Social Science Research Council

Akissi Britton
Anthropology, City University of New York Graduate Center.
“From Brooklyn to Brazil: Race, Place, and Religion in the Mapping of Diasporic Blackness.”

My proposed research is a comparison of two communities of Yoruba religious practitioners in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil and Brooklyn, New York that have maintained a relationship for the past thirty years. This project will focus on issues of Blackness; the construction of oppositional identities; and the transnational exchanges that inform these constructions. My research will contextualize how Blackness and the practicing of Yoruba-derived religions are related. Moreover, I will examine the different socio-historical trajectories of the development of Yoruba religion in Bahia as opposed to its development in the United States. For the Brooklyn group, the Black Nationalist Movement of the 1960's and 70's was integral to its formation. In practicing the Orisa tradition, this community of African-descended practitioners found an "authentic African" spiritual system that was consistent with the ideology of Black Nationalism. Given this history, I would like to explore the underlying political motivations of the religious practices of each group. Within the African Diasporic framework, my project seeks to determine whether the manifestation of Yoruba religion occurred in the same politicized manner in Bahia as it does in New York. Answers to these questions may reveal why and how the Brooklyn-Bahia alliance has been maintained.

Jamie Davidson
World Arts & Cultures, University of California-Los Angeles.
“Embodied Knowledge in the Tambor de Mina of Maranhão.”

My dissertation will explore embodied ritual practices among the Mina-Jeje peoples in northeastern Brazil. The term Mina-Jeje describes the Afro-Brazilian descendents of the vodun-worshipping peoples identified with the Allada town and kingdom of present-day Benin. In the 17th and 18th centuries European travelers and slave traders called these people "Mina" after the slave Fort of Elmina or São Jorge da Mina. In Cuba these people would come to be called Arará, and in Haiti, Rada, names identified with Allada. The "Mina" who arrived in northeastern Brazil (specifically, the states of Bahia, Pará and Maranhão) would be renamed "Jeje" in the mid-18th century but their religious practices would retain the name, "Tambor de Mina." My work explores the ritual practices of the Tambor de Mina in Maranhão state. I will address the following questions in my research: What stories are being (re)enacted through these dances? How are ritual and political power manifested, distributed, renegotiated and reiterated during danced rituals? And how does today’s dancing body function as an archive for understanding the history of the Black Atlantic?

Nandini Dhar
Comparative Literature, University of Texas at Austin.
“Problematizing the Archive, Re-Writing Agency: 'Neo-Slave' Aesthetics in Museums and Historical Novels of the African Diaspora.”

My proposed study will examine representations of the history of slavery at three British historic sites: the Bristol Slave Trade Walk, the Breaking the Chains exhibit opened April 23, 2007 at the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, and the International Slavery Museum to be opened August 23, 2007, Slavery Remembrance Day. This study is part of a larger dissertation project which places colonial-capitalist slavery within a transnational context and “reads” contemporary North American and British history museums in conjunction with African diasporic historical novels on slavery (so-called “neo-slave narratives”). However, the question remains as to how these historic sites refashion the existing archive on slavery. Do such representations enable us to de-familiarize the existing archives which seek to represent the enslaved as the “mute subaltern” or the happy complacent “Sambo” figure incapable of any meaningful resistance? Can we at all contend that these representations are giving birth to alternative modes of history-writing? By providing answers to such questions, this project aims to analyze how racial-colonial trauma is remembered and performed within the civic life of a nation whose present has been shaped significantly by its imperial past.

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
Geography, University of California-Berkeley.
“Of Youth and Revolućion: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation in Contemporary Cuba.”

Any discussion of the fate of the Cuban Revolution must begin with the generation now reaching political maturity: a generation which not only hasn’t known any government but the current one, but was raised in the material deprivation and relative political uncertainty of the “Special Period” following the 1989 dissolution of the Soviet Union. My research will center around these young Cubans’ approach to two key concepts, revólucion and cubanidad, and it will assess the extent to which either of these concepts matter and/or are seen by the younger generation to reside in the current state. Research will examine the cultural policy of the government from the late 1990s to today. Examining the specific case-history of the Cuban state’s 1998 decision to declare hip-hop music—theretofore regarded as an imperialist corrupter of delinquent youth—an “authentic example of cubanidad,” the project will examine the political rationale for, and results of, that policy. It will explore the ways in which said policy had an impact on nationalist discourse and “race thinking” in contemporary Cuba, and will produce data the extent to which young Cubans view government decisions in this arena as responsive to their cultural affinities, political ideals, and life aspirations.

Sharon Kivenko
Social Anthropology, Harvard University.
“Dancing Through 'Performance-scapes:' Reflections on Transnationalism, Embodiment and West African Performance.”

How do transnational processes influence embodied practices? Can transnational social networks be traced through global flows of embodied performances? Migrant artists mobilized by changing socio-political and socio-economic climates offer insights into the effects of transnationalism on processes of the body. Post-colonial nationalisms, African diasporic imaginings, and international consumerist demands for “world beat” performance genres offer motivations and vehicles by which West African artists and their embodied forms enter into international performance spaces. These are the spaces in which “African dance” communities are imagined, and the places from whence global networks of “African dance” culture are launched. Through an investigation of the roles that Bamana performing arts play in the construction of transnational dance communities, this project will speak to the ways in which cultural flows of music and dance embodied by West African migrant artists and their foreign protégés contribute to trans-local discourses of race, gender, social class, diaspora, and post-colonial nationalisms. In so doing, scholarly discourses on transnationalism will be broadened to include questions of embodiment and performance.

Chelsey Kivland
Anthropology, University of Chicago.
“Masking Change, Performing Order: The Ritual Histories and Political Arts of Haitian Carnival.”

My dissertation research is concerned with how the ritual of Haitian Carnival is employed to reinforce, modify, and challenge particular social identities and exclusive communities. Through ethnographic investigation of the production and performance of Haitian Carnival, my study examines the social construction of ritual histories as political arts. Viewed as administrative, historical, and dramatic practice, ritual, I hypothesize, is an organizing and generative practice of culture. To understand how ritual is generative is to recognize it as a political process whereby cultural representations presuppose and entail an ever-changing field of social relations. For Haitian Carnival, this process is composed of a set of practices, including the selection, ordering, and placing of performers, performances, and audience, that circumscribe the content and form of the ritual, as it is presented, recorded, and exchanged. My study hinges on the articulation of how these practices influence and are influenced by ideologies that structure the experience and perception of social identity and difference, both locally and globally. By investigating the complex intersection of politics and poetics that inheres in the use of ritual as an ideological object, I will advance understanding of the role public performance plays in shaping and intensifying distinct nationalisms within Haiti and elsewhere in the world.

Xelaju Korda
Latin American Studies, Tulane University.
“Sex Tourism in the Brazilian Northeast: Gender Performances Within a Sexualized World Market.”

My dissertation explores the interpersonal and macro-level effects of sex tourism in Brazil’s northeast, an area known for extreme poverty and inequality, and a popular destination for foreign men on holiday. Studies of sex tourism in Brazil are rare, even though it is an acknowledged problem. While there are some similarities between Brazil and other sites of sex tourism in the world – particularly the Caribbean – Brazil also presents unique patterns and problems. This dissertation provides an ethnographic study of one town, Canoa Quebrada (Canoa) using the voices of a traditionally excluded population: Brazilian women of low economic means. Canoa is located one hundred miles south of Fortaleza (Ceará state), and is ideal for a study of sex tourism because it has been a popular destination for sex tourists for at least two decades. My main questions ask how the complex relationships that develop between Brazilian women and foreign men a) are both sanctioned and censured by social norms; b) consist of carefully staged identity and gender “performances”; c) contribute to a number of informal economic activities in the region; d) affect the health outcomes of those Brazilians who participate; and e) form part of transnational immigration networks.

