing on the decision-making of insurgent elites, the legitimacy struggles they must wage, and the structural and cultural fields that facilitate and constrain the transitioning of insurgent movements from violence to democratic politics. I argue that peace-seeking insurgents face three key sets of constraints: those stemming from the organizational structure of the insurgent movement; those imposed by state democratic structures and counterterrorist policies; and the ideological and moral barrier to “negotiating with terrorists” in democracies. I emphasize the interactive and dynamic nature of attempts to disengage from violence by showing how these structural and cultural factors not only constrain or facilitate political action, but are themselves shaped and reshaped by political action.

Madeleine Fairbairn

University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology

Exploring the “fictitious commodity chain” in Farmland: Impacts and Governance of Private Sector Farmland Investment in Brazil and Mozambique

[ project summary ]

The last two years have seen a rash of extremely large-scale land acquisitions in developing countries as foreign investors rush to acquire land throughout Latin America, Southeast Asia, the former Soviet Union, and Africa. The food price crisis of 2007-2008 ignited latent fears about the future availability of staple crops which, combined with the use of farmland as a hedge against inflation in the wake of the financial crisis, set off a wave of farmland investment which media commentators were quick to dub a “global land grab”. A new class of farmland investors, including private equity funds, hedge funds, and pension funds, are investing in agricultural land in record amounts, a trend whose impact has yet to be studied. My dissertation research will fill this gap by analyzing the constellation of financial actors which is coalescing around this wave of farmland acquisitions and the role of international and national-level land governance in mediating the penetration of these international capital flows. My research revolves around three research questions. 1) What is the emerging structure of the global chain in farmland investment? 2) What are the consequences of changing dynamics in international farmland investment on land use patterns at the national level? 3) What is the role of international and national land governance in mediating this reallocation of land resources? I propose to answer these questions through interview-based research with stakeholders in the farmland investment chain combined with in-depth case studies on the impacts of these investment trends for land use and governance in Brazil and Mozambique, two of the most popular investment locations in Latin America and Africa respectively. My research will contribute to both theoretical understandings of the globalization of land markets and practical knowledge about what policy approaches host countries can use to manage the impacts of this trend on domestic food security and land access.

Amelia Morel Fiske

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Anthropology

Representing Oil Damages: Evidence, Health, and the Environment in the Ecuadorian Amazon

[ project summary ]

In 1972, the U.S. based Texaco Corporation began oil production in the upper Amazon, operating for 20 years without any environmental regulations or public health guidelines. The result was the largest and most sustained oil disaster to date, for which damages are now being sought in a class-action lawsuit by the Ecuadorian people. This project examines how damages to health and the environment from oil development in the Ecuadorian Amazon are accounted for and translated into forms of evidence in order to be mobilized and acted upon in scientific, legal, and social arenas. The translation of damages into evidence by lawyers, scientists, advocates, and residents is significant because it is a means for making claims to truth, action, and reality. Over a twelve-month period, I will conduct community-based ethnographic research and document collection in order to investigate how the practices of measurement, documentation, and narration construct the reality of oil damages. This project contributes to anthropological scholarship on disaster and response, and draws on science and technology studies to examine the production of evidence and documentation practices of oil damages. By examining how evidence of oil damages is produced and mobilized in a multi-national case in the Amazon, this project also contributes to public and interdisciplinary academic knowledge about the human and environmental costs of oil development worldwide.

Mark Gardiner

Stanford University, Anthropology

Enriching Uranium: Technocrats and the Management of Namibia's Uranium Rush

[ project summary ]

Nuclear power is back on the energy policy agenda, thanks to concerns about carbon emissions and rising oil prices. For Namibia, this has meant massive new uranium mines funded by foreign investors: a uranium rush that has demanded expert technical management in order to ensure “good governance.” This ethnographic project will investigate how varied technocratic dispositions join with post-apartheid processes of state-building, discourses of “good governance” and the “resource curse” in Africa, and the particular nature of uranium to shape the management of Namibia’s “uranium rush.” The ethnographic object of analysis is therefore both Namibia’s technocratic community and the technical processes that they engage in while managing the uranium industry. The project will be based on 12 months of fieldwork in three key institutions involved in the uranium rush—the Ministry of Mines and Energy (6 months), Namibia’s Uranium Institute (3 months), and Rössing Uranium Mine (3 months)—as well as other sites of technocratic activity. The primary method will be participant observation at these sites, combined with in-depth interviewing (including life histories) and content and textual analysis of relevant documents and reports. These qualitative methods will be supplemented by cultural domain analysis and social network analysis. Combining these methods will allow me to fully characterize the different human and nonhuman actors and relations involved in the “social drama” of the management process. This research will contribute to the limited literature on what African states “actually are” and to anthropological understandings of technocracy, building on literature from science and technology studies on materiality and from anthropology on the production of expert subjects. It will do so by approaching “good governance” critically, examining the historically, culturally, and socially situated relations through which it is constructed.

Claudia Gastrow

University of Chicago, Anthropology

Grounding Citizenship: The Politics of Property in Post-conflict Luanda, Angola

[ project summary ]

Since the end of the Angolan civil war (1975 - 2002) urban housing has become one of the country’s prime sites of political tension. Even as the state seeks to build a million new homes by 2012, it has engaged in the destruction of existing urban housing, causing public protests in centres across Angola. The meeting of two processes has enabled this coupling of construction and destruction: firstly, the government's national reconstruction program, secondly, the 2004 legalization of urban private property. The apparent violence of government actions is often taken by Angolans and external observers to be at odds with the stated goal, namely the creation of a politically inclusive post-conflict polity. Using this seeming contradiction as a starting point, this project, based on eighteen months of ethnographic and historical research in Angola's capital, Luanda, will study urban residents' experiences of reconstruction and the introduction of the new property regime. In tracking how residents are adapting to the two aforementioned developments in various manners, such as registering their properties for the first time, moving to new urban areas, and reconstructing their homes, this project seeks to study the relationship between property, citizenship, and the (re)formation of political communities. In so doing, it aims to study how state authority and citizenship are constituted and made meaningful even under conditions that appear at odds with liberal notions of politics.

Brie M Gettleson

New School, Anthropology

The Politics of Femicide in Guatemala

[ project summary ]

This research investigates the effects of a gendered approach to violence in Guatemala by tracing femicide (defined most generally as the murder of women for reasons of gender) through the work of human rights organizations, institutions of the Guatemalan state, and women’s groups. Since the end of the 36 year-long war between the state and guerrilla groups, Guatemala has emerged as a global epicenter of an escalating femicide crisis, as identified by human rights organizations. Guatemala has one of the highest femicide rates in the world, but the murder rate for men remains far higher—so why is it the murder of women that is capable of garnering international attention? This research begins from the assumption that femicide not only measures the murder of women, but is utilized as a means to hold the Guatemalan state accountable for ongoing impunity by Guatemalan activists and international human rights bodies. This research hypothesizes that femicide is capable of politicizing violence in a way that a “gender-neutral” approach is not. Drawing from scholarship on feminist politics, violence, governance, and the post-war Guatemalan state, this research asks about the intentional and unintentional political consequences of a gendered approach to violence as a means of seeking accountability. Research will be carried out through twelve months of continuous ethnographic research in Guatemala consisting of media archival research, formal and informal interviews, and participant observation with NGOs and representatives of the Guatemalan government, beginning in July 2011.

Francis S. Goicovich

University of Texas at Austin, History

War, Politics, and Ritual in Colonial Borderlands of the New World: Spanish-Indian Conferences as Spaces of Negotiation and Cultural Hybridity (Chichimeca, Guarani, and Mapuche)

[ project summary ]

My dissertation project is at the same time a revisionist, comparative, and interdisciplinary study of the complex dynamics of three colonial borderlands of the Spanish Empire in America.The Chichimeca from northern New Spain, the Guaraní from the Paraguayan jungle, and the Mapuche of the forests of southern Chile and the pampas of Rio de La Plata were three native societies that challenged the Spaniards' military capacity in the New World. The successful resistance of these three cultures forced the Spanish Empire to implement a policy of agreements based on the recognition of their political autonomy and territories. My research focuses on the Spanish-Indian Conferences, interethnic councils that began among the Chichimeca, but reached a higher level of complexity among the Guaraní and Mapuche. The central hypothesis of this project is that these intercultural meetings were an instance of hybridity in which two cultural forms converged: Indian ritual and Spanish political protocol. As a revisionist study, this project problematizes the recent historiographical assertion that this policy of pacts mediated by gift-giving was born in French, British, and Dutch colonies, and was later borrowed by the Spanish. By contrast, I assert that it actually formed in the Spanish borderlands of the New World. This is a comparative study because it seeks to assess the successes and failures of the intercultural policies as they differed and converged along the borders of the Spanish Empire, and how the experiences of one region served to inform and shape the interethnic relationship in others. Finally, the interdisciplinary aspect of this study involves both a historical and discursive analysis of colonial documentation, and an interpretation of the material culture used in these Conferences through Interpretive Anthropology and Symbolic Archeology. Due to its interdisciplinary nature, my project requires working in both archives and museums.

