Social Science Research Council

Noah Cincinnati
History, Johns Hopkins University.
“The White Man’s Other Burden: Zoos, Empire, and American Wildlife Conservation, 1889-1924”

The Bronx and National Zoos, established at the end of the nineteenth century, were critical spaces where Americans encountered wildlife from across the continent and globe. Only recently have animals and zoos begun to receive substantial historical attention. Scholars have explored how American zoos were part of city beautification movements and how the zoos reflected broader attempts to recreate more perfect forms of nature. While useful, historians have been less willing to examine how animals on display in American zoological parks were part of a larger imperial world. American zoos were an intricate part of the practical and ideological machinery of American empire and Progressive-era conservation. This project focuses mostly on the intentions of zoo officials and zoological societies, while also considering how the public participated in the experience of animal exhibition. In my dissertation, I plan to use archival material on the Bronx and National Zoos, from 1889 to 1924, as a lens to uncover a hidden dimension of animal exhibition and conservation—one rooted in imperialism and nativism. In doing so, it is my hope to blend American cultural, imperial, and environmental history into a single narrative for students and scholars alike.

Colter Ellis
Sociology, University of Colorado at Boulder.
“Animals, Inequality, and the Environment”

Today’s agricultural practices are more abusive of animals than those in use at any other time in human history. Scholars of animal studies clearly note the connection between animal exploitation and the oppression of human groups, such as women and minorities. This connection constitutes the theoretical foundation for my proposed dissertation topic. Building on data collected through my course work and in collaboration with faculty, my proposed dissertation topic will use ethnography to explore animal-human relationships at four stages in the beef production chain. The first stage is 4H, an agriculturally based youth program that provides early socialization into the field of animal agriculture. The second stage will investigate cow/calf operations, often understood as “cattle ranches.” These operations range between 50 to 1000 cattle and are concerned with breading and early rearing of caves. The third stage in the beef production chain is the feedlot. Here, animals are fed an unnatural diet that causes extreme weight gain. Once of adequate size, animals enter stage four, the slaughterhouse. Each stage has a considerable environmental impact. My work will provide a critical analysis of the beef industry and empirically investigate the interrelationship among animal exploitation, racial and gender oppression, and environmental degradation.

Radhika Govindrajan
Anthropology, Yale University.
“Beautiful Beasts and Beastly Beauty: Human-Animal Relations in the Western Himalayas”

From pastoralism to hunting, domestication to wildlife conservation, human-animal relations have been an integral part of the historical development of relations between state, society, and nature in India’s western Himalayan region. My dissertation will analyze the cultural and political processes through which human-animal relations took shape in the context of colonial and postcolonial social and environmental change over the twentieth century. The project will unravel the intricate web of representations, practices and experiences that not only mediated these everyday relations, but also constituted the very categories of ‘human’ and ‘animal’ in India. I shall explore three specific themes. Firstly, I wish to examine how animal symbolism in folklore, religious beliefs, and kinship terminology shaped historical patterns of human-animal interactions. Secondly, I shall analyze how changing discourses and practices of hunting and wildlife conservation have transformed not only the ways in which people relate to non-human animals but also their access to animal resources. Thirdly, I will investigate how demographic changes influenced by commercial agriculture, state-led economic development, and the expansion of agrarian frontiers in colonial and postcolonial India have simultaneously created new lines of conflict between humans and animals as well as novel means for representing and managing them.

Clare Gupta
Environmental Science, Policy & Management, University of California – Berkeley.
“The Elephant Question: An Ethnography of Environmental Imaginaries in Chobe Enclave Community Trust, Botswana”

My dissertation research will use a case study of environmental imaginaries in rural Botswana to explain how local visions of the environment and of human-wildlife relations play a role in the local politics of natural resource management. In Botswana, as in most parts of the world that still support populations of charismatic wildlife species, the introduction of Western neoliberal models of wildlife management has heightened struggles over control, access, ownership and benefits from these wild animals. Despite the name “community-based natural resource management” (CBNRM), these programs have been criticized for failing to incorporate local conceptions of appropriate environmental practice into their design. I propose to study the different ways community members in CBNRM villages in rural Botswana engage with wildlife—including CBNRM schemes’ influence on these interactions—and how these engagements shape and are shaped by local imaginaries for wildlife. By making visible the complexities of these material and metaphorical relationships, my research will contribute to a set of interdisciplinary bodies of literature, including recent political ecology, that aim to understand how nature politics is both materially and discursively constituted. My findings will also inform critical examinations of how CBNRM policies in Botswana might begin to take local human-wildlife relations into account. This ethnographic research will take place within the Chobe Enclave Community Trust, Botswana’s first CBNRM program.

Karen Hibbard-Rode
Biology & Wildlife, University of Alaska – Fairbanks.
“Identity and History of the Teshekpuk Lake Caribou Herd: Perspectives from Oral History and Landscape Genetics”

Caribou are an important subsistence resource, a key component of Arctic terrestrial ecosystems, and an increasingly powerful symbol of wildness in the debate over oil and gas development in the Arctic. My research will investigate the identity and history of caribou herds on the North Slope of Alaska, using methods from oral history and landscape genetics. Interviews with caribou hunters and reindeer herders, and genetic analysis of samples from caribou, will be analyzed. Through a parallel examination of scientific- and local traditional- knowledge of caribou identity, I will illuminate differences in the underlying assumptions on which knowledge is based and, potentially, how these two systems may inform one another. Bringing several sources of information to bear on this topic may allow me to construct a more complete knowledge of caribou history and identity than each source alone could produce. Determining the historical changes in herds and the genetic relationship between them may also provide insight into their capacity to adapt, or vulnerability, to oil and gas development in the region.

Casey Riffel
Critical Studies, University of Southern California.
“The Visual Rhetoric of Animality: Animating Animals from Eadweard Muybridge to Jim Trainor”

With his invention of the zoopraxiscope and subsequent photographic experiments, which first froze animal motion by executing a technological spectacle in order to decompose movement, Eadweard Muybridge ushered the animal into the era of its animation. Linking the animated animal to the urge to imbue images with movement, I pair animation’s challenge to the ontology of the cinematic image with the animal’s challenge to conceptions of humanity. Thus my dissertation will pursue three interrelated goals: tracing the history of animal imagery in animating practices; illuminating a medium-specific approach to the possibilities of animation; and explicating the entrapment of the animal image in a matrix of media culture anthropomorphism. Tracing diverse themes—including monstrosity, propaganda, iconicity, violence, drawing-from-life, technological spectacle, and racialized and sexualized performance—through diverse figures—from Muybridge to Winsor McCay to Walt Disney to Ladislas Starevich to Ralph Bakshi to Jim Trainor—I will explain animation’s pervasive engagement with animal imagery in terms of its unique capacity for the mobilization of a visual rhetoric of animality. The animal’s centrality to animation, and vice versa, is from this perspective crucial, their shared etymological root highlighting their intertwined role in cinema’s exploration of movement and form as fundamental ontological categories.

Aaron Shackelford
English, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.
“‘I Think I Could Turn and Live Awhile With the Animals’: The Writer's Struggle with Animals in America, 1850-1865”

By the middle of the nineteenth century, American authors confronted a growing uncertainty regarding the status of animals. Scientific research asked how closely related animals are to humans, whether animals feel pain or use language. Simultaneous to these investigations was the growth of racially charged taxonomies that sought to split humanity itself into hierarchical categories, further blurring distinctions between what it means to be human or animal. As a result, figurations of animals in literary texts began to raise important questions of representation, consciousness, and ethics, about the very meaning of what it means to identify oneself as human and something else as animal. This project, then, seeks to map out the ways this uncertain status of the animal manifests itself in the literature of antebellum America. I want to inquire into the ways in which writers struggle to do justice to these emergent concepts. The literary use of animals increasingly demanded a different approach to writing and antebellum America offers a fascinating if at times confusing and contradictory time and place to study the literary tools writers use to make these discoveries and adjustments.