Jessica Krug
History, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Fugitive Nations: Maroon Societies in Kisama, Angola, São Tomé, and Brazil, 1500-1700.”

My doctoral dissertation will investigate the intellectual history of the political ideology and strategies of identification in Maroon communities, or quilombos, in Angola, São Tomé, and Brazil from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The recent proliferation of studies of the “ethnic” Black Atlantic ignores the primacy of political, rather than ethno-linguistic, identities for many Africans beginning in the sixteenth century. Forming multi-ethnic political identities was a highly effective strategy of resistance and social reformation in the context of the violence and chaos of the slave trade. After detailing the development of the political identity in the Kisama Maroon communities of Angola, I will turn to São Tomé, where quilombos also emerged by the early sixteenth century. As no historical study of the Angolar Maroons of São Tomé has yet been written, I will compare these quilombos with those of the Kisama in Angola. Since many enslaved on São Tomé came from Angola, I will also explore possible continuities between these communities. Finally, I will cross the Atlantic to Brazil, where I will study the sixteenth- to eighteenth-century quilombos in the modern states of Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais in the context of Maroon identity throughout the Black Atlantic.

Jamila Moore
Cultural Studies, University of California-Davis.
“Digitally Mapping The Black Atlantic: Spatial Imagination and the Politics of Re-Appropriation Between Africa and the Americas.”

In 1822 free people of color from the U.S. were sent to the west coast of Africa to settle what is now the Republic of Liberia. In 1918 developers in Cape Town South Africa began to construct the University of Cape Town [UCT] and designed Jameson Memorial Hall in the image of Thomas Jefferson’s famous Rotunda at the University of Virginia. In both cases, the idea of the site, including who would occupy it, and how it would be used vastly preceded its reality or date of construction. This project raises important questions about the spatial legacies of slavery and colonialism by exploring architectural and ideological border crossings between Africa and North America. By examining these distinct time/space events, I argue that Liberia and UCT (South Africa) are both sites that occupied and re-appropriated imaginary ideas of space in hopes of creating utopian environments governed around the strategic absence of black bodies. However, in neglecting the reality of their situations, they allowed a residue of dystopia to ferment, which continues to haunt historical memory at both sites. It is this forgotten residue of dystopia that I seek to bring to the forefront of contemporary occupations and ruminations about these sites.

Matthew Norton
Sociology, Yale University.
“Ashanti to Gold Coast to Ghana: A genealogy of the experience of documentary rule.”

The 19th century in what is now Ghana was a period of deep political, social, and cultural contestation. During this period, the Ashanti Confederacy and British colonial administrators engaged in a struggle over forms and systems of authority, and the systems of meaning that made rule possible. A critical but overlooked element of that struggle was the gradual establishment of documents as objects and symbols of authority. This project has two goals: reconstructing a genealogy of documentary forms of rule as they intersected with elements of Ashanti bureaucracy and British colonial administrative practice; and developing an ethnographic understanding of the cultural and experiential dimensions of documentary rule in contemporary Ghana. I hypothesize that documents became authoritative through a process of colonial authority construction that transformed and replaced structures of Ashanti rule. This suggests that the cultural and experiential dimensions of Ghanaian documentary regimes should be understood as historically contingent rather than generically modern artifacts of bureaucratic rationalization. Structures of authority formed through processes of colonial resistance and domination cannot be simply understood as ‘modern’, in a normatively European sense, but rather pose a strong challenge to a simplified and reified understanding of the modern state itself.

Petra Rivera
African Diaspora, University of California-Berkeley.
“What is Afro-Boricua?: The Impact of Migration and Popular Culture on Understandings of Blackness in Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican Diaspora.”

My dissertation centers on Puerto Rican popular culture, especially music, to discuss the similarities and differences between understandings of blackness in Puerto Rico and the United States. In particular, I am interested in the ways that transnational movement of popular culture via migration and mass media influences conceptualizations of racialized identities in different places. Puerto Rico is an optimal site for the study of race, popular culture, and transnational movement because of the large diaspora in the United States, especially New York City, and the continued movement between Puerto Rico and the U.S. Puerto Rico is also an important site for African Diaspora Studies because of its physical and cultural proximity to many Latin American and Caribbean societies in addition to the United States. My research will focus specifically on reggaetón as a cultural practice that has distinctly African diasporic roots and global commercial success. The project incorporates a variety of methods and sources, including interviews with artists and fans, ethnographies of performances, and analysis of mass media. In general, my dissertation contributes to broader conversations regarding the impact of transnational movements of people and popular culture on individuals’ understandings of racialized identities in different places.

Carmen Thompson
History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“Black Womanhood and Slavery: Survival Strategies in the New World and in West Africa, 1655-1863.”

In 1655 in the colony of Virginia, Elizabeth Key, an African-Anglo woman born in 1630 to a free English man and an enslaved African woman, sued for her freedom, and after lengthy legal proceedings, on July 21, 1659 she prevailed. The significance of the circumstances that surrounded the Key case was in the legal tactics she employed. Key’s strategy hinged on her claim of English ancestry and Christianity, tactics that I contend were part of a larger strategy of survival employed by many “enslaved” women in West Africa. And the techniques for surviving enslavement, as utilized by Key in her suit and other women in the diaspora, provide a unique framework for understanding what it meant to be a black woman in the seventeenth century. Survival strategies are a means for understanding how black women negotiated the oppressive intersections of race, class, and gender as they were developing within the polity of the New World. Equally, survival strategies are a source for tracing the arc of blackness and black womanhood as it was unfolding at a particular historical moment when slavery and blackness were not yet inextricably linked.

Avi Astor
Sociology, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
“Regional Variation and the (Re)Making of Islam in Modern Spain.”

Inter-religious conflict in Europe has provoked much discussion about what many see as an inherent tension between Islam and the West. Such discussion, however, generally neglects the tremendous diversity of Muslim practice in different European societies and in different regions within these societies. I plan to study the mechanisms that have given rise to competing conceptions and practices of Islam in different regions and locales within Spain. Spain provides a particularly interesting context in which to study this issue due to the profound increase in the Muslim population over the last decade, the powerful historical presence of Islam in the Iberian Peninsula, and recent events, such as the Madrid bombings, which have forced Muslim leaders to take a more active role in publicly articulating their competing understandings of the place of Islam in Spanish society. In studying the mechanisms driving diverse practices of Islam in Spain, I plan to analyze the religious fields (in Bourdieu’s sense of the term) in which Muslim leaders in different locations are situated, paying specific attention to how recent events have altered the dynamics of these fields. I will carry out my analysis by conducting semi-structured interviews with Muslim leaders in Madrid, Barcelona, Granada, and Córdoba, as well as by engaging in ethnographic study of religious and social institutions in these cities.

M. Nell Balthrop-Flynn
Anthropology, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
“Security, Embodiment, & Development in Euromediterranean Marseille's Franco-Maghrebi Communities.”

This project will examine second-generation Franco-Maghrebi immigrants’ experiences in Marseille, France, within the context of a redefinition of the city initiated by the EU’s Euro-Mediterranean Project. The international Project seeks to establish the Mediterranean region as a transnational zone of cooperation and security; Marseille uses the same name and rhetoric in an urban renewal project which aims to redefine the city as a trans-Mediterranean metropolis of cultural diversity to appeal to tourists, businesses, and gentrifying classes from throughout France and Europe. Projet Euroméditerranée marketing of the city often deploys this idea by depicting North African cultural products and experiences in advertising. However, contact is discouraged between “immigrants” and desirable tourists, gentrifying classes and businesses, and the presence of actual North African-descended populations is minimized in marketing literature. In this research, I will explore how second-generation Franco-Maghrebi citizens’ experiences of Marseille are impacted by the paradox of being perceived as threats to French national security and cultural identity while their familiar cultural referents are simultaneously packaged in new ways for consumption by outsiders.