Gregory Y. Goulding

University of California, Berkeley, Area and Cultural Studies

Modernism and Social Realism as Aesthetic Models in Post-Independence India

[ project summary ]

My project focuses on debates in Hindi literature and discourse over literary models, particularly Modernism and Social Realism, during the twentieth century following the independence of India. I examine these debates, and the formal problems of literature connected to them, through looking at the writing of Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (1917-1964), a Hindi writer known primarily for his poetry. Muktibodh thought and wrote widely on problems of literature and politics, and his work allows me to examine the way in which these debates influenced the development of new styles and literatures which would eventually transcend the terms of these debates. My research will be primarily archival, based out of New Delhi and Bhopal, with side trips to various small libraries in New Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh. I will be looking at literary and cultural journals from approximately 1940-1970, and examining the literary and cultural criticism and debates of the time. Furthermore, while in India I will be actively collaborating with scholars of Hindi, in part to prepare translations of the poetry and criticism of Muktibodh.

Francesca Grandi

Yale University, Political Science

Civilian Violence in Post-Conflict Environments: The Role of Politics

[ project summary ]

In Italy WWII ended in April 1945 but the violence did not. The literature does not consider post-conflict violence a puzzle, but rather a constitutive feature of societies emerging from war. Yet, the simple observation that killings in postwar Italy did not occur uniformly problematizes this perspective. Why were some areas distinctively more violent than others? Under what conditions did the violence subsume or resume over time? Existing accounts do not provide compelling answers to these questions and fail to look at the violence within a larger political context. By dismissing it as unproblematic the literature implicitly postulates that postwar violence follows the same logic that drives wartime violence. Yet, the dynamics that drove the killings in postwar Italy call for bringing post-conflict politics back in. The Italian case is particularly useful also because it presents patterns similar to those that we find today in countries emerging from war: the presence of a military occupier, a domestic government constrained by both economic disruption and allegiance to a much more powerful international ally, and the re-ordering of the political systems. A better understanding of post-conflict violence can further our chances of limiting it. Within this overarching motive, the present research has three specific aims. The first is to analyze patterns of post-conflict violence in post-WWII Italy. The second is to understand how violence intertwines with democratic consolidation in societies emerging from war. The third is to draw generalizable conclusions about the interaction between violence, democratic consolidation and statebuilding from the Italian case to other contexts, such as Iraq for example. In post-conflict settings killings after the official end of hostilities follow a specific political logic and have goals different from those during wartime. Actors use violence to carve a space for themselves in the nascent democratically competitive environment.

Jennifer Greenburg

University of California, Berkeley, Geography

The Weaponization of Humanitarianism: Haitian Geographies of U.S. Militarism

[ project summary ]

In the course of the War on Terror, US militarism has reconstituted itself as moving "beyond the guns and steel of the military” to a “hearts and minds” approach to US power (Defense Secretary Gates 2007). This dissertation examines the “new” US military humanitarianism through its historical geography in Haiti. I examine contemporary US military humanitarian projects implemented through International Organizations (IOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in relation to US military humanitarian projects during the US occupation of Haiti (1915-1934). My overarching claim is that during its century-long history in Haiti, US military humanitarianism has at key moments been undermined by the contradictory structure of its mission. In attempting to reconcile its foreign and military status with the developmental goals of civic associations in Haiti, the US military has encountered deep contradictions shaped by Haiti’s history of racialized liberation.

Brendan Gerard Hart

Columbia University, Sociomedical Sciences

Translating Autism: "Knowledge Transfer," Expertise, and Therapeutics of the Self in Morocco

[ project summary ]

This is a study of the introduction and reworking of the category autism within quotidian contexts of Moroccan social life. Autism is a novel kind of psychiatric category – distinct from mental illness and retardation – that represents and intervenes in human difference in unique ways. Autism therapies emphasize cultivating habits of relating to and working on one’s self, as well as translating and facilitating the child’s idiosyncratic mode of communication and interaction. As autism has become the paradigmatic disorder of child development in the U.S. and much of Europe, efforts to promote the category in parts of the world where it has not commonly been used are increasingly common. For the past decade, French and Moroccan parent organizations have been working to raise autism awareness, train a new cadre of experts (parents and professionals alike), and create an infrastructure for detecting, diagnosing, and treating Moroccan children as autistic. This dissertation examines the consequences of global autism activism in the context of distinctive Moroccan understandings and practices of selfhood, childhood, and parenthood and within a complex Moroccan field of expertise concerning what I am calling "therapeutics of the self." In contrast to discussions of “knowledge transfer” in global public health, this project draws on recent work in science studies in order to examine how the category autism and knowledge about it are transformed as they are translated within Morocco. To this end, I propose twelve months of ethnographic study of everyday therapeutic, diagnostic, and interpretive practices among autistic children in homes, clinics, and sites of religious healing in major urban centers (Rabat and Casablanca) and a smaller Southern city (Taroudant) and its rural surroundings. Defined in relation to domains of sociality, behavior, and communication – the very stuff of culture and selfhood – autism is an ideal object for this sort of anthropological study.

Stephanie N. Hassell

Stanford University, History

African Slaves and the African Diaspora in Portuguese Asia, c. 1539-1750

[ project summary ]

Enslaved Africans toiled across early modern Portugal’s Asian imperial domains within the Estado da India, which stretched from southeastern Africa to China. While we know that these African slaves were integral to the functioning and survival of the Portuguese Empire in Asia, we still lack details about their daily lives. Africans were historical subjects in their own right: people who had histories and impacted the larger history of East Africa, the Portuguese Empire, and the Indian Ocean trading system of which they were a central part. Their personal testimonies in inquisition cases between 1539 and 1750, an understudied era of thriving Indian Ocean slave trafficking (Vernet 2009), provide evidence of their own life experiences and perspectives. I will utilize these inquisition cases along with other archival documents, examining religious practices, family structures, occupations, linguistic choices, and legal status – and how these changed over time – in order to probe the world in which these African slaves and their descendants lived. My work will explore creolization, syncretism, and cultural retentions – interrelated themes explored primarily in interdisciplinary Atlantic scholarship but also recently in Indian Ocean scholarship as well (Vaughan 2005, Larson 2009). In addition to probing the theme of creolization, I will also explore these Africans’ status as slaves along with their group identification (or lack thereof) as diaspora. Hence this project will contribute the debates on the nature of slavery in the Indian Ocean World as well as academic theories of diaspora. I am affiliated with the Instituto de Investigacao Cientifica Tropical (IICT).

Elizabeth Hennessy

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Geography

On the Backs of Turtles: the “Co-Evolution” of Nature and Culture in the Galápagos Islands

[ project summary ]

Since Darwin rode on the backs of the Galápagos giant tortoises, the archipelago and its unusual species have been central in understanding how environmental influences shape evolutionary development. Today, these fabled islands face a crisis that conservationists see as threatening the historic isolation that allowed for the development of endemic species like the giant tortoises. Most analyses situate this crisis in a Malthusian history of increasing developmental pressure over the past 30 years; however, I argue that adequately understanding current problems in the Galápagos requires a return to the annals of evolutionary science to analyze how this history has shaped the islands and their species. Using the giant tortoise as my focal point, I ask the overarching question: How do changing human conceptions of and interactions with nature shape evolutionary processes, and to what effect? Over the past 200 years, giant tortoises have been scientific curiosities, conservation icons, tourism commodities, and lightening rods of political protest. I use their story to situate the current crisis in intertwined histories of science, conservation, and development, which I argue have materially shaped social conflicts as well as the very nature of tortoises. To explore this claim, I look at these three paradigms of human-environment relations across three key historical moments in the Galápagos: Darwin’s visit in 1835, the founding of the Galápagos National Park (GNP) in 1959, and recent crisis declarations. This interdisciplinary project combines archival research at UNESCO and natural history museums with ethnographic research on three tortoise conservation projects in the Galápagos. This work is informed by theories of the social production of nature as well as developmental biology that sees evolution not as strictly biological, but as a process in which by ecological and social influences shape the conditions of possibility for an organism's development.

Philippa Lesley Hetherington

Harvard University, History

Victims of the Social Temperament: Prostitution, Migration and the Traffic in Women in Imperial and Soviet Russia, 1890-1928

[ project summary ]

In late nineteenth century Russia, trafficking in women for the purposes of prostitution emerged as a distinct social problem that preoccupied feminists, liberal activists and state officials alike and inspired multiple attempts at legal regulation in 1903, 1909 and 1922. My dissertation will investigate the historical origins of this ‘traffic in women’ in Imperial Russian and Soviet law and society over the period 1890-1928. It will trace the development of the particular crime of trafficking in Russian law alongside a study of the term’s contested meanings in public discourse, both of which were influenced by increasing concern about migratory sex work. My dissertation will have three main conceptual foci. The first is a study of the language through which Russian feminists, liberal activists, socialists, state officials and Bolsheviks constructed gendered understandings of sexual consent, and the way in which these understandings were codified in law and contested in public debate over forced prostitution. The second is an examination of the interaction between sex work and female migration at the turn of the century, which will investigate the various ways in which increasing mobility created possibilities and dangers for single women, from voluntary prostitution to forced trafficking or ‘white slavery’. Finally, I will look at the centrality of the anti-trafficking campaigns for Russia’s involvement in the formation of international law. The Russian campaigns against white slavery developed in the context of an international anti-trafficking movement that gained strength in the 1890s and reached its apotheosis in the interwar period as the League of Nations took up the struggle against forced prostitution. My dissertation will argue that Russian involvement in these campaigns problematizes widely held presuppositions regarding the inherent liberalism of turn of the century humanitarianism, which accommodated so easily illiberal Russian legal traditions.