Ryan Shapiro
History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Bodies at War: The Fight over Animal and Human Experimentation in Wartime America: 1916-1966”

From the sinking of the Lusitania to the launch of Sputnik II, American antivivisectionists and research advocates believed themselves at war with twin enemies; one abroad and another at home. Through war and peace, antivivisectionists and defenders of research alike consistently depicted themselves as partisans in a Manichean struggle over experimentation and America’s very survival. Each struggled for ownership of the rhetoric of national security in bids to metonymically and literally link their domestic opponents with foreign threats from the Kaiser to Stalin. This casting of the debate in martial terms significantly impacted the course of the conflict as well as the practice of medical research. My project seeks to explore this nexus of war and animal experimentation in the vivisection controversy in the United States from the First World War through the early Cold War, with particular emphasis on the roles played by gender, species, and nation in the martial renderings of the combatants. How were allegiance, masculinity, and menace constructed out of the beliefs and bodies of the men, women, and animals involved? How did the vivisection conflict manifest new visions of war and order in the laboratory and the home?

Analia Villagra
Anthropology, City University of New York Graduate Center.
“Taxonomies of Nature: Categories for an Interspecies Environmentalism”

Knowledge requires categories; humans necessarily classify the world in order to make sense of it. Drawing from the anthropology of science, kinship studies, and cultural primatology, my dissertation research will focus on the ways that different groups of people associated with the conservation of the Golden Lion Tamarin understand and categorize their place within the natural world, what I have called their “taxonomy of nature”. The Golden Lion Tamarin is a small monkey found only in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is variously viewed as the flagship species for the preservation of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest by conservationists and eco-tourists, a prestigious landmark for local landowners, and a potential rival by members of the Landless Workers Movement in need of property to farm. I intend to more thoroughly investigate the categories and taxonomies of nature that emerge among these diverse groups of people. On a biological reserve located about three hours outside of the city of Rio de Janeiro the fate of this tiny human cousin opens a larger debate about environmental justice, inter-species kinship, and how the boundaries we construct between “nature” and “culture” dictate the use of the land and the preservation of natural national heritage.

Sharon Wilcox
Geography, University of Texas at Austin.
“Encountering El Tigre: Jaguars and People in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands”

This project is concerned with jaguars and their conservation along the U.S./Mexico border. Exploring both the physical and symbolic meanings of “borderlands,” this study is not only physically located in a political border region, but is also concerned with the symbolic borderlands constructed between humans and animals. My research takes interest in the interrelationships between animals and peoples in this place, considering issues of agency, power, and access and how they alter and affect the lives of species, both human and feline, on the landscape. Utilizing conceptual debates regarding the “place” of animals from cross-disciplinary readings in the social sciences and humanities, this study offers a re-theorization of animals both within popular and academic conservation discourses. This project will interrogate representations of jaguars in order to locate the animals themselves, illustrating that the jaguar is at once removed from human sociality and yet bound to human social, economic, and political processes. Examining stakeholder participation in jaguar conservation efforts, I will explore the idea of considering and empowering the jaguar as a stakeholder itself. Ultimately, this study will consider the potential of this approach for enhancing the standing of animals themselves, bringing a new dimension of animal ethics to wildlife conservation.

Michael Wise
History, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities.
“‘Living Like a Wolf’: Predation, Civilization, and Conquest on the Northern Plains, 1869-1924”

From Reconstruction through the 1920s, Anglo-American settlers on the Northern Plains viewed wolves as barometers of civilization’s outer boundaries. The animals’ presence and daily habits—dragging down game and livestock, feasting on bison carcasses, and howling at humanity with ambivalence—struck ire and hatred in the minds of modernizing settlers seeking to “civilize” the wild grasslands of Alberta, Montana, and Wyoming. While human predatory economies of bison hunting and stock growing transformed the plains, wolves harnessed these enterprises to their own ends. Feasting on cattle and skinned bison carrion, wolves ate and mated their way to unprecedented population levels, fueling a booming trade in their pelts—both for sale and for bounty. As wolves’ metabolisms reverberated into the human world and blurred the lines between animal and human production, the Northern Plain’s predators of body and mind preyed on civilization and its insecure discourses of race, gender, and class. Incapable of controlling the region’s animal ecology, these Americans and Canadians imagined wolves as symbols of their human vulnerability. By placing wolves at the center of my historical project, I plan to explore the relationships between colonialism, predation, conservation, and eugenics that branded the Northern Plain’s transnational and human-animal history.

Rebecca Woods
History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Breeding Environments: Livestock and Location in the Modern Anglophone World”

“Breeding Environments” explores the reciprocal relationships between livestock and the environments they live in and shape over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Focusing on British imperial and post-imperial expansion into North America, New Zealand, and Australia, this project examines the role of livestock breeding in the construction of climatic labels such as “temperate,” and how resulting understandings of climate and environment shaped nineteenth-century theories of heredity both before and after the acceptance of Darwinian evolution. “Breeding Environments” traces the interplay between livestock and place into the late twentieth century to explore rare breed’s conservancy, an international movement that seeks to preserve, reestablish, and at times even recreate “historic” breeds of livestock. In this context, rare or heritage breeds—those whose numbers have declined due to the changing imperatives of the meat industry and revolutions in transportation—become, through their emblematic associations with particular times and places, a way to redeem an environment, or to preserve or recreate a past landscape.

Miriam Boyer
Sociology, Columbia University.
“From a Basic Staple to a Strategic Plant Genetic Resource: Maize, Biotechnology and the Transformation of Social Relations in Mexican Agriculture”

My dissertation will analyze the technological and sociopolitical process whereby genetic resources in agriculture are constituted. My goal is to define the central characteristics of capital accumulation based on the commodification of hereditary traits in plants—in terms of investment patterns, property rights regimes, and in particular the conflicts surrounding regulating political institutions. Since this creation of
global markets is related to biodiversity as a resource of key economic importance, a first part will reconstruct historically the decisive reinvestment of petrochemical capital into the ‘life sciences industries’ and their expansion into mass markets of food production and more recently, agrofuels. The project will then turn to the concrete social relations in the production of genetic resources in agriculture in Mexico, the country with the greatest agricultural diversity in Maize. This grain has been a strategic focus of biotechnologies associated with the industrialization of agriculture during the ‘green revolution’, and more recently with technologies allowing the specific control of genetic traits. The analytical focus throughout will be on the dissociation between territorial and economic control of genetic resources; tensions among regulating political institutions— including national, local and supranational regimes; and alternative visions and practices with agricultural resources by local communities.

Yu-Ju Chien
Sociology, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities.
“The Role of Intergovernmental Organizations in the Production of Scientific Knowledge on Avian Influenza”

My research explores how intergovernmental organizations mediate knowledge and policy production in response to a new disease—avian influenza. As the most legitimate source of information, UN affiliated organizations, including the World Health Organization (WTO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), have coordinated scientific research endeavors and proposed global preparedness and response plans. However, scientific understanding about the disease’s casualty and transmission mechanisms is not definitive today. Experts of various disciplines have different perspectives and focuses. Some recommendations were criticized for ignoring certain key factors such as commercial farms. Given this scientific indeterminacy and controversy, my research seeks to explain the dynamic process between knowledge production and policy construction. Through what processes do these organizations filter various perspectives and achieve policy recommendations? By using in-depth interviews and archival analysis, I will investigate three questions. First, what external and internal factors influence knowledge production within these organizations? Second, how are organizations shaping the content and hierarchy of knowledge on avian influenza? Third, what is the relationship between knowledge and policies? The research will contribute to our understanding about how organizations construct knowledge and perceptions.

Erica Dwyer
History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania.
“Making Sick People - Saving Lives and Building Careers in Times of Global Health Crisis”

In 2006, Yale researchers announced the presence of extensively drug resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) in a remote hospital in South Africa. 52 of 53 patients had died within a month of being seen; most were HIV positive. Experts warned of a new, frightening infectious disease: this "virtually untreatable," "rapidly fatal," "extreme" illness was poised to "imperil millions." The patients described were indeed dying from devastating TB infection. Yet tuberculosis has been endemic in South Africa for generations; TB resistant to all available drugs has been known since the 1990s; and the Yale patients were not as much untreatable as untreated – most of them had never received anti-TB medications. This dissertation will interrogate the processes through which a small cluster of deaths in remote rural South Africa was plausibly converted into an urgent global health crisis. What strategies have been used by academics and international organizations to identify and prioritize crises of human suffering in medical terms? What consequences does this biomedical framework have for the proposed solutions to these crises? In the context of HIV/AIDS, how has South Africa's post-apartheid relationship with the global community been affected by the dominant application of biomedical lenses to societal problems?