Abigail Dumes
Anthropology, Yale University.
“Musical Citizenship: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Belonging among African Gospel Performers in France.”

In the secular French Republic, where religious practice is constitutionally anathema to the public sphere, gospel music is flourishing. Indeed, since the mid-1990s, gospel groups have become increasingly popular attractions, performing in churches throughout France and marketing themselves to a non-immigrant French audience. Sung in English, performed predominantly by west and central African immigrants, and advertised as “authentically African-American,” the phenomenon of African gospel performance is a compelling site from which to analyze shifts in the articulation of subjectivities. Situating Paris as an historically embedded node in a global circuit of transnational flows, I will explore the ways in which the practice and consumption of African gospel performance sheds light on: 1) a localized production of blackness and its articulation with national and transnational processes and 2) everyday negotiations with individual and institutional constructions of the sacred and secular. I am ultimately interested in how, through gospel performance, west and central African immigrants and non-immigrant Parisians negotiate the politics of belonging in France’s Janus-faced times of cosmopolitanism and autochthonous revival.

Crystal Fleming
Sociology, Harvard University.
“Cultural Boundaries and Public Performance: The Politics of Ethnicity in French and American Spoken Word Poetry Venues.”

My dissertation will assess how minorities in France and the United States talk about ethnicity and identity in spoken word poetry venues. This work brings sociological methods and analysis to bear on questions usually relegated to cultural studies by providing a systematic examination of how marginalized groups explore the politics of identity through public performance. Spoken word is a contemporary form of performance poetry held in a wide range of public spaces including cafes, bars, classrooms, prisons and community centers. Closely associated with the hip hop movement, the genre first emerged in the United States during the mid-1980s and has since diffused throughout the world, particularly in Europe. Although the ethic of French Republicanism continues to frame group-based interventions in the public sphere as illegitimate, preliminary fieldwork reveals that spoken word poetry venues in France allow participants to explore the politics of identity, ethnicity and citizenship. I will utilize three methodological tools to examine the circumstances under which poets of African descent in France and the U.S. use the stage to explore racial identity and politics: (1) participant observation at 50 poetry events in Paris and New York (2) in-depth interviews with 30 performers in each site and (3) content analysis of performances.

Gulseren Kozak-Isik
Sociology, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
“A comparative study of Islamic Legal, Religious and Political Institutions in Europe and the USA: A Political Approach to Institutions.”

Both host country governments and Muslim communities in Europe and the United States are engaged in discussion about the adaptability of Islamic religious, cultural and legal traditions to western democratic settings. My dissertation will focus on the compatibility—or lack thereof—between basic principles and institutions of contemporary Western democracies and Islamic law and religion. Key concepts within Islam, such as identification with and loyalty to umma—group consciousness of all Muslims—and gender inequalities built into Islamic family law are in tension with key concepts of Western democracy, including citizenship within nation-states, secularism, individualism, and gender equality. My study will focus on the question of how Islamic traditions and organizations persist and reproduce themselves, while adapting and changing, when they migrate to the west and are confronted with alternative, possibly conflicting western values and principles of organization and behavior. To explore how variation in western receiving contexts shapes processes and outcomes or organizational adaptation, I will design a comparative study of major Islamic umbrella organizations and Islamic legal organizations such as fatwa councils- in the US and Europe.

Sheila Nowinski
History, University of Notre Dame.
“Postwar French Catholic Political Culture, 1944-1958.”

In 1944, the French Catholic leaders who emerged from the resistance had to extricate French Catholicism from its association with collaboration. For the first time, Catholics dedicated to democratic institutions and cooperation with parties on the left, including Communists, were the leading voices of French political Catholicism. My project examines how postwar French Catholic leaders re-shaped French Catholic political culture after Vichy. These leaders defined French Catholic political culture not by a rejection of democracy, but rather by support of republican institutions, and in particular, of the French Christian Democratic party, Mouvement républicain populaire. This shift was not simply a change in Catholic voting habits, but a redefinition of the French Catholic community’s political values and its relationship with the state and society. I argue that this ralliement of French Catholics to the republic reflected a change in political culture. I examine this process outside of electoral politics—in the words and actions of journalists, intellectuals, and social activists.

Elayne Oliphant
Anthropology, University of Chicago.
“Laïcité and Discreet Religiosity: Experiences of Catholicism in Secular France.”

This research will explore experiences associated with contemporary Catholicism in France in the context of more general concerns about the role of religion in public life. Debates surrounding the space occupied by religion in France have a long history but are most often connected to concerns surrounding the relationship between the state and religious institutions and the “visibility” of religious symbols in the public sphere. These anxieties have been most clearly expressed in the law declaring laïcité in 1905 and that regarding conspicuous religious symbols in 2004. While historians have grappled with the role of Catholicism in France’s past, few scholars have closely examined its more recent expressions, presuming modern France to be a space in which religion is (or should be) absent. Current analyses of religion in France, therefore, have tended to focus on Islam, a trend revealing the many ways in which Catholicism is an unmarked category of identification in France. By examining the institutions, practices, rituals, symbols, and discourses associated with Catholicism as they are expressed in the “"archdiocese" of Paris, I will attempt to make visible discreet practices and modes of belonging, thereby filling in gaps currently residing in discussions of la laïcité.

Michael O'Toole
Ethnomusicology, University of Chicago.
“Modeling Multiculturalism: Discourses of Multiculturalism and the Experience of German-Turkish Musicians in Berlin, Germany.”

My research offers an ethnographic study of arts organizations in Berlin, Germany that are engaged in actively promoting a discourse of multiculturalism through musical performance. Through this research, I hope to address the specific ways in which different models of multiculturalism are put into practice by a wide range of cultural institutions, radio stations, musicians and listening communities in Berlin. I focus in particular on the ways in which these multicultural models intersect with the musical practices and professional experiences of musicians in Berlin’s heterogeneous German-Turkish communities.

Zeynep Ozgen
Sociology, University of California-Los Angeles.
“Rethinking the Role of Identity in Daily Life: Social Interaction in Antakya.”

Since the 1980s Turkish politics have been shaken by the mobilization of ethnic (Kurdish), religious (Islamic) and ethnoreligious (Alevi) identities and the demands for wider recognition of these identities in the public sphere. The prospect of European Union accession has only increased the salience of these issues. Although the role of ethnic and religious identities in public life and the integration of minorities into a common framework have been discussed at the elite level in Turkey, little consideration has been given to the ordinary experiences of identity in daily life. This research examines the expression of ethnic identity in everyday experiences in the ethnically heterogeneous city of Antakya. Instead of taking "ethnic groups" as the unit of analysis, the research focuses on the social domain of marriage, where people with diverse ethnic and religious allegiances interact and the boundaries between groups crystallize. This research will help explain the everyday experiences of how people identify and define themselves, how ethnicity matters and whether or not ethnicity is politicized and translated into conflict in everyday encounters. It also aims to understand through which discourses, categories, analytical frameworks, and perceptions of past experiences and future expectations people express their identities in daily life.

Susan Rottmann
Cultural Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The Predicaments of Belonging to Europe: Ethnicity, Religion and Class for German-Turkish Return Migrants.”

This project explores the predicaments of belonging to a Europe that is struggling to embrace multiculturalism through an examination of how German-Turkish return migrants navigate the micropolitics of ethnicity, religion and class. German-Turkish migrants are at the center of controversies over national identity in Germany and Turkey, where encounters with racial, cultural and religious differences are increasingly challenging strong ethno-nationalist sentiments. These challenges to national identity are particularly apparent in deliberations surrounding Turkey’s pending European Union membership. Research on returning migrants’ viewpoints and everyday practices will provide new perspectives on these debates over the identity of Europe and its nation-states. German-Turks experience racial and religious discrimination in Germany, but they also face rejection in Turkey for their lack of Turkish cultural knowledge, their unfamiliar commitments to “European Islam,” and their conspicuous consumption. Examination of return migrants’ responses to these quandaries through ethnographic interviews and observations at “home” in Istanbul and Antalya, will expand understanding of transnational migration circuits. Furthermore, analysis of how migrants maneuver within or remain constrained by ethnic, religious and class orders will shed light on issues surrounding larger European social and political transformations.

