Ph.D. candidates Bri Alexander, Thayer Hastings and Lee Gensler received a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (of up to $25,000) from the Wenner-Gren Foundation to conduct ethnographic fieldwork for their doctoral research.
Bri Alexander‘s project is titled “Kin-Centric Circles: Reimagining Native Land and Language Reclamation as Cycles of Renewal and Relationality”
Much scholarship circulates narratives of reclamation as processes to reverse loss and theft due to settler colonialism, reproducing the exceptionalism of colonial events. This project instead draws from Shawnee concepts to reimagine reclamation as perpetual cycles of renewal and relationality. Centering Shawnee perspectives and histories through knowledge-shares with Shawnee citizens from the three tribally-recognized Shawnee bands, this multi-sited (Serpent Mound, Ohio; Johnson County, Kansas; northeastern Oklahoma; online) mixed methods (surveys, interviews, archives, autoethnography, participant observation) ethnography asks what Shawnee land and language reclamation projects say about place and relating. Oral tradition says that renewing Shawnee commitment to land and language stems from our First Law and creates a kinship bond, or what I call a kin-centric circle, that serves as a space to identify, outline, and mark relatives (to include) and non-relatives (to exclude) in time and space. These circles overlap, expand, contract, change, and blur; they are not static nor predictable, necessitating renewal. Tracing Shawnee histories from the First Law reveals that reclamation projects are more than responses to political and social climates or as shallow signals of individual or tribal identities but as something much deeper to what it means to be Shawnee in a world of relations.
Thayer Hastings‘ project is titled “The Demographic Governance of non-Citizenship: Inhabiting the ‘Center of Life’ in Jerusalem”
Neither citizens nor migrants, Palestinian residents of Jerusalem are required to regularly prove that their “center of life” is within municipal limits or risk residency revocation and expulsion even if their families have lived in the city for generations. From a site of governmental hyperactivity, the research for this dissertation documented how the practices and strategies people on the borders of inclusion within the nation-state model deploy in pursuit of the “center of life.” Ethnographic and historical research was conducted to attend to the local scale and immediate spaces of life in order to investigate the “center of life” as a crucible for reconsidering foundational political categories. The case of Jerusalem and Palestinians’ non-normative struggles over domination can help clarify the stakes of scholarship through attention to what it takes to center a life within circumscribed inhabitance and, therefore, what that might reveal about the possibilities for association beyond the frameworks of nationalism, citizenship, and sovereignty.
Lee Gensler‘s project is titled “Leftbook and contested visions of the good: Social media platform governance, political subjectivity, and new moral traditions”
In 2010, Facebook introduced ‘Groups’ to allow users to organize around shared interests. Currently, over 1.8 billion people use Facebook groups. Groups operate within Facebook’s larger structure of platform governance, primarily enforced through algorithmic content moderation. But each group is also created and governed by a team of Facebook users, who write and enforce rules, accept or reject members, and build and maintain the values of each space. This project examines social formation in Facebook groups, social media platform governance, and the interplay of user-led group moderation and algorithmic content moderation. In doing so, this project brings an ethnographic approach to understanding an oft-overlooked scale of platform governance. By bringing an anthropological lens to user-led Facebook group governance, it seeks to challenge existing frameworks for understanding social media platform governance that fail to examine how governance functions across scales. With a focus on left-leaning groups, this dissertation explores the processes of rule-making and enforcement within Facebook groups to address larger questions about how social media platforms shape and are shaped by the moral orders operating within them and examines the political subjectivities of those who are empowered and disempowered within those systems.