Jakob Feinig
Sociology, State University of New York – Binghamton.
“Making Monetary Politics Safe for Democracy - The Legitimacy of Independent Central Banks in Europe”

I want to find out what enables unaccountable central banks to operate almost entirely unhampered by democratic control and public pressure. How and why is it that the rule of central bankers is much less challenged than that of other experts? This is a very surprising phenomenon given the crucial socio-political importance of this institution. How and why are disinterest and acquiescence produced? I hypothesize that, comparing France and Switzerland, I will find similarities, most importantly the depoliticization of monetary issues for the public at large. I expect this to be the case despite quite disparate contexts: France is a large, politically much more unsettled country with a new currency and a non-national central bank. Switzerland is very different in all these respects. I intend to conduct and interpret interviews with people from different backgrounds and analyze public media and high school textbooks. My proposal opens a window to look at processes of state legitimization and social regulation - traditional social science concerns - in its relation with scientific truth claims, in this case economics. I further touch on political theory issues pertaining to democracy and expertise.

Elizabeth Hennessy
Geography, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.
“Turtles All the Way Down: Scientific Knowledge and the Governance of Crisis in the Galapagos Islands”

World-renowned for their endemic biodiversity and for inspiring Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, the Galapagos National Park is often referred to as the world’s most famous “living laboratory.” Over the past 10 years, however, tourism has boomed and unprecedented numbers of people have migrated to the islands in pursuit of economic opportunity. These migrants see the islands as rich in natural resources and livelihood possibilities, but local scientists and policy makers see the very presence of people as threatening the fragile natural ecosystem. This concern prompted the Government of Ecuador to declare the islands “at risk” in April 2007. UNESCO soon followed, declaring the World Heritage Site “in danger.” My work addresses the dynamics of this crisis through an institutional ethnography of two institutions at the center of environmental governance in the Galapagos: the Galapagos National Park and its research complement, the Charles Darwin Research Station. I explore how scientific knowledge is embodied in experts in these institutions, enacted as they work together to manage the crisis, and contested as policies are translated to local populations. This work explores how boundaries between institutions and ways of knowing are replicated in the physical and social landscape of the islands.

Anna Jabloner
Anthropology, University of Chicago.
“Multicultural Technologies of 'Race': (Re)Productions of Racism in European and US Gene Databases - A Comparative Analysis”

Over the past two decades, several countries, among them the United States and Iceland, have initiated large-scale, multidisciplinary human genetic research projects that combine efforts of governments, biotechnology corporations and individuals who give blood samples. These projects aim at representing and archiving (parts of) humanity through collecting varied human genetic codes. I would like to examine (re)conceptualizations of ‘race’ through technologies or knowledge managements systems like databases. Viewed critically, databases as multicultural technologies are based on certain ideas about biological classification. I am interested to explore whether ‘race’ as a classificatory category is still based on biologically determinist narratives or whether it is being re-conceptualized in cultural terms. My specific interest in this study lies in its relevance to urgent political questions – of (anti)racism and nationalism, of citizenship, of conceptions of the human – as they are ultimately delegated to science. Just as the search for genetic bases of diseases eventually encounters the question of ‘race’, so do genetic databases: in their endeavor to represent humanity in its totality, don't they need to make a definition of what counts as human? Examined critically, the question of a human gene pool appears to be structured by political and racial vectors.

Katherine Kenny
Sociology, University of California – San Diego.
“Different Publics, Different Health? Local and Global Knowledges in International Tobacco Control”

On February 28th, 2005, the world’s first international public health treaty came into force under the auspices of the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). As an unprecedented development in tobacco control, and international public health, the FCTC provides an exemplary case to consider questions of local and global knowledge, competing conceptions of health and disease, constructions of risk, public participation and global governance. I employ a range of qualitative methods in order to offer an interpretive analysis of the complex interweaving of cognitive, material, social and political aspects of this attempt at international public health and global governance. I argue that the FCTC operates on a traditional model of the relationship between science and policy, which tends to reify the distinction between global science and local politics. In advising member-states on how to design effective tobacco control strategies, the FCTC urges governments to recognize the importance of nationally specific ‘socio-political environments’ while simultaneously acknowledging the ‘global evidence’ of scientific tobacco research. I argue that the FCTC thus assumes a degree of universality to scientific knowledge that obfuscates the important social, political and cultural processes through which both science and policy, and experts and subjects, are co-produced.

Abigail Martin
Environmental Science, Policy & Management, University of California – Berkeley.
“Towards Biomass Sustainability Assurance: Technology, Politics and Governance”

The rapid expansion of biofuels promises new energy sources, economic gains for rural areas and developing countries, and feasible reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, potential negative ecological and social impacts of increased biofuel production loom large. As international trade in biofuels increases, mechanisms are needed to ensure biofuels are produced sustainably. To address this governance gap, a variety of multi-stakeholder initiatives are underway working to help establish minimum social and ecological standards for biofuels that will be internationally acceptable. These global standards will help structure supply chains and will shape trajectories for emerging bio-based industries. Given that biofuel sustainability standards are co-emerging with second-generation biofuel technologies, this research posits that these standards will not only prove to be a new site of transnational environmental governance, but also a productive of technological governance. Through process-tracing case studies of multi-stakeholder initiatives to construct biofuel sustainability standards, this research draws from Science and Technology Studies and the field of International Environmental Politics and Policy to further our understanding of how environmental governance is constructed by transnational actors of both major biofuel producing and consuming countries, and how sustainability standards may shape corporate behavior in research and development for biofuel technologies.

Chad Monfreda
Science Policy, Arizona State University.
“The Emergence of Public Reasoning in Global Environmental Governance: Cognitive Competition in IMoSEB and the MA”

Science and technology studies have revealed global expert institutions as sources of political order in their production, validation, and use of knowledge. While much of the work on global environmental institutions has focused on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other expert bodies related to climate change, less attention has been given to another aspect of the global environment—biodiversity and ecosystem change. The science and politics of biodiversity and ecosystem change are much different than those of climate change, making the topic fertile for further research. Two efforts to institutionalize global science advice in this area are of particular interest—the consultative process towards an International Mechanism of Scientific Expertise for Biodiversity (IMoSEB) and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA). Although there is much overlap between the scientists, policymakers, other participants in the two efforts, the communities involved exhibit distinct language, norms, standards, goals, and styles of reasoning. In this study, comparative analyses on shared and unshared ideas of what counts as appropriate scientific representation, what kinds of institutions are needed to address biodiversity loss, and which discourses are valid shed light on the processes involved in the emergence of global forms of public reasoning and political order.

Tischa Muñoz-Erickson
Environmental Policy & Governance, Arizona State University.
“Science, Policy and Water Governance in Puerto Rico: A Cross-Cultural Assessment of Knowledge Production for Sustainability”

Water sustainability is a key issue affecting human health and the environment, especially in light of global land use and environmental change. While water insufficiency is usually addressed through technological improvements, research increasingly suggests that institutional failure is a major driver; thus the need to pay greater attention to water governance. In the Luquillo Mountains of eastern Puerto Rico, scientists, water managers and civil society groups are engaging in deliberative forums to discuss science and policy priorities for regional sustainable water management. At the same time, the current legal and institutional framework is undergoing numerous modifications (e.g. decentralization and municipal land use zoning regulations). This presents a dynamic context in which to analyze barriers and opportunities to the production and dissemination of new knowledge and technologies, and the potential for adaptive water governance. This study proposes a stakeholder analysis and a characterization of discourses that are emerging at multiple institutional scales in this region. Interviews and document analysis will be used to examine the framing of water conflicts and stakeholder perspectives about water management, sustainable development, and the role of science and experts in decision-making. This study will set the stage for future comparative analysis to understand how emerging science and policy arrangements in a cross-cultural context.

Nathan Roberts
History, University of Washington.
“An Empire of Trees: U.S. Forest Policy among Filipinos and American Indians, 1875-1930”

As forest conservation policy was finding traction in the halls of U.S. bureaucracy, the United States was extending its empire out over the many forested island of the Philippines. State forest managers and academically-trained scientists viewed the islands’ famed tropical hardwood forests as a new frontier where they could measure, manage, and conserve valuable stands of trees for wise use. The impetus for capturing Philippine people and forests was often generated out of a comparison to American Indians’ places in American society. By comparing the forestry policies that the United States implemented in the Philippine and on Native American Reservations, a new version of American imperial policy is sure to demonstrate how environmental knowledge passes back and forth between colonies and the metropole.

