Ph.D. candidates Onaiza Arshad and Jessi McNeill received a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (of up to $25,000) from the Wenner-Gren Foundation to conduct ethnographic fieldwork for their doctoral research.
Onaiza Arshad‘s project is titled “Mediating National Past(s): Image and Built Form in Andaroon, Lahore”
This project is an archival and ethnographic study of people’s everyday interactions with the visual imagery and built environment of Andaroon-Shehr, an ancient walled city in Lahore, Pakistan. It interrogates the routine visual and material mediations, through which social actors, ranging from residents and tourists to state authorities and conservationists, participate in and contest the fashioning of Andaroon-Shehr into a national heritage site. It questions how and why the production of the space into a museumized relic of the past also frames it as disconnected from contemporary urban tensions over development, migration, religious discrimination, and ethnic violence and brings these consistently separated conversations into one frame of analysis. The research foregrounds these lesser-known entanglements and probes at how they can provide novel insights into Lahore’s urban history and development, and how they can make Andaroon-Shehr speak to concerns beyond a sanitized past. It emphasizes mediations, processes, and everyday engagements, exploring how taken-for-granted practices participate in long-standing histories of oppression and urban exclusions. Crucially, it homes in on disruptive moments within such routine mediations of Andaroon-Shehr, offering glimpses into its muted histories, imagery, and discourses and creating opportunities to interrogate dominant historical narratives and their impacts on contemporary urban life.
Jessi McNeill‘s project is titled ““Protect Them Both”: The Construction of Black Women’s Vulnerability by Conservative Anti-Abortion Advocates”
With vulnerability as the gauge, this dissertation project will trace and locate Black conservative politics of the United States and the ways it hinges upon Black reproduction. For conservative and Right-wing groups, reproduction is the battleground on which concerns about family, society, and the future are fought. In the context of this research, I explore the Black conservative evocation and function of vulnerability as a political tool utilized within the arena of reproduction. My project examines the ways Black, politically conservative anti-abortion groups construct and utilize the concept of vulnerability in their advocacy work with Black women. The following questions guide my inquiry: How do Black women navigate their participation in anti-abortion politics? What roles do race and racialization play in expressions of Black women’s vulnerability in anti-abortion politics? What can we learn about the movement and the wider history of reactionary politics in the United States by examining their experiences? This interrogation into the ways Black anti-abortion groups construct Black women’s vulnerability will reveal the ways in which conservative and right-wing authority restricts and engenders reproductive violence.