Sarah T. Hines

University of California, Berkeley, History

Flows of Power: Urbanization, Modernization and Water Struggles in Twentieth-Century Bolivia

[ project summary ]

My dissertation is a study of water governance in the Cochabamba and La Paz regions of Bolivia in the twentieth century. Its driving question is how water regime change interacted with the historical development of capitalism in the cities and countryside of La Paz and Cochabamba, the centers of political power and economic development for most of the century. More specifically, the study is organized around four major issues, key concerns in environmental history: the place of water in the economy, the nature of water governance structures essential to operating the economic system, the role of different groups and individuals in hydraulic innovation, and the comparative relationships of environmental conditions to water use and control in the Cochabamba Valley and highland La Paz. The study examines how each of these dynamics changed from the late nineteenth century to the present, when capitalism became the dominant economic system in Bolivia and a modern water system was built. But this is not simply a story about capitalist penetration viewed through the “lens” of water. Instead, it is an account of how a diverse set of groups and individuals thought about and related to the waterscape and each other in a period of dramatic social, political, economic, and environmental change. The study explores their visions for water and hydropower, their efforts to realize those visions, and the policies, practices, and conflicts that resulted. Ultimately it will show that the Cochabamba and La Paz waterscapes were complex and shifting products of ongoing contests and compromises among rural, urban, national and transnational forces. By revealing the longer history of water systems and conflicts, the dissertation situates recent “water wars” in historical context and informs contemporary debates about how and by whom water should be governed.

Jessica L. Horton

University of Rochester, Visual and Cultural Studies

Places to Stand: History, Memory and Location in Native North American Art

[ project summary ]

Spurred by a recent proliferation of international art residencies and biennial exhibitions, Native North American artists are regularly exhibiting their works of art in urban centers around the globe. In Places to Stand: History, Memory and Location in Native North American Art, I consider the political, conceptual and aesthetic dimensions of artists’ movement from local and national exhibition contexts into the so-called “itinerant” world of traveling curators, unpredictable art audiences and temporary art installations (Kwon 2004:46). Although art-world globalization is usually discussed in the context of late capitalism, my project also seeks to excavate earlier, little explored transnational moments in Native North American art and history in order to consider their relationship to contemporary artistic practice. Artists such as Rebecca Belmore, Jimmie Durham, James Luna, Edgar Heap of Birds and Arthur Amiotte frequently look to these earlier histories to establish the “ground” upon which to conceive new works of art for locations abroad. Their interventions are gradually producing a sustained indigenous artistic presence in cities like Venice and Sydney. In this dissertation I ask, in what ways do such historically informed, place-based engagements work against the disorienting flux of contemporary transnational experience? Can the movement outside of the fraught terrain of the settler colonial nation open up new possibilities for connecting to faraway people and places? What is lost and what is gained through this process?

Dana Leigh Immertreu

University of Chicago, History

Promoting the Socialist Lingua Franca: Russian as a Foreign Language in Soviet Cultural Diplomacy, 1945-1991

[ project summary ]

My dissertation looks at the export of the Russian language throughout the socialist world as part of Soviet cultural diplomacy from 1945 through the collapse of the Union. By examining the history of Soviet language expansionism I compare the cultural mission of Sovietization in the Eastern Bloc as it emerged in the 1940s and 50s to this mission as it was reformulated in the 1960s and 70s in an attempt to create a common, distinctly Russian, basis for identification in a socialist sphere that expanded into Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In order to contrast these two regions and periods, I use as case studies Soviet activities in East Germany and Cuba, including the formal language programs established by Soviet organizations as well as the export of media—radio programs, cartoons, Russian literature, etc.—for the purposes of increasing local exposure to the Russian language and culture. I also consider efforts to promote the Russian language that took place domestically. In particular, I examine Russian as a Foreign Language departments in Moscow, showing that these departments were significant both as institutes that trained Russian language teachers to be everyday diplomats and as the milieu in which foreign students coming to Moscow had one of their first experiences of active cultural learning in their host country. Finally, my dissertation poses the question of how the collapse of Eastern European Communism altered the place of the Russian language in the world, especially vis-à-vis English, and what this meant for institutions as well as individuals who were involved in endeavors to promote the Russian language abroad.

Miriam Intrator

City University of New York Graduate Center, History

Books Across Borders: The Politics of Cultural Reconstruction in Early Postwar, Post-Holocaust, Cold War Europe

[ project summary ]

This dissertation examines the active engagement of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the renewal of European and Jewish cultural life and institutions, particularly libraries and school and community book collections, in the immediate aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, during the early Cold War years. Through a comparative analysis of cultural reconstruction policies and initiatives in France, Poland, and scattered surviving Jewish communities, UNESCO’s concern for libraries, books and reading will be situated within the broader postwar contexts of the solidification of the Iron Curtain, the formulation of cultural rights as human rights, and issues of Jewish survivor identity and community (re)building. My examination of the unprecedented and increasingly global level of inter-organizational and inter-governmental cooperation initiated and facilitated by UNESCO will illuminate how international politics and policies shaped UNESCO’s cultural reconstruction efforts and relationships, and will identify the short- and long-term impact on library and book culture in postwar Europe generally and surviving Jewish Europe specifically. This dissertation will also provide new evidence in support of a recent historiographical trend that traces the desire to affirm Jewish identity, rebuild communal life, and revive Jewish languages, learning and traditions among Holocaust survivors. Identifying the key players, immediate aims, and long-term goals and results of the postwar library and book projects undertaken by UNESCO and a selection of the key organizations it was associated with, such as the World Jewish Congress and International Federation of Library Associations, will provide new insight into the nature and significance of postwar transnational cooperation and cultural reconstruction.

Kristy Lynn Ironside

University of Chicago, History

The Value of a Ruble: A Social History of Money in Postwar Soviet Russia, 1945-1964

[ project summary ]

This project will examine Soviet Russia’s complicated relationship to money in the postwar period, from Stalin’s attempts to rebuild after the Second World War, through Khrushchev’s attempts to engineer more qualitative changes in the realm of living standards in the mid-to-late 1950s through mid-1960s. Though money has widely been thought of as a triviality of the Soviet system, one that played a limited role in economic planning, prices, and distribution, this project suggests that it took on increasing social importance in the postwar period as the Soviet regime attempted to normalize the economy and move toward high living standards. My dissertation will look at six areas of socioeconomic activity, ‘financial assets’ and expenditures in the period 1945-1964, including: financial disputes between citizens, within families, and between citizens and the state; state bonds and lotteries; personal credit, including large-scale credit programs to rebuild and petty credit; savings accounts and programs; income taxes; and finally, state pensions and other financial benefits that formed a crucial part of the Soviet compensation package.

Kyle Alan Jaros

Harvard University, Department of Government

Foreign Economic Strategies of China's Interior Provinces

[ project summary ]

My dissertation project examines the varied strategies China’s interior provinces have adopted over the past two decades to boost their foreign economic ties, and the political factors behind these strategies. In contrast with the well-known economic success of China’s coastal areas, interior provinces have struggled to tap into the world economy since they began “opening up” in the early 1990s. Despite lagging far behind the seaboard, however, interior provinces have been eager to access international capital, markets, and expertise. Taking advantage of the administrative discretion Beijing gives them, these provincial governments have mounted a range of efforts to jumpstart foreign trade, investment, and people flows. My preliminary research suggests that despite facing similar challenges, interior provinces have displayed varying levels of initiative and taken different policy approaches in their efforts to internationalize. I hope to explore this variation in provincial foreign economic strategies, and to examine its political and economic causes and consequences. To do so, I will carry out a comparative study of policy-making in eight interior provinces between 1992 and 2010, including intensive case analyses of Shaanxi and Sichuan. An International Dissertation Research Fellowship would enable me to travel to Beijing, Shaanxi, and Sichuan for 10 months of interview, archive, and library research to collect information on provincial politics and policy-making that is unavailable outside of China.