Lee Vinsel
History, Carnegie Mellon University.
“Paper Tigers in an Asphalt Jungle: State Management of the Automobile in the United States, 1966-1988”

In the United States, the 1960s and 1970s were an intense period of peacetime institution building in the federal government, rivaled only by the New Deal. Due to the pressures of consumer advocates, such as Ralph Nader, many agencies created during this time dealt with issues of technological risk. This project will study the organization and construction of three such agencies—the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and the Department of Energy—by examining their regulation and information gathering on a common object—the automobile. Whether as the perpetrators of traffic fatalities, producers of toxic emissions, or victims of fuel shortages, cars played an important role in discourses about risk and technological innovation during this era. Studying these agencies affords a view on how risk perception and the labor of paper pushing influenced technical change. Furthermore, by utilizing the perspective of co-production, we can see how social factors, such as networks, trust, and political influence, structured technological systems and how these technological assemblages simultaneously shaped policy and the social ties between the federal bureaucracy, consumerist groups, and corporations. Finally, examining the transition from Keynesianism to the “neoliberalism” of the 1980s will clarify how deregulation, both official and unofficial, altered these technopolitical regimes.

Seth Baum
Geography, Pennsylvania State University – University Park.
“Discounting Across Space and Time in Climate Change Assessment”

Discounting concerns the comparison of values across space and time. Discounting has emerged as a dominant factor in climate change assessment yet remains the source of much confusion and controversy. Conventional discussion of discounting is also confined to a narrow set of ethical frameworks and circumstances. My dissertation begins by proposing a discounting definition that is at once easy to understand and broad in its scope. This definition is grounded in fundamental ethical concepts, clarifying the normative assumptions that underlie any treatment of discounting. The dissertation then introduces a novel psychological survey of how people discount. Results from this assessment indicate that conventional discounting treatments are too narrow. Given this result, the dissertation then revisits climate change assessment. Emphasis is placed on several important dimensions of climate change commonly neglected in discounting discussion. These dimensions include spatial heterogeneity in climate change impacts, opportunities for adaptation to climate change, and worst-case climate change scenarios. The proposed discounting definition and psychological survey facilitate important insights into the assessment of these dimensions. Furthermore, the assessment process yields important insights which improve our basic understanding of discounting.

Bryan Bushley
Urban & Regional Planning, University of Hawaii at Manoa.
“Reading Between the Trees: Impacts of Livelihood Diversification on Community Forestry Participation in Rural Nepal”

Nepal is often held up as a success story of community based forest management. For nearly three decades, the government has supported decentralization of forest management through various programs and policy reforms. Today “community forestry” is touted as an antidote to the ills of poverty and environmental degradation, providing rural communities with incentives to replant and protect ecologically threatened forests, to benefit themselves and future generations. Simultaneously, Nepal’s rural regions are undergoing rapid socioeconomic change as residents are integrated into urban and global markets, and increasingly turn to job opportunities in cities and overseas. This increased integration and mobility is resulting in diversification of household livelihoods away from local, resource-based income from agriculture and forestry, toward more remote, non-resource-based income, ranging from off-farm jobs, to seasonal migrant industrial work and remittances from international migration. This dissertation explores the implications of this spatial and occupational diversification of rural livelihoods for local participation in community forestry user groups. Combining quantitative survey methods with qualitative research, it aims to uncover how contemporary socioeconomic and cultural factors, along with corresponding shifts in gender and age dynamics, are impacting the extent, nature and equity of participation in these local forest management institutions.

Jennifer Carrera
Sociology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“Hearing the Rain: The Role of Gender, Knowledge and Community in Novel Solutions to Water Shortage in Rural India”

Global warming is predicted to have profound impacts on the world's water resources. With India's population bourgeoning and water supplies already limited, the effects of global climate change may be disastrous. Particularly affected will be poor women, who bear greatest responsibility for providing food and water for the family. In the rural Kerala village of Plachimada, poor farmers, predominantly women, mobilized to protest the extraction of groundwater by a Coca Cola bottling plant, who they argued had been responsible for wells in the area going dry. Given that Coca Cola was only one factor contributing to water shortage in the region, this study will ask why was Coca Cola considered particularly more problematic than Pepsico or the beer bottling plant also in the district? What can local knowledges and cooperative community-centered approaches to solving continuing water shortage in the region offer to addressing issues around local empowerment in addressing global climate change? How can women’s empowerment in natural resource disputes lead to empowerment in other areas? This study uses ethnographic methods to explore community member knowledge about water, conservation, sustainability, and meaning in an effort to appreciate local efforts at addressing systemic issues around water availability in the rural setting.

Kathryn Doherty
Environmental Studies, Antioch University New England.
“Toward a Global Consciousness: Lessons Learned from Environmental Exemplars”

My research focuses on the human responses to contemporary and anticipated global environmental change. Specifically, I am interested in why people take action to mitigate climate change. Recent polls show that most Americans believe climate change is occurring, is caused by human activities, and is a threat requiring immediate action. Unfortunately, in most cases, these new beliefs have not changed old behaviors. Social science research on climate change typically describes behaviors and policies Americans are willing to adopt and analyzes reasons for inaction, but often overlooks reasons for positive behavior change. Environmental exemplars, such as the individuals who participated in ‘The Climate Project’ presenter training initiated by Al Gore, are at the forefront of the movement to mitigate climate change. They are both concerned and taking action. What can we learn from these individuals that might help transform society from ‘concerned’ into ‘acting?’ How did the presenters become aware of and concerned about climate change? What led them from concern to action? The answers to these questions could facilitate the creation of programs designed to lead Americans toward informed environmental decisions and a global consciousness.

Cerian Gibbes
Geography, University of Florida.
“Understanding landscape patterns in the Four Corners Area of southern Africa: An investigation of the role of resource management decisions in determining landscape change and fragmentation.”

Human activities and management decisions increasingly shape landscapes, making conservation of ecosystems challenging. Understanding causes of environmental change is necessary for efficient ecosystem and resource management. Protected areas are a commonly used conservation approach that attempts to limit the impact of human activity on the landscape, and manage the interactions between organisms and landscape composition and pattern. With increasing amounts of land being designated as protected areas, the effectiveness of protected areas as a land management option needs to be evaluated. This is of particular importance in regions where land designated as a protected area, directly limits the resource availability for local populations. Such is the case in the Four Corners Area of Southern Africa. This region has experienced continued growth of both human and wildlife populations, and is experimenting with a variety of landscape management practices including the use of protected areas and community based resource management. To contribute to the understanding of landscape changes in southern African savannas, I will investigate and compare the effectiveness of protected areas versus communally managed lands at limiting landscape degradation and homogenization. This research intends to contribute to the understanding of landscape change and enhance the understanding of land management decisions.

Jennifer Howk
Government, Harvard University.
“Losing Ground: Climate Change, Political Uncertainty, and Social Mobilization in Four Alaskan Communities”

Alaska’s rural communities are slipping off the face of the Earth. Out of 213 rural and predominantly Native villages throughout the state, 184 are threatened by profound erosion brought about by a mutually-reinforcing combination of rising sea levels, increasingly strong winter storms, and melting permafrost. Four communities—Shishmaref, Kivalina, Newtok, and Koyukuk—are in imminent danger of complete obliteration; the others stand to lose runways, roads, and other public structures. These rural villages are the canaries in the coal mine of global climate change, and they offer a unique window onto the social, political, and cultural effects of warming. Despite many shared characteristics, Alaska’s four most endangered villages demonstrate tremendous divergence in their responses to the disaster bearing down on them. Empirically, this research project employs a comparative historical approach and sustained fieldwork to explore how Alaska’s experimental alternative to the reservation system—the Native corporation—has conditioned local norms of political participation and grievance construction. Theoretically, I use the Alaskan case to generate new and more global hypotheses about what matters most in complex, historically informed intersections of public and private actors who are operating under very uncertain conditions and in a nearly perpetual state of environmental emergency.