Alexander Street
Political Science, University of California-Berkeley.
“Testing, Testing, A, B, C: The Politics of Language and Civics Tests in Europe.”

In recent years a number of European countries have introduced language and civic knowledge requirements for immigrants who wish to acquire permanent resident status, citizenship, or even to enter the country. In some cases these requirements are part of broader, compulsory integration programs. The trend started in the Netherlands in 1997 and has spread to Austria, Belgium (but only in Flanders), Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Portugal and the United Kingdom. I will compare the knowledge requirements, the political debates surrounding their introduction, and the support available to help immigrants pass the tests, in three countries: Austria, Denmark and the United Kingdom. I argue that there are different uses to which such requirements can be put. They can be opportunities for politicians to shape the discourse around immigration and nationality. They can serve as hurdles to immigration. Or, when combined with language classes and job training, they can provide newcomers with useful skills. I will investigate the various (and overlapping) goals that politicians have pursued in these three countries, and link the new requirements to changes in the context of European immigration that help explain how and why the politics of immigration is being re-thought.

Rebekah Tromble
Political Science, Indiana University at Bloomington.
“Islam's Transnational Call to Action.”

This project will examine how transnational Islamic organizations with apparently rigid and particularistic ideology frame their messages in order to attract adherents across the globe. Using survey questionnaires and semi-structured interviews, I hope to investigate which specific messages resonate (and why) in two very different social and political contexts where organizations have demonstrated a degree of success in recruiting and maintaining members: Western Europe and former Soviet Central Asia.

Heather Bergman
Political Science, University of California-Los Angeles.
“Reliance on Volatile Foreign Capital and the Politics of Regional Redistribution in Latin America.”

This research will seek to address a paradox that has emerged from the literature on regional redistribution of income and its relationship to emerging market countries’ greater integration into global markets. On the one hand, if this integration provides governments with more resources to redistribute to poorer regions (and more incentive to compensate such regions for risks they take on with exposure to the market), we should expect to see more policies aimed at regional redistribution. On the other hand, this market integration and hence greater exposure to the demands of foreign investors increases the pressure on central governments to pass policies that foreign investors demand. If investors, as the literature assumes, prefer less redistribution over more redistribution, then we should expect to see fewer policies aimed at redistributing revenues to poor regions and thus higher regional inequality. In Latin America, at least, we observe both outcomes. I will argue that what determines whether or not governments redistribute will depend at least in part on the credibility and strength of the foreign investors’ demands. I will use a cross-country dataset for Latin American countries as well as other regions to test the degree to which increasing market integration along with other measures of political variables influences the level of regional redistribution.

Luis Camacho-Solis
Political Science, University of Texas at Austin.
“Statists or Free-Marketers? Preferences for Redistribution in Latin America.”

Over the past two decades, market reforms and state retrenchment across Latin America have led to varying levels of demands for state-sponsored redistribution across countries and within countries over time. Existing theories about why people endorse public welfare cannot account for this variation; both structural accounts based on class-power and rationalist explanations based on individuals’ skill sets and employment sectors predict stability in demands for redistribution. My theory overcomes this limitation by stressing the interaction of two dynamic factors: individuals’ prospects of social mobility and the broader macroeconomic context. I argue that during periods of stable macroeconomic conditions, individuals’ predictions about future social mobility affect their preferences for redistribution as one would expect: upwardly mobile individuals prefer less redistribution than downwardly mobile ones. However, when the economy is unstable, individuals heavily discount their future mobility and increase their demands for redistribution. Through future dissertation research, I plan to further develop these ideas into a theory of the formation of preferences for redistribution in developing democracies.

Miguel de Figueiredo
Political Science, University of California-Berkeley.
“The Politics of Poverty: Explaining the Origins, Administration, and Outcomes of Social Programs in Latin America.”

Starting in the 1990s, Brazil and Mexico embarked upon unprecedented strategies for combating poverty. Rather than invest directly in schools or healthcare for the poor, both countries launched programs that gave direct cash transfers to families in exchange for a child’s school attendance or health clinic visits from family members. Mexico’s first anti-poverty program consisted of clientelistic targeting with mediocre social welfare effects, followed by increasingly de-politicized targeting with welfare-improving results. In contrast, Brazil’s poverty alleviation originally involved low politicization with little evidence of electoral targeting, followed by relaxed enforcement of program conditions and high electoral issue salience. These events raise important questions that my pre-dissertation research will explore: (a) When and how do politicians manipulate anti-poverty programs for political gain, and (b) what are the social welfare effects in the presence or absence of different forms of manipulation? Specifically, what are the levers politicians have to use these programs for political gain? Are the programs having an impact on voting by the poor? What are the programs’ effects in eliminating poverty traps? These questions are particularly relevant to Latin America, where income inequality is particularly high, and where the poor are emerging as an important electoral constituency.

Michael Ewers
Geography, The Ohio State University Main Campus.
“Migration, Rent Distribution and Development in the New Gulf Development States.”

This is the pilot project of a dissertation which will examine the relationship between wealth distribution and migration in three Arab Gulf States – Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates –by contrasting current labor migration composition and labor force requirements with those of 25 years ago. Economic development in the Gulf is the result of oil-generated wealth accumulation, which stimulated large flows of skilled migrants from Western multinational corporations (MNCs) and low-skilled migrants from developing countries. Gulf governments created vast bureaucracies to distribute this wealth to a minority citizenry. Recognizing the unsustainability of a mono-resource economy, new development strategies have been instituted, including economic diversification beyond oil and labor indigenization programs to limit foreign labor. Diversification is primarily occurring through urban infrastructural projects to attract non-oil MNC subsidiaries and tourism. During this pilot, key informant interviews will be conducted with MNC and Chamber of Commerce representatives. For subsequent dissertation research, themes from these interviews will be the basis of a large survey of regional MNC subsidiaries. This survey, combined with analysis of labor data, will assess whether, contrary to labor indigenization, current development paradigms are requiring further importation of labor, thus perpetuating the rent-distribution economy in a new guise.

Guy Grossman
Political Science, Columbia University.
“Three Worlds of Arab Welfare Capitalism - the Middle East in Comparative Perspective.”

Adopting a broad approach to welfare-states, one that includes social insurance, provision of social services, labor market regulations and overall macroeconomic steering, my dissertation identifies and explains the rise of different models of welfare capitalism in the Middle East in 1950s-1980s, as well as subsequent reform and retrenchment in the last two decades following pressure of capital mobility and oil-price fluctuations. The dissertation, which addresses a disturbing lacuna in the literature, integrates micro-foundational level analysis with structural conditions. It explains origin and change of welfare policies in the MENA – along with their redistributive outcomes – by accounting to differences in the preferences of governments and pivotal societal actors towards welfare policies and to variations in political factors that influence the incorporation of preferences into the policymaking process. Whereas governments’ preferences are derived from economic development strategies, state-revenue structures, and the structure of political competition, non-monolithic business and labor preferences are derived from states’ capacity and from the way welfare policies distribute risks associated with work cycles. Finally, the study also investigates how institutions established in the expansion era shape the responses to the challenges of globalization during the retrenchment period. Importantly, this study integrates the MENA experience to comparative social policy.

Tai-Wei Liu
Political Science, University of California-San Diego.
“The Political Logic of the Financing and Provision of Social Welfare in China.”