Ceyda Karamursel

University of Pennsylvania, History

Victims, Tricksters, and Homemakers: The Worlds of Slave Women in the Ottoman Empire, 1789-1922

[ project summary ]

This project will examine the practice and distinctive features of slavery in the Ottoman Empire throughout the long nineteenth century. It will begin by asking why Ottoman slavery involved mostly women and in what ways female slaves' reception and assimilation into Ottoman society differed from that of male slaves . Second, it will look at how and when such categories as age, race, ethnicity or class mattered and how their meanings and experience changed over time. Finally, it will examine how the Ottoman institution of slavery, distinct from other slavery systems most notably by its lack of abolition, faced new ideologies, such as nationalism, in which Ottoman state’s involvement in (re)defining women became stronger as slavery itself came to a silent end. Focusing on phases of slaves’ plight; their uprooting from their origins, their passage to and reception in their new environments as well as their manumission, this project will draw from and contribute to the emerging field of Ottoman slavery studies as well as the larger literature of history and theory of slavery.

Patrick William Kelly

University of Chicago, History

The Ambiguities of Anti-Politics: Transnational Human Rights Advocacy in the Southern Cone in the Long 1970s

[ project summary ]

The last third of the twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented global convergence on the use of human rights as a moral and political framework for a wide variety of state and non-state actors. My dissertation investigates this advent of a transnational politics of human rights in the “long 1970s,” when social activists raised global awareness about rights abuses during military dictatorships in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. At the core of my work is an effort to understand the ideological and political negotiations of local activists in South America and NGOs such as Amnesty International over the concept of human rights. Utilizing an interdisciplinary and transnational methodology, I draw from archives in South America, Europe, and the United States, as well as oral testimonies with activists from this period. In focusing on the explicit idiom of human rights, I will trace the evolution of human rights activism from its embryonic form in the late 1960s, through its explosion after the Chilean coup of 1973, to the development of an international human rights regime by the time of the 1976 Argentine coup. Through these campaigns, my research foregrounds the shared contributions and rival visions of transnational activists who first used the language of human rights in a sustained way. My work also speaks to enduring dilemmas for human rights politics in Latin America and beyond. When human rights emerged in the 1970s they were seen as an appealing form of anti-politics, a minimalist utopia, and a frantic response to political emergency. Yet, as human rights politics snowballed over the next few decades, its program expanded far beyond its initial breakthrough as a response to catastrophe to offer a universal vision of utopian politics. My project thus seeks to explain a paradox of human rights as it cascaded through the end of the twentieth century: the essential tension between human rights as an anti-political language that is necessarily political.

Masha Kirasirova

New York University, History

“The Eastern International”: Modes of Soviet-Arab Exchanges from the Interwar Period to the Cold War

[ project summary ]

This dissertation reconstructs a neglected domain of political and cultural interaction between the Soviet Union and a range of communists, students, and broader leftist intellectual circles in Syria. Focusing on the period from the 1920s through the end of the Cold War, and using newly available archival materials in Russia and Syria, I plan to bring together hitherto separate scholarly domains by exploring the Comintern’s training of Arab communists from nations that Stalin referred to in 1925 as the “foreign East” within the context of Soviet nationalities policy in Soviet Central Asia—“the domestic East”—and Soviet Orientalism. I also investigate the ways in which broad intellectual circles in these lands were powerfully influenced by Soviet-Russian culture that was disseminated by the Soviet state, returning communists, leftist intellectuals, and non-communist students. By focusing on such linkages, interactions, and modes of cultural transmission, I look to go beyond narrowly political histories of Arab communist movements as well as the large corpus of Cold War literature that uses state-scale categories of analysis and envisages Arab communists as nothing more than Soviet agents. I contend that this exploration of the cultural-political interactions between the Soviet Union and the Arab East in this period enriches our understanding of cultural and intellectual developments in the Middle East during the Mandate and Cold War eras, and open up new avenues for further research on how the Middle East was conceived within non-European or US-centric transnational political imaginaries.

Eugenia C. Kisin

New York University, Anthropology

Indigenous Sovereignties, Non-secular Modernities: The Market for Northwest Coast First Nations Art

[ project summary ]

Indigenous social movements have had long histories in former settler colonies. But in recent decades, a new politics of recognition has emerged that hinges on expressive culture—art, music, and performance—to assert the continued value and vibrancy of traditional practices while demanding rights and sovereignty. Within these movements, indigenous peoples have complex affiliations in relation to the commodity market, including community, pan-indigenous, and religious identities that articulate with both modern ceremonialism and local Christianities. My project seeks to understand these contemporary indigenous cultural politics by focusing on how the state, the art market, and indigenized forms of Christianity have all been entangled in expressive projects of indigenous self-determination in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I ask how First Nations cultural activism in this urban setting negotiates within powerful networks of two seemingly unrelated social spheres: the secularizing art world and the religious spaces of Protestantism. In Vancouver, First Nations artists extend traditional uses of material culture, including object-enabled displays of power, to contemporary political acts of asserting claims to land. At the same time, Protestant religious institutions have actively encouraged First Nations art production as a viable industry, and many artists draw on their Christian affiliations in their work. Paradoxically, First Nations artworks are valued in galleries for both their secular modernist qualities and traditional “spirituality.” Through participant-observation, life histories, social network analyses, and archival work in artists’ studios, heritage institutions, and Protestant churches, I will examine how the politics, discourses, and processes of contemporary First Nations art production have led to a $100-million local market for Northwest Coast First Nations art—and how, on this market, cultural and monetary values might be interlinked.

Rachel Lora Lambrecht

Emory University, History

Under the coral tree’s shadow: Popular politics and state-building in the Rio de la Plata (1810-1820)

[ project summary ]

My project explores popular political participation in the Rio de la Plata littoral, a geographical area that today is part of Uruguay and Argentina but was once one same political body, the viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata. By integrating plebeian politics in the provinces of Corrientes, Entre Ríos, and the Banda Oriental in the aftermath of independence, I analyze the ways in which regional and local politics influenced state-building. I aim to expand the debate regarding the collaboration of the lower ranks by questioning the means in which these groups, i.e., Africans descendents, Indians, and poor white/mestizos, directly engaged in political conflicts. I ask whether these groups shared a common political culture and examine the nature and motivations of their contribution in relation to the colonial political framework and the development of a novel American identity. Thus, by showing how politics fluctuated during independence and by rethinking national boundaries, I will bring a new focus to demonstrate how popular political participation affected and influenced the debate over state building in the Rio de la Plata.

Shing-Ting Lin

Columbia University, East Asian Languages and Cultures

The Female Hand: The Making of Professional Women’s Medicine in Modern China, 1880-1940

[ project summary ]

The turn of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of Western-trained women doctors, who obtained expertise from a missionary education, in Chinese society. The establishment of medical profession for women—not only in terms of medical knowledge, but also in the very idea of a profession with established standards of training, shared technical skills, and common ideals of service—was a striking social phenomenon bridging the late imperial and early Republican periods (1880-1940). My dissertation examines the making of the modern women physicians during this period. By integrating historical analysis with material culture studies, I explore how the professionalization of women’s medicine was embedded in the history of everyday practices of healing at the Hackett Medical Complex for Women in Canton. My goals are three-fold. First, foregrounding Chinese female physicians as practitioners who were learning and doing medicine in a concrete medical setting, I highlight the way daily life contributed to the history of professionalization. Second, I hope to illuminate a distinct paradigm of knowledge transmission and the nature of women doctors’ experience. My premise is that “medical profession” is not a set of abstract criteria used to identify a group of expert with a certain “professional frame of mind;” it is rather a process embedded in the concreteness of medical actions—observing, diagnosing, and treating patients—in the daily practice of medical work. Finally, a delineation of female experience with medical profession produces an alternative framework of social analysis and political agenda from that of the male profession. I suggest that missionary medicine altered China’s female healing practice by implementing new technological instruments (e.g. forceps) and ideas in the birth room. In other words, the female definition of medical professionalism was articulated not through political or legal means, but through material and technological strategies.