James Jeffers
Geography, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.
“Institutional Decision-Making and Vulnerability to Climate Change in Coastal regions of Ireland”

This study seeks to expand the geographical coverage of information about vulnerability to natural hazards and to fill an important gap in knowledge about public decision-making in the face of environmental change. Not only are patterns of human vulnerability to coastal hazards little known for Ireland but the interaction of scientific knowledge about environmental change with collective decision-making about appropriate public policy, is poorly understood at the community scale, across most of the world. Existing socio-environmental models of vulnerability will be applied to coastal areas of Ireland to provide a basis for assessing emerging patterns of vulnerability to environmental hazards. This information will inform a follow-up exploration of the role of knowledge about hazards, climate change and vulnerability in policy choices faced by key decision makers who have responsibilities for urban coastal communities. These places are undergoing a mix of societal changes driven both by forces of globalization and more localized soci-environmental shifts. Political restructuring within the island of Ireland, transformations of governance and demography within the European Union, as well as differential participation for Ireland’s two states within the global economy have also combined with site-specific changes in the coastal environment to create a complex menu of public issues and choices.

Martha Lincoln
Anthropology, City University of New York Graduate Center.
“Preparing for Disaster: Climate Change and Public Health Policy in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta”

My proposed research project will focus on public policy that addresses the health effects of climate change in Vietnam's Mekong Delta, a region that the International Panel for Climate Change has identified as extraordinarily vulnerable to typhoons, flooding, drought, and outbreaks of infectious disease. Despite this alarming vulnerability, Vietnam's climate change mitigation efforts, disease prevention programs, and disaster management infrastructure currently represent an inefficiently coordinated multipartisan effort by various foreign governments and nongovernmental organizations. Simultaneously, Vietnam’s transition from state central planning to a market economy has contributed to the population’s increased vulnerability, with a decrease in institutional adaptation to environmental risks (Adger, 2000). Via a careful analysis of the conflicts and challenges inherent in Vietnam's attempts to address the predicted rise in infectious disease, my proposed project will seek to create space for reframing public health policy in terms that address the economic, political, and sociocultural needs and values of poor residents of the Mekong Delta. I aim not only to provide an experience-near portrait of a population facing unprecedented ecological and epidemiological transition, and maximize the value of anthropological insights in crafting robust responses to the largest problem confronting global society. Documentary research and contact with relevant actors will support an ethnographically grounded dissertation, to be completed following fieldwork at sites in the Mekong Delta.

Peter Richards
Geography, Michigan State University.
“Mechanized Agriculture and Amazonian Deforestation”

Brazil’s ‘arc of deforestation,’ broadly encompassing the southern and eastern fringes of the Amazon forest, is the largest and most active frontier of deforestation and land cover change in the world. Recently, researchers have become increasingly concerned about the expansion of mechanized agriculture in the region. The impact of this expansion on the Amazon’s forest, however, remains unclear and so far only anecdotal information has been advanced regarding the extent to which the conversion of pastures by such operations has sparked indirect or compensatory deforestation by displaced ranchers. This study will provide an empirical assessment of direct and indirect deforestation attributable to mechanized agriculture in the Amazon Basin. Satellite-based remote sensing classifications, field research, and spatial econometric data will be integrated to provide a more complete understanding of land cover change and agricultural transformation occurring in the Brazilian Amazon. I propose to assess to what extent pastures are being converted for intensive crop production throughout the basin and examine whether mechanized production is displacing smallholder producers and ranchers and “pushing” them into forested areas or ‘leapfrogging’ pasture lands and directly converting forests to mechanized agricultural production, thus disaggregating Amazonian deforestation into its proximate and underlying causes.

Camille Washington-Ottombre
Forestry & Natural Resources, Purdue University Main Campus.
“Simulating Social and Land-Use Adaptations to Climate Change on Mount Kenya”

Current research forecasts that the toll of climate change will be particularly heavy on farming communities in developing countries. With limited access to agricultural chemical inputs and modern technologies, those communities will need to rely on collective action to adapt to climate change. This project studies and simulates the social and land-use adaptations to climate change on the slopes of Mount Kenya in
Kenya. I will analyze four farming communities from the bottom to the top the mountain: Ivondo (arid), Kambita (semi-arid), Kianjuki (semi-humid), and Ndunduri (humid) building on and adding to datasets collected through a NSF Biocomplexity project. This research aims at quantifying and qualifying adaptation capacities as well as adaptation pathways of social and land-use systems on Mount Kenya. In order to do so, this work analyzes and simulates the dynamic role of social capital and networks, institutions, and land-use diversification in adaptation processes. This research combines qualitative research methods such as role-playing games, surveys and interviews with computer models including agent-based and neural network models to study adaptation processes dynamically. The agent-based model and other results of this research will be used to test the robustness of various adaptation scenarios with local farmers, extension agents, and decision-makers.

Alice Wiemers
History, Johns Hopkins University.
“Community and Climate Change in Northeastern Ghana: Local Authority and Natural Resource Management under Decentralization”

Over the last forty years, drought, desertification, and rising land values have been concrete manifestations of global climate change in northeastern Ghana, as elsewhere in the West African Sahel.
Dramatic floods in 2007 were a reminder that climate instability continues to shape the area’s physical, social, and political landscapes. Recent decentralization initiatives have put increasing responsibility on Ghana’s local governments to respond to the challenges of climate change. These demands have been acutely felt in the northeast, where natural resources play a critical role in local politics. In addition to government officials, local politics involve chiefs, earthpriests, NGOs, and religious leaders. Disputes among these authorities often hinge on competing historical claims to land and natural resources. In this context, it is unclear that local governments can mobilize the resources necessary to cope with climate change. My project seeks to understand the historical and social contexts in which local governments attempt to employ decentralized environmental management. Together with archival and ethnographic fieldwork, I will map resource flows connected with land and natural resources. By examining changing local political economies of environmental management, I will elucidate the implications of decentralization for governments’ ability to cope with climate change in Ghana and elsewhere.

Alice Brooke Wilson
Anthropology, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.
“Interrogating Agricultural Sustainability: Food Sovereignty and the Defense of Maize in Central Mexico”

This dissertation research aims to be part of developing a new analytical framework for understanding and enhancing agro-ecological sustainability in the context of the global food sovereignty movement. Modern industrial agriculture contributes to global environmental change on multiple levels, including the annual consumption of 70 percent of the world’s available fresh water, loss of agricultural biodiversity from the transgenic seed industry, and high levels of climate-affecting pollution from synthetic fertilizers, agrichemical and factory-farm runoff. The social, health, and environmental costs of food have been largely externalized as global agriculture has industrialized over the last fifty years, but cannot be ignored indefinitely. Increasingly, sustainable agriculture has shown the potential to repair soil damage, capture carbon, contribute to rural economies, and improve health. This dissertation research will investigate understandings of alternatives to industrial agriculture as framed by a social movement of self-described “traditional” corn farmers in central Mexico, Defensa del Maiz (in Defense of Maize). Their “defense” of traditional agricultural provides a vital lens through which to study how conceptions of the environment, economy, and society are actively re-worked, in order to expand current understandings of human behaviors that contribute to ecological sustainability and mitigate climate change. 

Said Abdelrahman
Islamic Studies, University of California – Los Angeles.
“Fiqh of Muslim Minorities: A model of ongoing legal and social transformation in a religious minority, the Case of Muslims in the United States”

Islamic consciousness among Muslim communities in Europe and in the United States has been on the rise over the last decade or so. One of the representations of this consciousness is the attempt of the community to seek the Islamic legal stance pertaining not only to the ritual practices but also to other social and political issues, e.g getting divroce through the common legal system, the legality of non-Islamic political participation, etc. This interaction between fiqh and minority; religious law and society through the experience of the Muslim communities in the United States, is the focus of this reseach project. A key question would be "How this interaction made an impact on the Muslim’s communities’ application of their religious laws to the extent that some Muslim scholars call for the establishment of a specific branch of Jurisprudence for Muslims living in a non-Muslim polity, i.e. Fiqh of Muslim Minorities." The research investigates: How such production of a new category of Fiqh is relevant to the process of modernization, accommodation, protest and identity? How such a production correlates with the question of law and modernity? Can jurisprudence be modernized and accommodated, as a requirement to cope with the modern world? Or is it modernization that accommodates itself within the existing jurisprudence? How this production is connected with the process of (re)defining Islam for, or in other words islamicize, Muslim communities living in a non-Muslim 'modernities'. The proposed research will also explore the actors and agencies behind the production of this Fiqh and examine the factors that count for its production, dissemination or limitations.