After the early period of economic reform when income distribution usually becomes more unequal, a government, especially a socialist one, would be expected to increase social policy expenditure for redistributive purpose in order to prevent a backlash against the government. Contrary to this expectation, the public financing of social welfare in China has dropped significantly since 1994. Fifteen years after the start of China’s economic reforms, the responsibility for welfare has been shifted away from public provision to individual provision. My research seeks to understand this Chinese trend of shifting welfare burdens from the state to the individual which violates the redistributive goal by comparing it with other transition economies with authoritarian or less institutionalized democratic governments. How much of an anomaly is this Chinese trend? Could it be due to the decentralized nature of Chinese authoritarian institutions? My initial research suggests that local officials are more interested in economic growth than in funding welfare for local citizens, and they may have enough political influence to affect redistributive policies. By comparing China with other transition economies, I hope to shed light on the impact of decentralization on a nation’s redistribution performance.

Christopher Marcum
Sociology, University of California-Irvine.
“Population and Organizational Response to Disasters.”

In 2005, media coverage of Hurricane Katrina brought issues of age, race, income, class, politics, and geography to the forefront of national politics. Individuals experienced the hurricane and the subsequent response differently, depending on these social and economic characteristics. The question of what to do with the irreparable infrastructure and the displaced population very quickly became a question of redistribution, framed in terms of “aid” and “rebuilding” the Gulf Coast. From a sociological perspective these questions intersect in terms of a broader question of inequality and access to resources. This study evaluates the extent of redistribution inequality during the organizational response to Hurricane Katrina.

Rachel Meltzer
Public Policy, New York University.
“Business Improvement Districts and Neighborhood Change: A Political and Socioeconomic Analysis.”

Over the past two decades U.S. cities have increasingly adopted Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) as a way to revitalize their urban centers. As city centers re-populate, the demand for public services diversifies across neighborhoods, and some property owners will view the standard city package of public services as inadequate. Yet due to collective action problems, the property owners in high-demand areas cannot mobilize to supplement city services. BIDs solve this problem by imposing a “tax” on property owners, which pays for the provision of supplemental services. The proposed study takes an in-depth look at the BID formation process and the characteristics of neighborhoods where BIDs form and operate, for 55 BIDs in New York City. The first part of the study will describe the neighborhoods where BIDs form and the institutional and political dynamics of the formation process. The second part will measure economic and social changes in BID neighborhoods after formation. Neighborhood indicators of interest include neighborhood wealth, income, investment, and population composition, such as race and socioeconomic class. I will employ mixed methods, using a case-study approach to collect qualitative data on BID formation experiences and econometric methods to measure both baseline neighborhood characteristics and subsequent changes.

Sade Owolabi
Development / Urban Planning, Cornell University.
“Fiscal Decentralization in Kenya - Rhetoric versus Practice.”

My proposed project is to evaluate the design and implementation of an intergovernmental fiscal reform in Kenya involving the establishment of local government transfer funds through which money is redistributed to local authorities by the central government. The monies are to be used for urban development projects which must be determined through a participatory process. First, I will examine the redistributive patterns of these fiscal decentralization efforts since their inception in 1999. Where data permits, I will compare the total allocations to previous expenditures on urban development by the central and local governments. What other indicators can be used to categorize the redistribution patterns aside from geographic location? How much do these funds constitute as a percentage of local government revenue, expenditure and budgetary need? Second, I will analyze the participatory processes through which the allocation of funds takes place. What is the structure of the committees, who participates and at what level? Is the process truly participatory? How has the participation of different stakeholders shaped the prioritization and construction of projects? What impact have the projects had on service delivery mechanisms? What factors drive the success or failure of this development model?

Yumiko Shimabukuro
Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Analyzing the Provision of Public Employment Training at the Sub-National Level: The Case of the United States and Japan.”

The extant literature on the political economy of redistribution assumes that policy outcomes emerge out of contestation or competition, whether in the form of simple 'bargaining' between groups or more sinister pork barrel politics. Given the conventional wisdom, it is empirically puzzling that some local governments in the United States and Japan spend far less than their allocated public employment training funds each year and are not actively pressuring the national government to increase funding vis-à-vis others. This project examines the theoretical and empirical questions generated by the local level variation in the provision of public employment training and analyzes the link between the formation of interest organization and the formulation of redistributive policies. Preliminary research shows a strong, positive correlation between the number of small business lobby groups and the willingness of local government to provide public employment training. This suggests that the causal process identified in cross-country analysis--the most prevalent type of study on this issue area--alone yields either an incomplete or incorrect account of redistribution at the local government level. The variables these studies highlight, such as partisanship, are not significant in intra-country analysis.

Rebecca Tippett
Sociology, Duke University.
“Institutional Determinants of Household Debt: A Comparative Study of the United States and Canada.”

Broadly speaking, my proposed project is a comparative study of the institutional causes and potential life course consequences of household debt in the United States and Canada. Although consumer debt is a growing problem for both countries, differences in usage patterns, forms of debt, and debt levels suggest that institutions structure both access to and need for debt. Thus, the driving question of my research is, "How do political-legal institutions define and structure debt in a way that is consequential for individuals and their households?" My proposed project seeks to answer this question by examining the major legislation on debt from 1970-2005 and the public intellectual discourse surrounding major legislative milestones in both the United States and Canada. Such an analysis reveals dominant narratives that will improve our understanding of why such supposedly similar political economies differ on this important outcome. As discourse on debt is often heavily imbued with morality, it also provides an opportunity to see how questions such as "what is the role of the state?" and "who is at fault for poverty (or indebtedness)?" are answered and how the answers to these questions may change over time.

Tod Van Gunten
Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The Politics of Monetary Institutions: Macroeconomic Policy, Inequality, and Expertise.”

Monetary institutions and policies have distributional impacts that make them inextricably political. The differential sectoral impacts of monetary and exchange rate policies imply divergent preferences among actors at the national and international level. At the same time, monetary institutions are administered by highly trained experts, generally economists, who claim to apply social scientific knowledge to policy. Thus, while monetary systems are enmeshed in social conflict over distribution and policy, monetary institutions are at least potentially autonomous from powerful actors and coalitions in the broader society. This proposed dissertation will investigate the politics of monetary policies by focusing on distributional conflicts and the role of experts. By illuminating the political struggles at the heart of one of the central institutions of modern capitalist society – money – I aim to contribute to a sociological understanding of the potential for and limits to economic development.

Sinem Arcak
Art History, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
“Islamic Art in War and Peace: Ottoman-Safavid Cultural Exchange in the 16th and 17th Centuries.”

Between the 16th and 18th centuries, the Shiite Safavids of Iran and the Sunni Ottomans of Turkey – two of the greatest Islamic empires in history – developed a complex relationship in which tenuous peace alternated with bloody conflict, often at dizzying speed. Most scholarship to date on Ottoman-Safavid relations has been surprisingly one-dimensional, simply documenting territories lost and won in what is portrayed as an ongoing series of conflicts. My project, in contrast, will be the first systematic investigation of the Ottoman-Safavid relationship from the perspective of cultural history, through a study of the exchanged objects that formed part of the visual cultures of each empire. These objects—ranging from books and carpets to garments and even falcons—enriched the visual culture of each court, and led to the formulation of two distinctive artistic canons with a lasting legacy in the artistic traditions of each empire. Taking war and diplomacy as media of cultural dialogue, I ask how, through the movement of objects, each ruler’s military might and his political image were shaped, and an unmistakably distinctive artistic canon for both the Ottomans and Safavids was concurrently constructed.

Emerson Bowyer
Art History, Columbia University.
“Perceiving the Sculptural in Nineteenth-Century France and England.”