Andrew Liu

Columbia University, History

The Two Tea Countries: World Competition and Agrarian Labor in Northeast India and South China, 1839-1911

[ project summary ]

My dissertation is a comparative social history of agrarian labor in the tea regions of northeast India and south China in the late nineteenth century. Starting in the 1850s, increased world access to tea ignited a period of intense competition led by the two regions, during which world sales soared exponentially. As a result, hundreds of thousands of workers were enlisted by both foreign and native brokers to grow, process and pack tea for overseas consumers. I analyze this process of labor mobilization by looking at how new trade networks were established, how new mobilization practices were introduced, and how new concepts of political economy, such as free trade and the category of labor as a commodity, emerged in the writings of those connected to the trade. I am conducting research in two parts. In China this year, I am looking at fieldwork surveys, merchant correspondence, family genealogies and contracts. With the support of an SSRC grant, I will travel to London and India, where I will look at records on labor migration, annual reports on the Indian industry, company papers, and the writings of industry critics. Through this comparative study, the first of its kind, I build upon past approaches to the study of tea. Using assumptions based upon divergent trade statistics, scholars have traditionally represented the China trade as outdated, undeveloped agrarian production, contrasted against the colonial efficiency of the Indian plantation. But the reality was more complicated. Both "tea countries" shared in common a reliance upon informal networks of middlemen and brokers and also political economic debates tied to the development of labor markets. Ultimately, I show that these regions should be seen as connected through processes of competition, and their divergence analyzed as part of a larger phenomenon of economic unevenness. Thus, although I focus on tea, my study has wider implications for the study of local labor processes embedded in world markets

Christine J. Mathias

Yale University, History

Violent Encounters: The Long Conquest of the Argentine Chaco, 1870-1935

[ project summary ]

In order to convert a frontier into an economically productive, taxpaying territory and its indigenous occupants into laborers, nineteenth-century states had to maintain a “monopoly of violence.” I will illuminate both material and discursive dimensions of this hegemonic process through a detailed study of methods of coercion and instances of colonial violence in the northern Argentine territories of Chaco and Formosa. Multi-archival research in Buenos Aires and several northern provinces will provide a comprehensive history of violence in the Chaco over a period bookended by two of the continent’s most destructive wars: the War of the Triple Alliance, which pitted Paraguay against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay (1864-1870), and the Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia (1932-1935). I will situate the Chaco’s history in comparative perspective and illuminate the international context that informed Argentine policies. Subsequent chapters will look beyond inter-state dynamics to consider continuities of violence in daily interactions between indigenous people and government officials, capitalists, soldiers, missionaries, and settlers. My dissertation proposes a new approach to the study of comparative settler colonialism, using methods from ethnohistory to show how struggles over the control of violence mapped onto struggles over competing versions of history.

David Meek

University of Georgia, Anthropology

Learning and Landscape Change in the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement

[ project summary ]

Global attention to Amazonian deforestation—while important—deflects attention from a related and equally important phenomenon: forest regeneration. Although our knowledge of the ecological dynamics of tropical forest succession has increased greatly, the cultural and political factors mediating forest succession remain poorly understood. Mather’s forest transition model (1990) suggests a link between learning and forest regeneration. Informal learning, gained through social movement participation, has been a focus of adult education studies; yet, it is unknown what economic and political factors motivate this learning, and how they affect agroecological knowledge, cultural conceptions of landscape change, and the occurrence of land cover change. To answer these questions, this research will focus on an Amazonian settlement of the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), a social movement with a strong pedagogical tradition rooted in Paulo Freire’s liberation theology. Ethnographic methods will be combined with quantitative spatial techniques. Research will track changes in environmental discourse in the movement’s monthly journal over a period of twenty-five years. Archival education records will provide contextual data on geographic education disparities. Ethnographic data on the roles of informal learning will be gathered from MST leaders through semi-structured interviews. Settlers’ oral histories will provide insight into the diversity of informal learning experiences among MST. Conceptions of “agroecology” will be elicited from these settlers, and knowledge gauged through a cultural consensus analysis. A survey will quantify levels of movement participation among these individuals. Interviews will be used to elicit perceptions of landscape change. Analyses will illustrate whether participation is a variable influencing the distribution of cultural knowledge surrounding these issues. These data will be correlated with spatial data on land cover change.

Marissa Anne Mika

University of Pennsylvania, History and Sociology of Science

Creativity in Crisis: Cancer Research in Uganda from the 1950s to the present

Juan Felipe Moreno

Johns Hopkins University, Anthropology

Surviving Aerial Coca Crop Fumigations in Southern Colombia

[ project summary ]

My project examines – ethnographically and historically – peasant practices of economic subsistence and moral persistence in the context of coca crop aerial herbicide spraying in Colombia. Since the end of the 1970s, within the framework of the global “War on Drugs”, the Colombian state has been the only one in the world to gradually implement a systematic program of aerial herbicide spraying with the aim of eradicating coca and opium poppy crops, the raw materials for the production of cocaine and heroin. From 1999 onwards, with the political and economic support of the United States, the Colombian state launched a politico-military initiative called “Plan Colombia,” which consolidated the country as the third largest recipient of U.S. aid in the world (after Israel and Egypt). An important component of this initiative was the intensification of the program of aerial herbicide spraying, with a strong focus on the eradication of coca crops. The articulation of the Colombian state with the global security scheme of the “War against Drugs” has spawned a novel regulatory and technical form of chemical statecraft that is actualized in everyday economic practices of peasant communities seeking to survive in the midst of repeated sprayings. Taking as ethnographic sites two rural locations in the southern departments of Nariño and Putumayo, my project will explore: (1) the ways in which this Colombian case of chemical statecraft expands and deepens current understandings of multiscalar state power as it unfolds at the intersections between environments, local populations, state policies and global security schemes; (2) how systematic events of fumigations weave into peasant labor practices and domestic economies; and (3) how different senses of the legitimacy and/or illegitimacy of fumigations are modulated by local peasant articulations of notions such as “survival,” “just subsistence,””harm” and “food security.”

Gregory Duff Morton

University of Chicago, Anthropology

After the Wage? New Money and New Households in Brazil's Bolsa Família

[ project summary ]

What happens when workers stop earning wages, and instead support themselves through money that others "invest" in them? Many people in the contemporary world -- subcontracted entrepreneurs and microcredit recipients, for example -- now receive regular paychecks that take the form of "investment" payments rather than "wage" payments. What difference does this make? If people get remunerated through investments, do they still think of themselves as workers? More importantly, do they change their disposition towards money-- the habits they use to allocate their expenditures, plan their savings, account their valuables, and dream about their futures? This project investigates the world's largest attempt to bring investment logic to people living in poverty. Brazil's Bolsa Família program, a conditional cash transfer, operates as a government "investment" in 12.4 million participants who comply with requirements like child school attendance and vaccination. The policy strives to change household practices, increasing the effort that parents devote to certain child-rearing activities and converting children into sites for the guided growth of human capital. How do recipients understand this change? When receiving the payments, do they think of child care as work -- or as something else? Do the payments realign the gendered definition of labor? Bolsa Família has already been associated with quantitative improvements in child outcomes, but researchers remain uncertain about which changes inside the household lead to these improvements. This project uses the tools of ethnography to investigate such household changes, as symptoms of the deeper shifts in money and work that are happening at our moment in history.

Baruani I. Mshale

University of Michigan, Natural Resources and Environment (NRE)

Conflict or Cooperation? Collaborative Forest Governance in a Changing World, Case of Kilwa, Tanzania.

[ project summary ]

Why are local people and state agencies in Kilwa, Tanzania resistant to cooperate in governing local forests despite over ten years of experimentation with participatory forest management in Tanzania? I apply a political ecology framework in analyzing and explaining how ecological and political (social, economic, cultural) changes have transformed the composition and roles of actors for collaborative forest governance focusing on local people, state agencies, civil society, international community and private sector. Preliminary field work was conducted between 2009 and 2010 to identify study sites, gather preliminary information on socio-economic, institutional and ecological conditions of people and forests in the district. Contemporary environmental challenges such as mitigating climate change through avoided deforestation in the tropics calls for multi-stakeholder collaboration at multiple levels. Communities in Kilwa started avoided deforestation projects beginning 2008 as part of the UN pilot program in 9 countries including Tanzania, to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD), and my research makes timely contributions to achieving effective collaboration in implementing REDD projects. I apply a combination of ethnographic field work and ecological methods in understanding changes in political and ecological systems and their ramifications on collaborative forest governance. Analyzing factors for effective collaborative forest governance using political ecology framework is necessarily interdisciplinary and draws from concepts and methods in ecology, anthropology, economics, sociology and political science. My research contributes in advancing the theory and practice of political ecology by demonstrating usefulness of a balanced ecological-political focus in analyzing and explaining factors for effective collaborative environmental governance from local to global levels in addressing tropical deforestation in a changing climate.

Virginia Nolan

Columbia University, Architecture History and Theory

How the ‘Savage Mind’ Became the Artificial Mind: Or, Some Strange Ways That Architecture and Design Made Use of the Social Sciences,1880-1980

[ project summary ]

This dissertation critically examines how twentieth-century architects and systems-designers in Europe and the U.S. attempted to translate theories of the ‘savage mind’ into a modern science of creativity. While it is well-known that European avant-gardes often used artefacts from small-scale societies as models to imitate, there is scant scholarship accounting for how the actual thought processes of so-called primitives were studied as models for developing avant-garde design methodologies. Concerned with creating relationships that supposedly linked designed things to larger contexts of signification, many designers turned to anthropological studies of small-scale societies and to psychological studies of child development, assuming that such cases offered pared-down, ‘authentic’ versions of how humans construct systems of signification that permeate all aspects of social life. I am selecting three events/institutions that each demonstrate how a particular theory of design drew from the disciplines of anthropology and psychology: The Public Industrial Arts School of Philadelphia (1880) and its influence on the Bauhaus; the French ethnographic mission, “Dakar-Djibouti”(1931), published by the Surrealists and thereby leading the architect, Aldo Van Eyck, to conduct field work among the Dogon (1960); and finally, the development of the M.I.T. Media Lab (1980) from its beginnings as the Architecture Machine Group (1969). I will use these cases to trace changes in designers’ interpretations of ‘the primitive’. Whereas at the turn-of-the-century, designers translated primitivist theories into techniques of cultivating creativity and dexterity, by the late twentieth century, theories of primitivism were used towards inventing machines that could think and design. This thesis thus interrogates the historic connection between how early avant-garde applications of the burgeoning social sciences affected the eventual development of technologies of artificial intelligence.