Orkideh Behrouzan
History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Fashioning Psycho-biological Selves:  Psychiatric Subjects in Iran”

Dunya Deniz Cakir
Political Science, University of Massachusetts.
“Between the Education of Democratic Civility and Islamic Activism: Alternative Modernities in Turkey and Egypt”

This research aims at bringing ethnographic scrutiny to bear on particular manifestations of modernity in the Middle East through a comparative case study of Turkey and Egypt. Taking its cue from Foucauldian analytics of government, it locates practices of modernity in the multiple forms of local reappropriation of, and negotiation over the discourse and politics of democratization through civil society development. The project aims to investigate the workings, techniques, instruments of the democratization apparatus funded by a vast network of international aid agencies. By highlighting the processes of subject-making through the inculcation of particular types of behavior and identity among the targets of democratization, the research essentially aims to excavate the different modalities of resistance to the governing democracy paradigm specifically by focusing on the relationship between civil society development projects funded by USAID in Egypt and EU in Turkey and Islamic activism. In that respect, the project emphasizes a rather underestimated topic in governmentality studies which overwhelmingly concentrate on the workings of power to the neglect of resurging patterns of local resistance to governing discourses. In that respect, Islamist movements provide a starting point for the project of examining alternative modernities sought vis-à-vis the disqualification of political Islam as a pathological component of Middle Eastern politics in need of rehabilitation through inclusion into democratic politics.

Gilla Mae Camden
Arabic Languages and Literature, Georgetown University.
“Ruling in on Muslim Women’s Role within the Judiciary System: Linguistic Identity Construction in Egypt, Malaysia, and Afghanistan"

In order to harness the societal power of religious authority and transcend traditionally constructed boundaries associating gender reforms with a secular, Western modernity, Muslim women have become prominent contributors to the linguistic restructuring of the debate on their expanding agency within the public sphere through presenting critical reinterpretations of religious texts. Hence, I propose to examine the Islamicized discourse within which Muslim women situate and legitimate their contemporary roles, focusing on the debate on women’s right to serve as judges. Using discourse analysis and an ethnographic approach, I will conduct interviews with female, Muslim activists and adjudicators in Egypt, Malaysia, and Aghanistan and research native campaigns to introduce women within the judicial system particularly in relation to shariah courts and family law. By analyzing data from training programs and public awareness campaigns from the Arab Center for the Independence of the Judiciary and the Legal Profession in Cairo, Sisters in Islam in Selangor, and Afghan Women Judges Association (AWJA) in Kabul, I hope to contribute to the understanding of how Muslim women use language to construct and validate their multiple identities— reappropriating terms such as female, Muslim, modern, and educated-in order to challenge dominance within their societies.

Tabitha Decker
Sociology, Yale University.
“Planning the Global City: Negotiating Gender and Mobility on the Dubai Metro”

Dubai is a city of superlatives: home to the world’s tallest building, highest star-rated hotel, and soon, one of the world’s most technologically advanced metro rail systems. Alongside this hypermodern built environment exists a less recognized city, consisting of the everyday spaces required to meet the transportation, consumer, and social needs of 1.4 million inhabitants. With increasing population density and diversity in Dubai, what priorities have shaped its urban development? How do Dubai’s aspirations to become a global city incorporate and affect notions of local identity, tradition, and heritage? I will examine these questions through a case study of the new Dubai Metro. The Metro is both an essential infrastructure project and an important symbolic initiative. Beyond state-of-the-art driverless trains, it will feature optional sex-segregation and a first class car. This spatial configuration may diminish the Metro’s efficiency, suggesting the importance of non-economic logics. Through archival research, participant observation within the transit authority, and interviews with key planners I will develop a comprehensive account of official plans for the Metro. In addition, I will collect and analyze data on marketing and public opinion of the Metro both prior to and following its opening in fall 2009.

Joshua Gedacht
Southeast Asian History, University of Wisconsin – Madison.
“Islam's Distant Shore: Colonialism, Conversion, and the Creation of Modernities around the Sulawesi Sea, 1851-1946”

My project seeks to examine the relationship between Euro-American imperial rule and shifting Islamic identities in the southern Philippines, the easternmost islands of present-day Indonesia, and Sabah in Borneo. The advent of colonization around the mid-nineteenth century marked a period of flux; foreign rulers systematically diminished or dismantled local sultanates, competing empires severed longstanding networks of trade, and Christian missionaries inundated the islands. My research will consider how local actors refashioned their identities amidst this crucible of colonial change. I will pay particularly close attention to the interactions between foreign Christians and local Muslims as a window to understanding shifting attitudes, beliefs and practices. My working hypothesis—that this wave of missionary activity profoundly unsettled the pre-existing spiritual balance, giving impetus to a reorientation of Islamic social and spiritual life away from the sultan toward the lower strata of indigenous society; to the village teacher (pandita), the village school, and the lay person—will provide insight into the transformations constitutive of Muslim Modernities. Indeed, this project will contribute to a more nuanced framework for interpreting the formation of religious subjectivities and communal boundaries across regions with diverse historical and cultural backgrounds.

Shady Hakim
History, Georgetown University.
“The Formation of Modern Coptic Identity: Religion, Class, Gender, and Nationalism in Egypt, 1881-1919”

Egypt’s 1919 revolution has received significant attention as a historical moment in which Christian and Muslim Egyptians were united in their national aspirations and anti-colonial resistance to the British. However, scant attention has been paid to the particular trajectories of Coptic identity up until that point. Less than a decade prior, between 1907 and 1911, intercommunal relations between Copts and Muslims were strained; the Muslim and Coptic presses expressed bitter disagreements, Coptic Prime Minister Butrus Ghali was assassinated, and leaders of the two communities held mutually exclusive congresses in the spring of 1911. The dissonance of these two historical moments, taking place only a decade apart, highlights important questions related to the negotiation of minority identities within an Arab Muslim colonial context. While the imbricated categories of religion, gender, modernity and nationalism have been explored in recent Middle East historiography, rarely have they been examined with specific reference to non-Muslim communities. This project seeks to analyze the construction of Coptic identity through several interrelated prisms: the class implications of an elite-driven Coptic communal modernizing process, the formation of Egyptian nationalist consciousness among Copts under British occupation, and the gendered implications of these developments in the formation of modern Coptic identity.

Sarah Parkinson
Political Science, University of Chicago.
“Masters of Their Domain: Sovereign Cooptation and Militant Mobilization in Lebanon”

What are the social and environmental factors that determine the predominance of certain political groups in different refugee camps in Lebanon? This project argues that resistance groups and other political actors respond to the competing demands of local and international supporters by adopting different organizational forms. It examines the ways in which group elites understand and adapt to the benefits and constraints of support networks that draw on local populations, national governments, and international patrons. I maintain that by understanding how organizations draw on conceptions of prestige, loyalty, and resistance within varied environments, we can subsequently analyze organizational evolution and competition.

Daren Ray
History, University of Virginia.
“Swahili Modernities: Imagining Islamic Communities in Nineteenth-Century East Africa”

I propose to open the way towards a multi-centric analysis of Islam and Modernity by examining how East Africans created Swahili ethnicity to meet the challenges of growing Arab and European presences in the nineteenth century. Scholars centering their analyses of Islam and Modernity on the Middle East and Europe, respectively, have marginalized other regions, such as the Swahili Coast, as deviant peripheries gradually drawn into one or the other core of orthodoxy. For instance, historians often herald the nineteenth-century immigration of Omani sultans and Hadraumi merchants to the Swahili Coast as the beginning of Modernity there, since the sultans integrated the region into the world economy and the merchants introduced egalitarianism prior to British Colonialism. My research will contextualize these alleged transformations of the political-economy in centuries-deep articulations of Islamic communities along the East African coast to challenge the usual scholarly emphases on “integration” and “egalitarianism”. I will avoid the teleology of “pre-modernity” by historicizing East Africans’ debates over bid’a (innovation) and sunna (tradition) through which they created a new “Swahili” identity. This novel “imagined community” enabled individuals to participate in the large-scale engagements with strangers that characterize Modernity while retaining the Traditions that anchored them in local communities.