During the nineteenth century, major technological advances provided the possibility of scale-free reproduction of sculptural forms, and their dissemination to an increasingly broad audience. This dissertation will address the largely neglected problem of sculpture in the age of its mechanical reproducibility, focusing on artistic and industrial production in England and France throughout this period. Reproduction fundamentally altered the very notion of the sculptural, radically transforming the traditional importance of "sitedness" and "spatiality", as well as altering conceptions of authorial "touch" and ownership. As I will show, the manufacture and consumption of sculpture at this time necessarily involved a complex mediation between materiality and the phantasmagoric. The dissertation will be comprised of a series of interrelated case studies that explore the key concepts emerging from the operation of various sculptural technologies - reduction, fragmentation, multiplication, and impression (exemplary concerns of modernity). I am particularly interested in pursuing the impact of newly-introduced mechanical devices (and their sculptural products) on other visual media - painting, prints, and photography. Hybrid technologies such as "photosculpture" will be closely examined, and the ways in which certain artists (Gérôme, Cezanne) staged themselves in response to modern techniques of sculptural production.

Ramzi Fawaz
American Studies, George Washington University.
“Heroic Measures: A New Cultural History of the American Superhero, 1955-2006.”

My project seeks to provide a new cultural history of the American superhero, investigating the ways that superhero comic books have appropriated, magnified, and reinterpreted American socio-political life across the latter half of the 20th century. Veering away from traditional formalistic approaches, this work employs visual and cultural studies scholarship to illuminate how superhero comics have been vehicles for critiquing American cultural anxieties in the post-WWII period, particularly over the nuclear family, teen culture, the social geographies of suburbia, consumer society, and the threat of atomic annihilation. Between 1955-2006, comic book superheroes absorbed these concerns in tales of world-shattering adventure, providing visual mappings of America’s rapidly changing social realities. Superhero comics, then, not only provided American culture with politically relevant narratives of the fantastic but also produced a counter-discourse to a conservative rhetoric that wove these concerns together in terms of an impending cultural apocalypse. This study intends to unpack the counter-narratives that superheroes provided American culture during the tumultuous years leading up to the turn of the millennium, showing how one of the most widely read and intellectually ignored mediums of the 20th century visually theorized a new politics of liberation under the mantle of superhuman solidarity.

Olivia Gruber
Art History, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
“Representations of Beauty: Empress Elisabeth and the Visual Culture of Femininity in Austria-Hungary 1848-1914.”

In my dissertation I will employ the figure of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1837-1898) as the core case study to examine shifting ideas in the Austro-Hungarian Empire about femininity, beauty, and representations of women from 1848 through 1914. While dominant representations of women during the Biedermeier period (1815-1848) emphasized domesticity and bourgeois values, by the outbreak of the first World War Austro-Hungarian artists depicted certain women as femmes fatales: hypersexualized and deliberately wielding aggressive power. This transformation is embodied in the figure of Elisabeth, who as a historical entity interrogated, exploited, and even subverted the changes of the period to develop her own visual culture of femininity. Elisabeth is situated at the intersection of numerous intellectual currents and an examination of her representations will provide insight into nineteenth century cultures of beauty, celebrity, nationalism and the development of psychoanalysis. By analyzing portrayals of Elisabeth in paintings, photographs, prints, and the popular press and comparing these works with contemporary images of Austro-Hungarian women as well as other European royalty, I will develop a greater understanding of how the visual culture of femininity changed in late nineteenth century Europe.

Brian Jacobson
Critical Studies, University of Southern California.
“Making Modern Space: Architecture, Technology, and Early Cinema.”

Thomas Edison’s Black Maria studio is a compelling material embodiment of the relationship between cinema, architecture, and technology. The Black Maria was not only the first specially designed motion picture studio; it is also an artifact of the sweeping transformations to the built environment that historians of technology have described as the most important technological revolution in history. Edison’s central role in that revolution is indicative of the ways that moving-image media have, from their origins, developed in relation to a range of diverse technologies. This project will use Edison, the Black Maria, and early production spaces such as George Méliès’s glass and iron studio as starting points for examining the role of moving-image media in the construction of the built environment, the production of artificial spaces, and more general technological change. Examples from early cinema will be combined with technologies including rear projection, chroma key (“bluescreen”), and computer-generated imagery to consider both the architectural spaces of image making and their technologically produced virtual corollaries. By tracing the historical coincidence of cinematic, architectural, and technological practices, the project will contribute to our understanding of the ways that visual culture is both embedded in and constitutive of the human-built world.

Aynne Kokas
Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California-Los Angeles.
“The Space of Contemporary Shanghai and the Global Cinematic Constructions of the City as a Place.”

A hyperbolic and evocative vision, “Shanghai” as a space holds a dramatic allure akin to the sublime and sinful associations with “Hollywood.” Because of Shanghai’s hallowed history as the birthplace of Chinese cinema, it is no surprise that the city has returned to prominence as a global filmmaking space in the period immediately preceding and following Mainland China’s WTO accession in 2000. However, as the economic borders of cinematic production in China become increasingly fluid, the borders of cultural classification have become ever more rigid. In my project, I will explore how the boundaries between Mainland China and the West are alternatively blurred and fixed by the filmmaking process. Analysis will trace the textual, cultural and economic factors leading to the production of films from multiple national points of origin, yet ending in production in Shanghai, the urban nexus of Mainland China’s financial growth, from the period of 1997 to 2007.

Erin Lambert
History, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Hearing the Image, Seeing the Word: Illustrated Hymns in the German Reformation.”

While the Reformation is widely recognized as a period of religious change, it was equally a process of cultural negotiation. Through an examination of illustrated hymnals and songsheets, my dissertation will consider the roles of vision and hearing in sixteenth-century Germany. Ranging from inexpensive broadsides to luxury editions, illustrated songs reached every level of society as their texts spread reform through well-known melodies. At the same time, the woodcuts that fill the illustrated hymnal’s pages reveal relationships between picture and text. As it focuses on the production, circulation, and interpretation of musical and visual culture, this project seeks to understand their intersection in sixteenth-century religious identity. Based on the collections of Wolfenbüttel’s Herzog August Bibliothek and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, my research thus explores the relationship between sight, sound, and faith on the pages of illustrated hymnals and in the performances of early modern Europeans.

Toby Lee
Social Anthropology, Harvard University.
“The Social Life of Cinema: An Ethnographic Study of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival.”

In this dissertation, I will turn an interdisciplinary eye to cinema and its institutions in Greece and the Balkans, specifically focusing on the city of Thessaloniki and its annual International Film Festival. In an ethnographic study of the festival, I will explore how it functions both as a cultural institution and as an event connected to larger social, industrial and spatial contexts. Combining this anthropological approach with a more philosophical consideration of film/video and close readings of particular films, I will examine the ways in which the specificities of the cinematic experience and of the moving image as medium are implicated in the festival's functioning as institution and event. Through this twofold approach, I will look at the dynamic relationship between festival and city and examine the ways in which the festival mediates between Thessaloniki and other Greek cities, particularly Athens; between the city and the state; and finally, between constructions of national, regional (Balkan), and European identity. This work will build on and contribute to the anthropology of Greece and the Balkans, the anthropology of cinema, and the dialogue between the arts, social sciences, and film/visual studies.

Ryan Linkof
History, University of Southern California.
“Framing the News: The British Tabloid and the Spectacle of the Everyday.”

The tabloid is a peculiarly British institution. Fleet Street’s sensational journalism and aggressive paparazzi have long set the standard for developments in print media across the Western world. Beginning in the late nineteenth-century, the British tabloid began to clutter sidewalk kiosks, newsstands and train stations. While “traditional” news did not disappear with the coming of the radically simplified format, it was rapidly becoming a thing of the past. In an effort to increase readership amongst women and the working-classes, Britain’s news moguls peddled eye-catching all-photography formats and female-oriented pictorial spreads. The tabloid – exemplified by papers like Daily Mail and Daily Mirror – siphoned readers away from traditional news formats to become the dominant source of news and entertainment by the end of the 1930s. My project will treat the tabloid as a crucial cultural phenomenon, an integral part of the fabric of everyday life for all sections of British society – whether they liked it or not. I will focus, more specifically, on the place of celebrity in British culture, emphasizing the role of gender and class in representations of celebrity, particularly with regard to the development of the international cult of the British royal family. I will also suggest that homosexual men occupy a prominent place in the world of British journalistic celebrity of the 1920s and 1930s, disproportionately represented as photographers, writers, society columnists and editors of “women’s pages.”