Tore Carl Olsson

University of Georgia, History

Growing Together: The American South, Mexico, and the Making of the Green Revolution

[ project summary ]

Scholars of global agriculture have long acknowledged the importance of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Mexican Agricultural Program (1943-1963) as providing the developmental model for the Green Revolution, America’s Cold War-era exportation of agricultural technology to the Third World. But few scholars have linked this postwar campaign with the Rockefeller philanthropies’ first attempt at "rural reconstruction,” directed in the U.S. South under the General Education Board (1903-1914). In both regions, Rockefeller agronomic experts imagined rural people as backward, tropical, and unknowledgeable, and sought to solve their social problems with technical, scientific solutions. Yet for small farmers in both Mexico and the South, technocratic development eased neither poverty nor hunger, engendering instead rural outmigration, the expansion of agribusiness, and environmental degradation. But contrary to much recent scholarship, these transformations were the product of human contingency and politics, not technological determinism, as local elites and industrializing states co-opted the Rockefeller project for their own purposes. In narrating these two campaigns as threads of a shared transnational story, rather than a comparative study, I hope to argue that “scientific agriculture” offered both promises and perils to tenant farmers, campesinos, sharecroppers, and ejidatarios, and that the histories of the twentieth-century American South and Global South reveal much when placed in common conversation. The project of development may indeed have roots closer to home than many Americans might expect.

Jeffrey W. Paller

University of Wisconsin, Madison, Political Science

Ghanaian Slums: Constructing Democracy in Unexpected Places

[ project summary ]

My dissertation project is a comparative ethnography of three Ghanaian slums. The central question of my study asks: Why do some slum communities in emerging African democracies establish effective mechanisms of political accountability that advance the interests and livelihoods of their members while others do not? Contrary to existing literature that emphasizes competitive elections and formal representation, a strong civil society, and formal individual property rights as crucial conditions of political accountability, I propose that the key to local-level democratization is institutional syncretism—the blending of old and new rules and values into hybrid institutions through the everyday practices of ordinary individuals (Galvan 2007). Communities that blend formal institutions with local cultural understandings, such as incorporating a trusted “father” of the community into the formal electoral process, are more likely to make democracy work in contemporary Africa than those that do not. The local political struggle and bargaining process of incorporation may provide the solution to improving the quality of democracy in Africa. This process involves a combination of community organizing in the slums and state legal recognition. Drawing from ethnographic methods, interviews with residents and local leaders, and archival work, I will attempt to explain the origins and processes of political organizing in urban Africa and to reveal the institutional obstacles to effective democratic activity. Rather than treating slums as lawless and anarchic urban spaces, my study suggests that a closer examination of Ghanaian slums is necessary to understand the “nuts and bolts” of how politics works in these areas. I will attempt to illustrate how vulnerable communities can be active participants, even leaders, in the democratization process.

Brian Palmer-Rubin

University of California, Berkeley, Political Science

The Subnational Bases of Party Competition: Mexican Political Parties and Civil Society Linkages

[ project summary ]

This project explains variations in party-association linkages among Mexican states in competitive and noncompetitive electoral environments. The subnational comparison includes two states governed by each of Mexico’s three major parties, one state where the party is electorally dominant and another where elections are competitive. In each of these six states, I study associations from both the traditional popular sectors (e.g., organized labor, peasant associations) and the new popular sectors (e.g., neighborhood associations, indigenous movements). Party-association linkage outcomes are explained by variations in electoral competition and national party organizations. Dominant parties in noncompetitive environments will tend to form stable material-based linkages, while parties in competitive electoral environments are hypothesized to form a combination of stable policy-based linkages and unstable material-based linkages. The linkage legacies and the levels of decentralization of national party organizations also influence whether parties on the state level form linkages with associations representing the traditional popular sectors or the new popular sectors. The subnational comparative method, large-n statistical analysis, and ethnography are combined to draw reliable causal inferences. The subnational comparison of six Mexican states allows me to observe variation on hypothesized causes of linkages while controlling for national-level factors. Through statistical analysis, using original survey data of associations and data from election results and budgets for state-administered social programs, I test the relationships among my causal variables on a larger sample. Ethnographic studies of a neighborhood association and a union of social security employees in Mexico City allow me to flesh out the cultural and organizational mechanisms that lead to the construction and reproduction of party-association linkages.

Intan Paramaditha

New York University, Film Studies

The Wild Child's Desire: Cinema, Sexual Politics, and the Experimental Nation

[ project summary ]

My dissertation is about the new generation of Indonesian filmmakers emerging after the downfall of the New Order dictatorship in 1998, looking at how they are produced by the post-authoritarian political transformation as new citizen subjects driven to perform political awareness in the public sphere. While embracing a cosmopolitan worldview and projecting their aspirations in the transnational landscape, the filmmakers actively invest in the process of remaking of the nation through their collective engagement within the advocacy against censorship. The centrality of sexuality issues in censorship connects the filmmakers to the larger national discourse of sexual politics. When the myth of national coherence dissolves, sexual politics is used by different actors, including the state and the Islamist groups, to assert new versions of nationhood. My dissertation investigates how the filmmakers’ desire for the nation in post-authoritarian Indonesia is articulated through sexual politics and analyzes how this desire is shaped and limited by the discourses of paternalism, transnationalism, and religion, within which other desiring national actors are implicated. I intend to examine how sexual politics is translated into political activism and artistic practices. While my involvement in the advocacy against the new film law has allowed me to observe the formation and circulation of ideas on nation, citizenship, secularism, and sexuality, the question of how sexual politics is translated into artistic production remains unanswered. I expect that my proposed fieldwork next year, focusing largely on the process of film production, will enable me to see the correlation, or perhaps contradiction, between sexual politics in art and in activism. I also seek to observe how aesthetic decisions are influenced by state censorship, transnational funding network, and anticipated reaction among Muslim conservatives.

Nicola Pezolet

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Art History/Architecture

Spectacles Plastiques: Public Space and the Debates on the "Synthesis of the Arts" in France, 1945-1962

[ project summary ]

The doctoral dissertation examines the collaborative efforts of different international groups based in France – such as the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Groupe Espace, and the Internationale Situationniste – which advocated a “synthesis of the arts” in the years that followed the Second World War. My work considers a wide range of projects, from the collective decoration of monumental buildings to temporary installations in galleries by way of outdoors art exhibitions and theatrical performances. I seek to answer a set of general questions: How exactly did the "synthesis of the arts" discourse lead to a rethinking of public space in postwar France? How did it participate to the physical reconstruction and modernization of French cities? How did this discourse, that challenged the notion of artistic autonomy as the precondition of genuine aesthetic experience, contribute to forming new forms of spectator involvement and public address? Finally, how did it relate to the shifting priorities of official French cultural institutions in the middle decades of the twentieth century in regards to the integration of modern art to the built environment? I argue that the different proponents of a "synthesis of the arts" reterritorialized the language of artistic abstraction developed in the 1910s and 20s into a spatial paradigm that would directly engage with everyday life by creating purportedly unified and immersive environments, what were called “spectacles plastiques”. Such spectacles were shapeable performative events in which individuals were mobilized and invited to communally share an embodied aesthetic experience. The "synthesis of the arts" was also an attempt to move away from Germanic notions of Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art”, tainted as they had become with various types of totalitarian regimes in the 1930s. Some of the artists and architects considered include Le Corbusier, F. Léger, F. Del Marle, N. Schöffer, G. Debord and Constant.

Aditi Saraf

Johns Hopkins University, Anthropology

Invoking ‘Azaadi’: Practices of Freedom in Kashmir

[ project summary ]

The movement for freedom from Indian rule, articulated as azaadi - the Urdu word for freedom - was launched in India-administered Kashmir in 1989, resulting in more than a decade of armed militancy and a brutal reprisal by the Indian state. At present, Hurriyat (G), the Islamist faction of the political front of Kashmiri separatists based in the capital city of Srinagar heads the freedom movement.While the demand for freedom from India is made transnationally intelligible as the political right to self-determination, in local publics and media it is also staked to the formation of a specifically Muslim political community towards which individual members must fulfill their ethical obligations. As the locus of ordinary social and economic activity, the marketplace becomes an important site for the implementation of separatist civil disobedience and protest activities, but the resultant loses suffered by the Kashmiri Muslim mercantile community amounts to billions of dollars. My research consists of an ethnographic focus on Kashmiri Muslim merchants in Srinagar to study the tensions they experience between the demands made on them in the struggle for political self-determination and the freedom to pursue their individual moral responsibilities as Muslims towards their families, livelihoods and religious duties.With this approach in mind, my research aims to shift the debate on the Kashmiri freedom movement from deliberative discourses and political rhetoric to the realm of everyday practices. I observe these practices as they arise within the ethos and sociality of the urban marketplace as a locally embedded public and a place of congregation and exchange. Finally, I take the merchant as the locus of a distinct Muslim ethico-political subjectivity, committed to both success in worldly pursuits and individual requital to God in the afterlife, in making inquiries into the exercise of freedom in Kashmir.