Abdoulaye Sounaye
Religion, Northwestern University.
“Muslim Epistemologies of Social Transformation in Niger”

The tendency to draw on Islam “as a template for ideas and practices” particularly when Muslim actors envision “alternative political realities” and attempt to reconfigure “established boundaries of civil and social life,” (Salvatore and Eickelman, Public Islam and the Common Good, eds, (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004) xii.) marks contemporary Islamic activism in Niger. How does this phenomenon affect the public sphere and the society as a whole? How to conceptualize the civility invoked by such activism? These questions inform my research, especially when it centers on preaching, learning institutions, and other intellectual activities (seminars, debates, etc.) as sites of social action. The making of this universe where knowledge production, acquisition and transmission are crucial in informing both individual subjectivity and sociopolitical discourses is a turning point in Muslims’ activism in Niger. Following the 1990s multiplication Islamic associations, Islamic activists now focuse on what they view as the necessary uncovering and vulgarization of the Sunna. Of course, this is predicated on the idea that the knowledge of the Sunna would reshape the ethical world of the subject and thereby the moral economy of the society. Consequently, learning becomes the vehicle through which Tarbiyya (good behavior, especially in relation to youth) and Magabarcin Kwaray (good governance, leadership) are to be achieved. My preoccupation is to analyze this unexamined connection between morality, nurturing the self and the conduct of public affairs in contemporary Niger.

Timur Yuskaev
Religious Studies, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.
“Toward an American Qur’an: Traditions, Modernities and Publics in American Muslim Qur'anic Interpretations”

How do American Muslims interpret the Qur’an? To answer this query I focus on two preachers, Hamza Yusuf and Warith Deen Muhammad, and one writer, Aminah Wadud. I analyze how they use the Qur’an in their pedagogies of American Muslims. They Americanize the Qur’an - a process that creates tensions and raises issues about American Muslim identity apart from, and in concert with, the global Muslim community. My research intersects practical and theoretical issues of Muslim modernities in both American and transnational contexts. I analyze how the Qur’an is spoken as well as read, and investigate how American interpreters invoke tradition as a modality of contextually driven change. I look at methodologies they employ and try to see how contexts, audiences, and rhetorical forms that are marked as American influence their interpretations. In the summer 2008, I will begin combining my study of aural and literary texts with fieldwork. I will travel to Berkeley, CA, a current home to Yusuf and Wadud. I will interview them, as well as students and faculty at Yusuf’s Zaytuna Institute. I will also talk with Bay Area Muslims who are not affiliated with Zaytuna, nor allied with Yusuf’s interpretation of the Qur’an.

Edoardo Zavarella
Anthropology, University of California – Berkeley.
“Images and Remembrance of Death”

Since the Second Palestinian Intifada in 2000, images of death have invaded the everyday life of Muslims all around the world. The content of these images varies from the bloody display of dead bodies to the equally morbid footage of suicide bombers' messages from the grave. This flow of images has been consistently channeled by satellite TVs such as Al-Jazeera and Al-Manar for the past 7 years: anthropologically speaking, 7 years is enough time for a phenomenon to crystallize and irradiate its meaning in people's everyday lives. I am interested in the interplay between this flow of death-images and a core practice of Islamic cultivation of sensibility, that is, the remembrance of death advocated by Al-Ghazali. I thus pose two distinct and yet interrelated questions: i) How is the Islamic practice of remembering death affected by the proliferation of live-broadcasted images of death, a phenomenon that has followed the birth and wide-spread growth of Arab satellite TVs such as Al-Jazeera and Al-Manar? ii) What is the outcome of the influence of TV images on Islamic ethical-political agency? The intersection of Islamic tradition, satellite media, and modern political struggles, defines the perimeter of my inquiry.

Jennifer Boles
History, University of Indiana at Bloomington.
“’8 Millimeters Versus 8 Millions’: Superochero Cinema, Mexico City, and National Identity after the Golden Age”

My dissertation examines the connection between urbanization, national identity, and the rise of independent cinema in 1960s and 1970s Mexico. By contextualizing the decline of Mexico’s “Golden Age” national cinema in the 1950s and the rise of socially conscious independent genres in the 1960s, I propose to show how a group of filmmakers called the superocheros sought to expose what they saw as a contradictory dichotomy of urban progress and rural exoticism that lay at the core of Mexican identity. This became particularly clear in 1968 when the spectacle of modernity and cultural nationalism clashed with the most visible challenge to that image: the student movement and the state-sponsored massacre and imprisonment of hundreds of students. Inspired by 1968 and the regional genre of “New Latin American Cinema” that combined social activism with cinematic expression, independent filmmakers focused on the changing cityscape to critique their marginalized status. The superocheros, however, distinguished themselves with 8mm hand-held cameras that allowed them to move through the city streets. By using their cameras and their bodies to capture the city’s evidence of disparity and disillusionment, they renegotiated the abstract and material boundaries of modernity and national identity. My project combines the textual analysis of film studies with the disciplinary strengths of history to examine how a section of Mexico’s youth saw themselves through the lens of the city—a place that made transparent the contradictions between modernity and Mexico's national identity but that also served as a space for its very contestation and invention.

Mona Damluji
Architecture, University of California – Berkeley.
“Baghdad on the Big Screen: Iraq’s urban history through the lens of British Newsreels from the 1920s to the 1950s”

British colonial authorities declared the military occupation of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul provinces in the wake of World War I and a collapsed Ottoman Empire, just as British plans to inaugurate the extraction of petroleum from the region were coming to fruition. Meanwhile in London, the nascent British film industry had launched into regular production of popular cinemagazines, which featured newsreels showing the first moving images of people and places in Iraq to be exhibited to mass European audiences. The newsreels that were produced in affiliation with British military and petroleum industries between 1920 and 1960 focused on various representations of urban modernity, and therefore these films not only embody the radical transition of orientalist representations from literature and painting into the dynamic medium of moving image, but also offer a critical window into the earliest visualizations of the twentieth century urbanization in the Middle East as it developed in the context of modernist trends in architecture and planning. Underscoring my interest in tracing the evolution of imagined urban geographies of “Iraq” in contemporary western visual culture is the fact that the history of colonial intervention in Iraq by the military, oil and media industries remains a crucial precedent for understanding contemporary American and British engagement in the region.

Bridget Gilman
History of Art, University of Michigan – Ann Arbor.
“Robert Bechtle’s Painted Streets: Tracing the Shifting Realities of Northern California’s Urban and Suburban Landscapes”

The focus of my proposed project is representations of spatial environments in 1960s and 70s California art movements. The core of this work centers on the paintings of Robert Bechtle, a member of the Photorealist movement and prolific documentarian of his own Bay Area surroundings. Bechtle’s work is significant not merely due to its skillful illusionism or its convincing “realness,” but also because of the unusual nature of the subjects he has chosen to depict. Concentrating on the seemingly banal spaces and objects of daily life, Bechtle’s artworks, though the rigor of their transformation from photograph to painting, elucidate the signification of “ordinary,” lived spaces. Moreover, working from the 1960s through the present day, the artist has recorded subtle shifts in landscape that demographic statistics fail to capture. Encouraging the viewer to think across the seemingly discrete categories of “city” and “suburb,” the artist illuminates how the history and current reality of such spatial boundaries is much more fluid than their respective terms imply.

Zachary Hilpert
American Studies, College of William and Mary.
“Picturing the American City in Peril: The aesthetic of urban devastation and its role in American culture”

Why do we choose so often to understand our cities through images of their destruction? Our society has nurtured an aesthetic of devastation specific to American cities that plays on a deeper fear of the urban environment. In what ways do these images reveal our greatest fears within the urban landscape? Why do we document the worst moments of a city’s history before we rebuild, and does this aestheticization serve our collective memory, or our collective amnesia? I will explore images created in the wake of such iconic events as the 1865 intentional burning of Richmond and the unintentional 1871 Chicago fire, the 1889 Johnstown flood, and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. My work will also cover images of more gradual forms of urban decay, such as the effects of the Depression in urban centers and the mid-century ghettoization of Detroit, and representations of twenty-first century events like the September 11 attacks and the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina. These instances of catastrophe produced images that shape the historical narrative for viewers. Understanding the cultural work done by these images will allow us to comprehend how we have collectively understood and reshaped urban America in response to our own fears.