Alexander Olson
Program in American Culture, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
“Ruin and Representation: Bohemians in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1906.”

Using visual and written descriptions of the 1906 Earthquake as a starting point, this project will examine the networks of circulation that connected San Francisco bohemians to wider publics. As a multidisciplinary object of analysis, bohemianism cuts against the tendency in visual culture studies to focus exclusively on a single medium such as photography. Similarly, as a phenomenon linking cosmopolitan enclaves around the world, it highlights intellectual relationships sometimes lost in urban history. Recent work on Greenwich Village, for example, tends to privilege New York as the originating site of American modernism. Yet the San Francisco Bay Area also had a thriving bohemian community, one that included artists and intellectuals who arrived directly from the Left Bank in Paris. While San Francisco’s Bohemian Club was not exactly bohemian, excluding some leading artists and writers because they were women, the cultural production of the region was far more variegated than a single institution. By taking an expansive view of what counts as visual representation, this project can examine the reconstruction of the city’s built environment and look for examples of the interpenetration of scientific, political, commercial, and literary imagery.

Traci Reeves
Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago.
“Black Female Images of Embodiment: Towards A New Theory of Representation and Phenomenological Spectatorship.”

Drawing on the scholarship of film feminist scholars Vivian Sobchack and Laura Marks, I wish to complicate their theories of spectatorship in an analysis of black female representations in mainstream Hollywood cinema. I wish to trace how transnational black religious practices and the places of diaspora in which they occur are represented in an American film imagination as a particular mode of representation which I term black female-as-medium. Black cultural practices that feature females as vessels of metaphysical embodiment experiences such as those of Haitian Voodoo rites of possession, “holy ghost” worship experiences in the black church and faith healing practices in South Africa offer an important critique and gives new perspective to feminist theories of affect in film representation and experience. Ultimately, I wish to assess how this new theory helps to dismantle the outdated discourse of stereotype altogether and helps to re-inscribe current theories of the body beyond merely offering up a gendered and racialized notion of the body, but also by raising the question: How do cinematic imaginings of black female experiences with the unembodied Other (spirits, ancestors, and ghosts) help to inform current models of embodied film spectatorship?

Victoria Watts
Cultural Studies, George Mason University.
“Patterns of embodiment: dance notation and visual culture.”

Labanotation [LN] and Benesh Movement Notation [BMN] are systems for the graphical recording of human movement: they both have undergone substantial changes in their appearance over the course of the 20th century. This study plans to document these changes, and to subsequently consider what prompted developments in the visual perception the systems encode. I contend that these notation systems not only record the movement under observation, but also act as a trace of the way in which movement is seen. Further, given that the stylized movement of dancers can be seen as existing on a continuum with more quotidien movement practices, I argue that these changes in the visual register of the notation systems not only provide insight into shifting patterns of representation in dance but also into changing modes of embodied subjectivity in western culture last century. For example, conventions for describing torso movement have changed considerably since Labanotation was developed. While these developments are presented within the LN community as amendments or improvements to the existing theory, it is plausible to suggest that theoretical changes are made in response to shifting patterns of embodiment.

Virginia Breedlove
African History, Johns Hopkins University.
“Landscape and Livelihood in the Lake Chad Basin: A Social History of Environmental Change in Eastern Niger and Northeastern Nigeria Since 1968.”

Lake Chad, once an enormous inland sea, had a surface area of approximately 15,000 square miles before the 1968-1973 Sahelian drought. Since then, the lake has receded dramatically, now covering less than 500 square miles. While both geological and historical evidence demonstrate similarly large fluctuations in the size of the lake over the past 8000 years, the impact of such profound environmental changes on communities in the Chad Basin remains relatively poorly understood. In addition to dramatic environmental transformation, this historically important space of social, economic, and political interaction has undergone significant political change in the past half-century with the establishment of four post-colonial nation-states (Niger, Nigeria, Chad, and Cameroon) whose borders meet at the Lake and the multi-national Lake Chad Basin Commission. In my dissertation, I plan to use archival and ethnographic research in eastern Niger and northeastern Nigeria to explore the relationships between these rapidly changing environmental and political conditions and the ways in which individuals combine different types of income-generating activity to make a living in the Chad Basin.

Christopher City
Geography, Clark University.
“Constructing Drought: Law, Land Use, and Water Sustainability.”

This proposal seeks to examine socio-legal discourses of water sustainability in order to understand how the legal frameworks of water use and land use are contributing to an emerging hazard of “suburban drought” in the eastern United States. Suburban drought in water-rich environments is the result of a low-density, lawn-intensive “sprawl-like” pattern of development that contributes to unsustainable water use. Current land use and water laws are not well-coordinated with each other and each contributes to water-intensive patterns of development. As a consequence, suburban communities are unlikely to improve water sustainability without significant changes to land use and water law. The proposed research applies analytical approaches from legal and urban geography to address the role of the law in impairing or achieving water sustainability. Using metropolitan Boston as a case study, the project seeks to understand how law and the environment have contributed to the current water consumption landscape. The project further asks how the law has addressed and is currently addressing issues of sustainability in water and land use. This analysis is intended to lead to recommendations of how legal structures of water use and land use could be reconfigured to better achieve water sustainability.

Tessa Farmer
Social Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin.
“Water and Oasis: Social Meanings and State Administration of Water in the Egyptian Oasis of Siwa.”

Through attention to the Egyptian state’s politics of water management and distribution, this project will examine the production of new forms of citizenship and identity and local response to these specific policies. Water is a metaphor for life, a basic and irreplaceable biological necessity, and a site around which complex social relationships are formed. In a desert landscape, water is most apparent in its scarcity. The Egyptian Oasis of Siwa is a rare site of abundance situated in Egypt’s Western Desert, and water is its condition of possibility. The community of Amazigh, or Berber, who live in the Oasis have customs to allocate water resources, as well as traditions of collective life that incorporated water into the symbolic order of the Oasis. These resources are finite underground reservoirs. In recent decades the rate and types of use of these resources has increased dramatically as the Oasis has been increasing incorporated economically and administratively into the Egyptian state. Additionally, this project seeks to understand the ways in which Siwans themselves have managed, and still manage, water resources prior to the introduction of deep water drilling, bottled water factories, and desert land reclamation projects undertaken in the last few decades.

Angelia Haro
Cultural Anthropology, Duke University.
“Water and Promises of Utopia in Development Discourse and Practice.”

I propose to do ethnographic research in three United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Millennium Villages in East Africa: Koraro, Ethiopia; Sauri, Kenya; and Ruhira, Uganda. Each of the villages has been chosen by the UN and other NGOs to rmeasure progress toward its Millennium Development Goals. Because water is one of the principle categories in the discourse of Millennial Development, this project focuses on water as the site where hope, friction, dialogue and imagination converge. Water, as the most basic need of human life, is woven into the fabric of all cultures, religions and societies in important ways. My own engagement takes up that thread and investigates the use of water as a utopian category, a site of the production of hope and future desires, in transnational and local contexts. I contend that hope and its framings must be investigated through its attachment to particular categories, like water, around competing understandings of the present’s possibilities coalesce. The question of water, as a galvanizing political and social problem, will be investigated both as an empirical development issue and as a category with signification and usage beyond the concrete. I will observe the deployment of utopian NGO discourse about water and the grassroots local translation or transformation of that desire in target communities.