Seiji Shirane

Princeton University, History

Japan's Maritime Gate: Colonial Taiwan in the Making of a Southern Empire, 1895-1945

[ project summary ]

My dissertation examines the central role that Taiwan played in Japan's southern expansion from 1895 to 1945. As Japan's first overseas colony, Taiwan was the maritime gate through which the Japanese extended their economic and geopolitical interests in South China and Southeast Asia. Under the administration of the Government-General of Taiwan, the Taiwanese port cities of Keelung and Kaohsiung emerged as the main Japanese entrepots for the circulation of people, goods, and ideas across the East and South China Seas. While scholarship on Japanese imperialism has predominantly concentrated on Korea and Northeast China, my research reorients our geographic focus to the understudied southern half of Japan's empire. Drawing on archival sources in Tokyo, Taipei, and Xiamen, as well as the methodologies of maritime and migration studies, I look at how Japanese imperialism shaped Taiwan's relations with its southern neighbors, and in turn how Taiwan impacted policies and conceptions of Japan as a maritime power. In exploring the role of colonial Taiwan as a base for "informal" (economic) and "formal" (military) imperialism, I focus on the perspectives of Japanese officials and colonists, Taiwanese subjects, and local and overseas Chinese. First, I illustrate how Japanese officials aimed to mobilize, limit, and monitor the movement of people--officials, entrepreneurs, laborers, soldiers--across the China Seas to extend Japan's economic interests in the south. Colonial rule not only transformed trade and migration networks between Japan and Taiwan, but also those between Taiwan, South China, and Southeast Asia, much of it at the expense of the Chinese and Western powers. Second, I examine Taiwan as a military and administrative base for surveying, and ultimately occupying, South China and Southeast Asia in the 1930s-1940s. Lastly, I analyze the sea- and island-based ideologies of southern expansion that shaped Japanese and Taiwanese conceptions of nation and empire.

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi

New York University, Art History/Architecture

Just Add Water? Instant Camps and an Architecture of Aid

[ project summary ]

Histories of refugee camps see architecture as utilitarian, and histories of architecture don’t see refugee camps at all. Yet, a global humanitarian complex has been responsible for frequent and radical urbanizations in the name of aiding refugees, and a global culture of architecture has colluded in the project. Through an archaeology that examines architectural artifacts from Ethiopian and Kenyan camp cities as well as Museum of Modern Art exhibits, this dissertation will argue that global regimes of humanitarianism and design developed in conversation since the end of the Cold War. As the aid-industrial complex mushroomed, professional architectural practices inside the camp fence mirrored an imaging of camp architecture in centers of excellence outside. The humanitarian regime co-opted this architectural register in the realization of “humanitarian space” in camps, in an inadvertent form of city planning. Conversely, contestations within the architectural discipline over the construction of design expertise outside of it drove a turn toward humanitarian projects. In a close examination of architectural objects and practices both within and related to the camp, this dissertation interrogates the assumption of a humanitarian and political role by architects, the collaboration of cultural and critical institutions, and the integration of design professionals and architectural models into humanitarian practice. This inquiry is critical to understanding tangible practices and culture at work during states of emergency—a dynamic mode of urbanism during a watershed period in global urbanization. It also sheds light on the nature and construction of expertise—in this case, around architectural design—as a historical and cultural phenomenon.

David R. Singerman

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society

An Empire of Purity: Science and the Modern Sugar Market

[ project summary ]

Between 1880 and 1920 the world cane sugar economy was transformed by new methods of production, new forms of labor, and new concentrations of power. My dissertation focuses on an unexplored but crucial element of this transformation: the change from thinking of sugar as a food and agricultural product that could be valued only by experienced judgment, to thinking of it in the chemical terms of its sucrose content. By analyzing factory production records, correspondences, and especially legal and trade disputes in Cuban, British, and American archives, I will show how this shift from sensory to scientific knowledge reshaped the nature of trade, production, and the organization of work in the sugar economy. I will focus on two trading relationships in particular: the flow of sugar and capital between Cuba and the United States, and the flow of people and machines between Cuba and Glasgow. My study of the turn-of-the-century sugar market will draw and expand upon questions and literatures in history and the history of science, especially science in the context of empire. In sugar’s wildly varying natural, technical, and human environments, and across the great distances that separated the U.S., Cuba, and Scotland, instruments, measurements, and people routinely failed to agree, with serious consequences for trade and trust. On a wider scale, I intend to question the way historians write about commodities and about the process by which a natural product becomes a globally tradeable object. The difficulty of making instruments and techniques function equally well in New York, Glasgow, and Havana—which a scientifically-measured commodity required—highlights a problem facing all modern commodity markets: how do dispersed producers, traders, and consumers trust what they are buying and selling, when such trust depends on measurements made on the far side of the planet?

Naomi S. Stone

Columbia University, Anthropology

Person as Frontier: Human Technologies in the Iraq War

Matthew Swagler

Columbia University, History

African Youth Radicalism and the Global History of Revolt in 1968

[ project summary ]

This project examines the impact of African youth and student movements through a study of radical political activism in Senegal and Congo-Brazzaville during the 1960s. Throughout that decade, thousands of young people across Africa increasingly turned toward various conceptions of Third-World Marxism, in order to address national problems of economic inequality and impoverishment. My dissertation will examine the growth of these ideas, which culminated in youth-led revolts in both Senegal and the Congo in 1968. By conducting archival research and personal interviews in Senegal, the Congo and France, my project seeks to understand how African student and youth leaders engaged with each other across national borders, and circulated within global radical networks.

Edgar Curtis Taylor

University of Michigan, Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History

Histories of an Event: The Ugandan Asian Expulsion of 1972

[ project summary ]

My research examines the social and intellectual history of the 1972 Asian expulsion from Uganda. My work will focus on the circulation of racial ideas among activists in the preceding decades, race as a political resource in the trading hub of Kabale, and subsequent popular memory of the expulsion. This will help me to trace intellectual currents and forms of governmentality that are critical to racial politics but often erased in structural analyses. I will spend three months conducting ethnographic and archival fieldwork in Kabale, one month working in the National Archives in Entebbe, and eight months pursuing ethnographic and archival work around Kampala. The archives I will explore in Kabale, Entebbe and Kampala all contain material that previously has been inaccessible to scholars. My research will be the culmination of ongoing restoration projects. Finally, I will organize a public photography exhibit, both as a site of memory for Ugandans to reckon with their postcolonial past and as a means with which to elicit responses to visual representations of the expulsion.

Rachel J. Taylor

Northwestern University, History

Crafting Cosmopolitanisms: Nyamwezi Male Labour and Consumption c.1850-1917

[ project summary ]

In my dissertation I will use the decisions of men from Unyamwezi (western Tanzania) about labour and consumption to explore the ways in which succeeding generations strove to reshape and attain honourable male adulthoods in the context of the dramatic economic and politicall changes of the late-precolonial and early-colonial periods. This topic refocuses studies of the early colonial period through opening up questions obscured by recent trends in colonial scholarship which have prioritised “colonial middles” – relatively privileged colonial subjects who translated between colonial and mission programmes and local societies. Despite the significant contributions of this innovative body of work, in prioritising mediations between western and local power structures and discourses it occludes consideration of regional connections and mobility. In contrast, putting the aspirations and actions of Nyamwezi men at the centre of my study opens up questions about the emergence of a new route to male adulthood predicated on participation in emergent regional networks – what I name a cosmopolitan masculinity – during the nineteenth century. How did this cosmopolitanism – and the regional connections it sustained – constrain or enable Nyamwezi men in their encounters with specific colonial policies and actions? Furthermore, to what extent did Nyamwezi men reshape regional networks and aspirations for a male adulthood in response to the economic, political and military strategies of the German colonial state? In its focus on networks, connectivity and the limits to connectivity, my dissertation engages with and builds on globalization scholarship, providing a detailed study of the construction and refiguration of a regional network, linked to but not fully absorbable into wider transcontinental connections. In addition, my work will contribute to studies of precolonial and colonial African history, of African masculinities and of cosmopolitanism and colonialism.

Omar Tesdell

University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Geography

Hidden Ecologies: A Spatial History of Palestinian Agriculture in the West Bank

Marnie Jane Thomson

University of Colorado at Boulder, Anthropology

Humanitarian Governance, Congolese Refugees and Memories of a Neglected War

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How do refugees fare when the conflict they fled is declared beyond the scope of humanitarian intervention? The UN recently claimed its resources are too limited to respond to the conflict in the DRC. Refugees from eastern Congo are still crossing Lake Tanganyika to seek refuge in Tanzania, the country that has hosted the greatest number of refugees in all of Africa for almost five decades. Despite the ongoing flow of new arrivals since the mid-90s, Tanzania and the UN are closing rather than opening refugee camps. As refugees face the reality of repatriating to the DRC, many seek official resettlement in a new country. To qualify for resettlement, refugees must prove to humanitarian representatives that they escaped the DRC not because it was a dangerous war zone for everyone but because they were individually persecuted. Institutional demands for narratives of personal and national histories thus shape refugee lives and impact their futures. How do assumptions about intractable violence and refugee motivations get expressed in bureaucratic demands for clear personal narratives that frame violence as personal? What do refugee experiences of dislocation and memories of the violence reveal about the politics of humanitarian intervention in both Tanzania and the DRC?