Max Hirsh
Architecture & Urban Planning, Harvard University.
“High-Speed Urbanism: The Infrastructure of International Mobility in Frankfurt and Hong Kong”

My research focuses on the ways in which the built environment engages with questions of mobility and more specifically on the architectural and planning strategies that are designed to attract or retain skilled migrants. This summer, I would like to analyze the visual and social dimensions of three urban typologies that promote the circulation of people, goods, and information: 1) the global transit hub; 2) the international business center; and 3) the short-term residential complex. My initial hypothesis is that these mobility-driven environments are interrelated and can be understood as the physical interface between the global and local scales of urbanism. Mediating between these scales, they generate urban environments that are globally accessible while being rooted in a local sociocultural context. In so doing, they create synthetic urban spaces that attempt to provide a sense of visual and aesthetic coherence in the face of cultural and geographic discontinuities. Focusing on several sites in Frankfurt and Hong Kong, I hope to analyze the syncretic results in order to better understand the impact of international mobility on the built environment.

Nathan Holmes
Cinema & Media Studies, University of Chicago.
“Scenes of Crime: The Cinematic Aesthetics of Criminality and City Space”

My project seeks to explore the ways that crime and detective films construct and imagine a particular vision of urban space and life. In my research I propose to look at a number films and directors, primarily French and American, in order to understand how particular film styles both manifested and were inflected by transformations in urban space. It is my idea that particular tropes developed in crime films – such as displays of burglary and pursuits through city streets – supply both pleasurable spectacles as well as visual metaphors for understanding the complex relation between architecture, individual movement, and the social relations that are produced by, and produce, urban life. To ground these ideas, I would like to trace the ways that these films sustain and transfigure ideas of criminality developed in the nineteenth century through popular literature, the press, and the emergent field of criminology. It is my hope that this study will not only inform ideas about urban sociality, but, in that it traces these ideas out of a history of cinema, it will also be able to make claims about the ways that film optically produces and reproduces types of visual perception that enable us to see the modern world with different eyes.

Alfredo Rivera
Art History, Duke University.
“Re-Envisioning Cuba: Art, Architecture, and Visual Culture in Havana, 1955-1970”

My project explores the relationship between aesthetics and ideology in post-revolutionary Cuba by mapping various visual documents of the era against the politics of the Cuban Revolution. Focusing on Havana, I consider shifts in the city’s architecture, the reconfiguration of urban spaces, developments in poster and billboard art, and changes in the fine arts. How early- to mid- twentieth century Cuban modern art and architecture deployed the avant-garde in revolutionary Cuba, as well as how Soviet Realism was adapted and resisted is central to my project. The new Cuban government placed particular emphasis on the cultural development of the island; it was during this early, experimental era that the debate around Cuban aesthetics was most in flux. My thesis will explore investigate such questions as: How did the Cuban government develop an aesthetic of the revolutionary? How were architectural spaces from the island’s capitalist pasts re-inhabited, and how did the government envision the future of Cuban architecture? What was the status of artists after the revolution, and how did the government use the arts for ideological ends? Lastly, how does Havana serve as a model for analyzing the relationships of politics, representation, and the urban imaginary?

Joshua Souliere
History, Florida International University.
“Religious Encounters, Political Authority, and Space: Urban Space in Zaria, Nigeria, 1500-1800”

This study will examine how the urban space of Zaria (Nigeria) was shaped by the conflict and negotiations between Maliki Islam and indigenous Maguzawa religious discourses from 1500 to 1800. It argues that the contours of encounters, negotiations, and interactions between these two religious traditions were inscribed on Zaria's urban landscape. As Maliki Islam and Maguzawa both held strong notions about the proper layout, configuration, meaning, and symbolic function of the physical landscape, urban space, architecture, and visual experience, I expect to be able to use the imprints of the ideologies and discourses of these two hegemonic cultural traditions on the landscape to develop a richly textured understanding of the cultural history of Zaria over a three hundred year period. This project will utilize the theoretical and methodological approaches in cultural history, architectural history, geography, anthropology, and archaeology to interpret the urban space of Zaria as an arena of sociopolitical conflict and cultural negotiation between two competing ideologies and discourses. Conceptually, it draws upon Antonio Gramsci’s theories of hegemony, Henri Lefebvre’s conceptualization of space as social production, Joseph Roach’s notions of urban space as cultural performance, and upon William MacDonald’s thesis on the culturally-didactic nature of urban layout and architecture.

Sara Stevens
Architecture, Princeton University.
“Space Rules: Aesthetic Regulation in the American Built Environment”

I propose to study the functional and visual effects of urban policies and regulations that have placed limitations on the aesthetics of real estate development in twentieth century America. For example, private developers who build large residential subdivisions usually write the deed restrictions that limit what the homeowner can do on the property—from building setbacks to paint color to clotheslines. These private contracts have profound effects on the built environment by establishing formal patterns which extend over large areas of land. This project stems from my growing interest in the interaction between real estate developers and business leaders on the one hand and local and national politics on the other through urban planning. The history of the planning discipline has fascinating ties to the rise in expert culture and scientific rationalization, but it also belies countless links to the business community and corporate influence. Seeing how these forces interact on the turf of regulations on the built environment might tell us more about the networks of power at play in urban space, about the role of planning in America, and about the historical development of our visual surroundings. Reading the visual landscape for clues about the underlying private contracts and business deals will further inform our understanding of the spatial practices that shape urban America.

Jia Tan
Cinema/TV, University of Southern California.
“Experimental Art/Film in an Urbanization Experiment: Contemporary Chinese film and art in Pearl River Delta Region”

This project focuses on the southern region of China—the Pearl River Delta Region, which is a geographical area including Macau and Hong Kong, and most part of Canton Province. Economically, this region has been one of the leading regions since China’s reform and “Open-up” policy in the late 1970s. Pearl River Delta Region has been a successful state-led economic experiment to “import” market economy. Culturally, it is a major Cantonese-speaking area with its own regional identity despite the fact that Hong Kong and Macau were not part of China until the late 1990s. With the rapid urbanization process in this region, experimental arts in various visual forms have begun to gain a presence in the global film and art market. My project will survey the historical development of experimental artistic practices (mostly in film, video, photography and interactive media) and how these practices response to or allegorize the urbanization process. This project will also examine the network and interactions of local Cantonese artists inside and outside the region and how they mobilize themselves across national boundaries and eventually involve in the international art market. In brief, this project intends to write a contemporary historiography on the social history of such experimental visual culture in a region of urbanization experiment.

Alla Vronskaya
History, Theory & Criticism of Art and Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“Landscaping Dictatorships”

What was the early Soviet landscape and what was it imagined to be? What was its place in the new socialist type of town? What was its role in the process of constructing the new Soviet identity? Contemporary scholarship still does not have answers to these questions. I aim to draw a comprehensive picture of Soviet landscape from the Revolution of 1917 until the death of Stalin in 1953 in all its aspects, including attitudes about the past and future (restorations, demolitions, and the polemics that surrounded them), questions of national and class identification, and development of the new (proletarian) style in landscape architecture. A significant part of research will be devoted to theories of town planning that determined landscape architecture, such as the polemics of socialist settling of 1929, the Stalin plan for Moscow of 1935, new town planning conception. Comparing Soviet realized and unrealized landscape projects with those produced in other, especially totalitarian, countries (Nazi Germany, Maoist China, Post Soviet Central Asia) will form an important part of research.

Annis Whitlow
City Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Stories of trauma, visions of change: exploring how interpretations of Camden, NJ,'s decline are impacting its revitalization”

Camden, NJ, a city of about 80,000 located directly across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, PA, entered a period of intense revitalization efforts when its finances were taken over by the state in 2002. Since then, six years of visioning, planning, and political wrangling have met with only limited success. The population has continued to decline, and plans have met with significant resident protest. In his study of the history of Camden’s decline and renewal, Howard Gillette revealed the presence of narratives in the suburbs explaining the city’s problems in reference to the violence and instability of the 1960s and 1970s that culminated in the 1971 race riots (2005). He also identifies mistrust between community leaders and city and county decision-makers as a major factor stalling planning processes. In this study I will explore these narratives to understand how they are influencing planning processes. I will use theories of narrative construction of identity and theories of urban governance to understand how competing interpretations of the city’s history are shaping competing visions for the city’s future. I will also explore how the narratives are intertwined with images of the city’s past and future.