Jessica Lage
Geography, University of California-Berkeley.
“The role of water in rural land-use transformations in Spain.”

The importance of water in Spain—a central modernizing force and source of contestation for over a century—is reflected today in rural land-use transformations. Second-home development and rural tourism, and greenhouse production—representing decreasing and intensifying agricultural production, respectively—are transforming the Spanish countryside, and are linked in large part by water politics and management. The proposed research explores the interaction between water management politics and changes in production in rural areas, in particular as people experience them in daily lives and livelihoods. Spain’s geographic variability in water resources and the historic importance of agriculture and tourism to its economy, in combination with the country’s internal governance structure and rapid integration into the European Union (EU) economy makes this study of water management and land-use change informative to the EU-wide context of restructuring water policies and governance.

Hao Nguyen
Urban Planning, University of Hawaii at Manoa.
"The urbanization of water: Planning for adequate water services in cities of the developing world - The case of Vietnam."

My research aims at examining the complexity and diversity of the demands for water and water distribution in urban setting of developing countries, through the case studies of the Vietnamese cities. ‘The urbanization of water’ is considered as the conceptual framework to look at the context and process in which water is urbanized, as well as which institution(s) manage the process. By applying urban planning perspectives on urbanization and political economy of water provision, the research will also examine types of water regime, water governance issues (the interplay among governance actors in water distribution, provision and management), and water uses of urban inhabitants and economic activities to comprehend how complex and diversified water distributions and demands for water are in order to attain policy implications in planning for better water supplies for urban populations in Vietnam. For data collection, the research uses mixed methodologies of focus group discussions, in-depth interviews, historical research, using archives, desk study, and questionnaire survey with short and close-ended questions. The author expects to present a new way of approaching and comprehending the urban crisis in water supplies through the cases studies of Vietnamese cities’ water distribution, provision and management.

Maya Peterson
History, Harvard University.
“An Environmental History of Central Asia in the Late-19th and Early-20th Centuries.”

My dissertation will be an environmental history of Central Asia in the late imperial and early Soviet period (1860s-1940s). I plan to use natural resources, especially water, as a lens through which to study tsarist and Bolshevik administration of Central Asian lands and peoples and address larger questions of Russian history, empire, socialism, and modernity. By focusing on specific sites in the natural landscape – a river, a lake, a mountain – and specific projects to change that environment – the construction of a dam, the shift to cotton monoculture, the attempt to sedentarize the nomads – I will explore aspects of continuity and change in the nature of Russian versus Soviet rule in the Central Asian borderlands; how policies and policymaking with regard to Central Asia compared to policies for other parts of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union; how aspects of the Russian venture in Central Asia compare to characteristics of imperial rule in other empires, such as the British or the Qing; and how changes to the Central Asian environment shaped the encounter between Russians and Central Asians. Overall, I hope to contribute to the study of Soviet history, comparative studies of empires, and the developing subfield of environmental history.

Lisa Pfeiffer
Economics, University of California-Davis.
“Sustainability, Equity, and Growth: The Role of Water Markets in Mexico.”

Climate change, population growth, and migration are likely to induce extreme shifts in water management around the world. Mexico is often considered to be at the forefront of institutional change, and has made significant progress in decentralizing the management of water resources, water rights administration, development of a comprehensive legal system, and encouraging informal water markets. However, Mexico continues to struggle with the problems of over-concession, inefficient use, and unsustainable extraction. Water markets may be an efficient way to redistribute water and to signal its scarcity, but what effect will they have on poverty, inequality, economic growth, and the sustainability of Mexico’s water resources? Empirical estimation of regional water demand elasticities, efficiency gains from trading, potential agricultural productivity gains, and the effects of institutional changes are important indicators for policy makers, but have never been estimated in Mexico, despite the efforts by policy makers to manage water use. By using nationally representative rural household data, supplemented with urban water demand data, these questions will begin to be answered.

Neil Pischner
Comparative Literature, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
“Andean Oral Traditions as Cultural Response to Climate Change.”

How do Andean oral traditions narrate and influence cultural response to climate change? This project analyzes how a Southern Peruvian Quechua community’s oral traditions respond to water shortage and other consequences of climate change. For example, do stories and songs share ecological knowledge such as information about drought-resistant crops or include Western scientific views of why springs are drying up? Do spoken-word spiritual interventions attempt to restore sacred glaciers or harmonize precipitation patterns? Is there a resurgence of myths, stories and songs that encode social memory of past droughts while recounting strategies of successful response or morals of failure to adapt? Understanding how gender, social-economic, and generational categories rely on old and new oral traditions foregrounds community voices in informing policy-making and interdisciplinary research on cultural response to global warming.

Julio Postigo
Geography, University of California-Davis.
“Andean herders' responses to changing water availability.”

Herders in the Peruvian Andes must cope with shifts in the availability of water and water-related resources caused by climate change. An important effect of climate change is glacier retreat which increases runoff, moisture, bare soil and shifts pasture locations. My dissertation investigates Andean herders’ responses to these environmental disturbances, and to related changing social, economic and political conditions including the increasing density of humans. Factors that shape herders’ responses are local socioeconomic institutions that manage water, pasture, and herds. This project addresses crucial issues in the study of water sustainability, particularly the impacts of and responses to climate change; the interactions of local and national legal and administrative systems; the execution of research that benefits local communities and to policy makers; and the development of methodologies that address the physical, economic, and social impacts of water. Combining methods from the social science and Geographic Information Sciences, data collected in-situ and from remote sensors, a multiscale approach (household-community-region), and a multitemporal framework (colonial period, 1969–2008, and seasons of 2007–08) I will be able to model and predict future landscape scenarios and responses to changes in water availability.

Sandra Ruckstuhl
Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University.
“Socio-political Dynamics of Water Security: Understanding Institutions and Incentives for Improved Conflict Prevention and Sustainability.”

Considering the global significance of and linkages among human security, water management and environmental conflict, my research analyzes the incentives and norms that underlie and engender environmental management regimes. By conducting a comparative study of the structures of formal and informal water management institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Israel/Palestine, I intend to generate an understanding of the political economies and political ecologies that govern water management in these contexts. With a deeper understanding of the dynamics of ecological conflict, we can enhance environmental governance and conflict resolution capacities to encourage peacebuilding and inter-communal development. My summer research program will focus specifically on the social and political aspects of water management in Bosnia and Herzegovina. While in the field I will explore the work of environmental management institutions, conduct interviews with key stakeholders, and visit ecological sites, which will in turn help me to develop (1) a broad understanding of key water resources sites and issues in BiH, and (2) a preliminary map of Bosnia's water management stakeholders. This information will inform the ultimate structure of the case for my dissertation, and will contribute to the framing of my comparative analysis.

Sarah Wise
Anthropology, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
“Fluid Boundaries: Marine Protected Areas and Shifting Perceptions of Seascapes.”

Focusing on a newly proposed Marine Protected Area (MPA) in Andros Island, Bahamas, my research will examine how existing water tenure systems vary significantly from the many ways ownership is understood, practiced, and talked about under emerging conservation ideologies. Situated within the 100,000 miles of ocean and 700 cays comprising the Bahamas archipelago lies Andros, an island described as more sea than land. The people of Andros have a reputation throughout the Bahamas as exceptional seafarers and fishers. Access to and ownership of waterways and fishing grounds are managed and protected though long-standing oral tenure institutions. Recently, The Nature Conservancy proposed an MPA in Andros. MPAs are promoted in the Caribbean, and elsewhere, as effective conservation policy tools, able to address issues of declining fish stocks and marine degradation while simultaneously improving social welfare through poverty alleviation and capacity building. Protected Area policy tends to use market-oriented language, focusing on the expansion of economic opportunity as incentive to comply with conservation. Like many conservation projects, this MPA challenges how local people perceive their marine environment and the various ways people view and claim ownership rights.