Alexander John Thurston

Northwestern University, Religion

Mosques, Schools, and Meeting Rooms: Relations between Arab-Educated Elites and the Political Establishment in Kano, Nigeria

[ project summary ]

My dissertation research focuses on the professional trajectories of “returnees” – religious elites with Arab university degrees – in Kano, Nigeria from 1960 the present. Nigerian returnees desire to Islamize state and society, emphasizing a “pure” Islam defined largely on the basis of Qur’anic interpretations and Islamic theologies that are uncommon in West Africa but dominant in the Arab Middle East. But Nigerian returnees are also a heterogeneous group whose members, in different ways, shape debates about Islam's place in politics and successfully compete with local clerics by popularizing alternative notions of Muslim orthodoxy and global solidarity. Through a focus on democracy, urbanity, and new media, I ask how returnees transform their background and credentials into personal charisma or institutional influence and how their interactions with other Muslims reshape prevailing definitions of Islamic knowledge. I hypothesize that Kano’s intra-Muslim debates, widespread Arabic literacy, shari’a system, independent media, and turbulent politics create spaces for Islamic activism that are particularly receptive to the knowledge and skills returnees possess, competencies as varied as the returnees themselves. This research addresses interrelated concerns in religious studies, anthropology, and political science. Within religious studies, this project will contribute to studies of the impact of transnational religious flows. Within anthropology, my work will increase understanding of urban religion and the behavior of Muslim actors in young democracies. Within political science, I will engage studies of religion’s role in state-society relations in Africa. Using methods of participant-observation, interviews, and media analysis to clarify how returnees make use of their credentials in teaching, theological discourse, and political activism, this research explores the relationship between local politics, sectarianism, and a global religious community.

Heather Tidrick

University of Michigan, Anthropology

Roma Integration and Institutional Practices with Roma in Postsocialist Hungary

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How do racial ideologies and perceptions of ethnic distinction mediate everyday practices in postsocialist institutions? Does it make a difference when staff members have undertaken specialized cultural training, and if so, how? And what do institutional actors’ conceptions of cultural competent practice and their evaluation of cultural distinction ultimately reveal about how they understand the social integration of minorities? These are the key research questions I will study through a year of ethnographic research in four distinct institutional environments in Hungary where ethnic Magyars and ethnic Roma (or “Gypsies”) interact: a university “Gypsy Studies” department, a Roma community-based organization, summer camps for Roma youth, and a city police department. In these interrelated Hungarian institutions, I will investigate the beliefs these institutional actors have about Roma, where these ideas come from, and how they influence day-to-day practices with Romani persons. I will first trace the production of knowledge about Roma in an academic environment, namely the field of Romology. I will then follow the ways that exposure to such knowledge might shape the work of professionals (police officers, teachers, and social workers) who encounter Roma in their daily professional lives. I will interview and shadow in their professional work both Roma and non-Roma, both those who have had special cultural competence training and those who have not. By observing institutional interactions with Roma and discussing these interactions with the relevant institutional actors, I will elucidate the ways their knowledge and beliefs about Roma shape their institutional practices with Romani people – and the ways formal training may influence these practices.

Tristan Tomlinson

State University of New York at Stony Brook, History

The Ills of Empire: Managing Health and Populations in the British Atlantic World, 1707-1834

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My project examines how population became a key problem for social and political authorities in eighteenth-century Britain and the Atlantic world. I focus especially on Britain and Jamaica between the formation of the British state in 1707 and the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834. Through this framing, my project will contribute to a re-casting of the narratives and chronologies of modern forms of governance and their relation to nation, state, and empire. I posit that both the modern focus on managing populations as a means for ordering society and strategies for doing so emerged far earlier than scholarly focus on the nineteenth century suggests. During the eighteenth century, mercantilist ideas, Enlightenment principles, and the experiences and imperatives of colonialism, slavery, and warfare all made the health of populations a pressing issue for British and colonial authorities. This was especially true of the urban poor, sailors, soldiers, and slaves, who together constituted an invaluable, coerced imperial labor force. I will examine the efforts of doctors, government officials, colonists, military commanders, and philanthropists to change the health and conduct of members of these groups, and thereby cultivate productive, healthy populations. This approach will illuminate how the management of various subaltern groups informed each other across transatlantic circuits and became a crucial feature of new approaches to governing society. Situating this study in a comparative Atlantic context will also raise questions about the colony-metropole dyad that focus on the colonial production of the practices, not just the theories, of modern governance and their transformations in different contexts.

Christopher Tozzi

Johns Hopkins University, History

Non-Citizen Soldiers: Foreigners in the French Army, 1750-1815

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Under the Old Regime, soldiers born beyond France's borders, most of them elsewhere in Europe but some as far away as the Congo, Pennsylvania and central Asia, comprised a substantial proportion of the French army. They were not merely mercenaries, but men who spent their entire careers in regiments created especially for foreign troops, and whose families often accompanied them on their migrations to France. Upon completing their tours of duty, many of these soldiers were awarded the title of “subject of the French king,” granting them and their descendants the same privileges as French natives. From the first months of the French Revolution, however, hostility towards foreign troops serving France began to mount, and continued as the Revolution progressed. The National Assembly abolished France's foreign regiments in 1791 and 1792, and the Constitution of 1795 entirely outlawed the recruitment of foreigners. In practice, however, revolutionary leaders' desperate need for manpower as they waged war against most of Europe beginning in 1792 meant that they continued to enlist foreign soldiers, even after such an act became illegal. Unlike their predecessors under the Old Regime, however, foreigners recruited during the Revolution were not granted citizenship and were expected to leave France once the war ended. Through research in archives located throughout France, as well as a study of parliamentary debates and other official discourses, I will trace this story of foreign soldiers in France from the last decades of the Old Regime through the Napoleonic era. One main objective of my research is to determine the relationship between French revolutionary political theory and policies on foreign troops, a topic of unique significance for the history of citizenship and nationality, but one which has received little attention from scholars. A second focus is the interactions between people of diverse backgrounds which the French army facilitated.

Sandra van Ginhoven

Duke University, Art History/Architecture

The Role of the Antwerp Painter-Dealer Guilliam Forchondt in the Large-scale Distribution of New Imagery in Europe and the Americas during the Seventeenth Century

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My dissertation focuses on the large-scale distribution of Flemish imagery across Europe and the Americas, particularly on the large number of paintings exported from the Southern Netherlands to Spain and New Spain during the seventeenth century. This profitable long-distance art trade and the artistic implications of the exchanges that took place through market mechanisms have yet to be addressed in a methodical manner and fully incorporated into the histories of seventeenth-century Flemish, Spanish and Latin American visual cultures. In order to shed light on this phenomenon, I systematically study the archival and visual sources left by one of the most successful seventeenth-century Antwerp international art dealers with Spain and the Americas, Guilliam Forchondt (1609-1678). He established a productive painting workshop and a successful commercial firm that concentrated on Spanish Habsburg territory, and dealt in the transatlantic trade between Europe and the New World. I examine his workshop practices, the type of paintings he directed to Spain and New Spain, and the mechanisms he established for artistic and information exchanges between Flemish, Spanish and colonial Spanish contemporaries. I also investigate the local conditions and responses in Spain and Mexico to the imported Flemish works. My aim is to evaluate the manner in which the imported artworks partook in the material and visual traditions of Spain and the Americas, and the way these same shipments impacted art production and workshop practices in Antwerp since many of these paintings were produced according to specifications originating in Spain and New Spain.

Laura Rose Wagner

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Anthropology

Perspectives on Disaster, Aid and Community in Port-au-Prince Haiti

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The earthquake that struck southwestern Haiti on January 12, 2010 should be defined and understood not only as a single moment of devastation but also through the ongoing, chronic social, economic, and political effects of the disaster -- in particular, Haitians’ experiences of loss and displacement. This research examines the enduring impacts of the earthquake in Haiti and changes to the social landscape by examining three distinct but interrelated themes. Using ethnographic methods, this project based in Port-au-Prince will focus on a) forms of community and connection that develop, evolve, or dissolve in the wake of the earthquake and subsequent displacement; b) various interpretations, understandings, and meanings that survivors of diverse backgrounds ascribe to the earthquake and the displacement and loss of home; and c) how aid groups, humanitarian organizations and development organizations have responded to the earthquake and displacement, and how they have addressed, or not addressed, forms of community and local interpretations that have arisen since January 12.

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.