The Early Research Initiative (ERI) and the Public Scholarship Practice Space (PS2) at The Center for the Humanities offered this year a record of 20 doctoral students – including 6 cultural anthropology students – a $4,000 Summer Public Research Fellowship, with generous funding from the Provost’s Office, to conduct research whose main question is driven by public needs and priorities.
Aman Roy‘s research is set in Central India, where his interests span urban property-making, the commons and technologies of governance. He is particularly interested in how housing rights activists design tools to defend existing claims to land against speculative real-estate regimes. This summer, Aman will build a library of spatial data and neighborhood histories in collaboration with several housing rights groups in Nagpur, India.
Cassandra Cronin‘s work looks at processes of commoning in U.S. agriculture – the ways farmers contest and create alternatives to commodification and privatization in land and seed systems. She is interested in both the legal and social infrastructures that are creatively (re)invented to allow for other-than-capitalist relations to flourish. Cassandra will spend this summer on farms, working with farmers who are cultivating a more livable future in the present.
Léa Coffineau‘s dissertation project focuses on the notion of “colonial debt” – a debt owed by the colonizer to the colonized – and on its manifestation in the political discourse of young West African migrants who claim the status of unaccompanied minors in France. This summer, Léa will bear witness to and assist the development of a national coordination of unaccompanied minors’ collectives.
María Mónica Sosa Vásquez‘s current research focuses on how sovereign debt and financial indebtedness have become sites of struggle for transfeminist movements in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This summer, María Mónica will co-create oral histories on financial indebtedness of/with women and LGBTIQ+ individuals, contributing to development of bridges among transfeminist in the Global South and Global North.
Nikhil Ramachandran‘s research and teaching interests lie broadly in the problematics of political imagination and the use of interdisciplinary methods. This summer, Nikhil will participate in the work of community organizations involved in the making of an alternative economic ecosystem
Sumeja Tulić is a Libyan-born Bosnian cultural anthropologist and writer whose work explores the intersections of visuality, history, conflict, and everything in between. This summer, Sumeja will explore how commemorative rituals shape Bosniak identity, particularly through direct engagement with Srebrenica genocide survivors
