Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (Other Keyword)
1-25 (38 Records)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project will carry out the first archaeological analysis of socio-natural landscapes in the Sandawe homeland of central Tanzania. This project will generate a basic corpus of data for the last 2,000 years of the region, including material culture inventories and chronologies, settlement patterns, and evidence of vegetation and environmental change. Traditionally, scholarship has cast the...
Biodesign and MedTech Innovation: Studying Health Entrepreneurs in Globalizing India (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2019)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This dissertation research studied the emergence of Indian doctors, engineers, and designers forming startups to create novel medical devices, or "medtech." As biomedical devices produced through "Silicon Valley" inspired business models are being increasingly used to manage and monitor health, and the current Indian administration shifts the burden of "hacking" public health burdens onto...
The Biopolitics of Infectious Diseases, Vaccines, and Settler Colonial Whiteness on Lingít Aaní (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2021)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This research project examines transformations in the relationship between race and biopolitics in Sitka, Alaska, focusing on infectious disease outbreaks over the past 200 years. Specifically, I interrogate the intersection of whiteness and infectious disease and suggest that the politicized concept of whiteness has shifted dramatically. I hypothesize that: 1) over the course of Russian and...
Care Under Biocontainment: Preparing American Healthcare Infrastructure for Ebola in the Biosecurity State (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2020)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
Caring for Children with Seizures in North India: An Exploration through Documents and Death (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2021)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) is one of the most dangerous places in the world for children. If it were a country, UP would have the sixteenth highest child mortality rate in the world. Child health outcomes have remained poor despite efforts by national and international agencies to improve access to medical services in the state. This project examines ways in which caregivers...
Childhood Gender Diversity and Transgender Medicine in Philadelphia, PA (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2018)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. As transgender and gender-nonconforming identities become more visible in medicine, policy, and the media, gender affirming medical care is increasingly seen as acceptable and necessary. Yet while childhood gender has long been the subject of clinical research, the impact of specialized medical care on young people and their families is poorly understood. Given the racialized and class-based...
City of Sand: Urban Ecologies and Uncertain Life in Chennai (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2021)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. In Chennai, and elsewhere, sand is a constitutive element of modern urban life. Through its many material arrangements and circulations, sand mediates lifeworlds and landscapes. For example, in Chennai, sand mined or dredged from riverbanks, beaches, and the Bay of Bengal flows into the city, where it supplies the "raw" material required for urbanization. Much of this sand becomes concrete,...
Deep Weft: Hand-Made Textile Making in Oaxaca (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2022)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This ethnographic project investigates the role that artisanal objects and ornamentation play in the constitution of gendered daily practices and ways of life in Oaxaca de Juárez (Mexico). Hand-made textile production is at the center of the social life of several rural Mexican communities. In this plural cultural context, servilletas are ordinary and richly adorned pieces produced by women...
The Disappearing Island: The Effect of Imminent Displacement on Social Exchange Relations on Tangier Island (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2018)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Tangier Island is a small, incorporated town, just over one square mile, of 470 inhabitants in the Chesapeake Bay, belonging to Accomack County, in the Commonwealth of Virginia, USA. Its residents are densely related watermen and their families--mostly white, lower income, politically conservative, Christian, and skeptical of science and climate change. Endogamous marriage is preferred,...
The Empowered Corps: Neoliberal Multiculturalism, Nonprofit Governance, and Ethical Political Subjectivity in Phoenix, Arizona (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2018)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Liberal capitalist nation-states find themselves in perpetual crisis due to the structural contradictions of democratic ideals and the enduring social inequalities and violences of race. Neoliberal techniques of governance address these crises by cultivating new modes of personal responsibility and value through state-sanctioned projects of 'caring' for marginalized populations, forming new...
Eritrea: A Diaspora in Two Parts; Memory, Political Organizing & Refugee Experiences amongst Eritrean Exiles in Italy (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2017)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project looks to emerging political practices surrounding the politics of memory for recent Eritrean refugees in Bologna, Italy. Since the mid-2000's Eritrea's young have been leaving in droves, in numbers as high as 2,000 to 7,000 people monthly. Traversing one of the deadliest migrant trails in the world, Eritreans constitute the second largest refugee group entering the EU by boat. I...
Ethical Self-Cultivation Amongst Black Muslim Youth (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2020)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This dissertation explores the ethical self-cultivation of black Muslim youth in Philadelphia. Anthropologist Saba Mahmood describes ethical self-cultivation as a "specific sets of procedures, techniques, and exercises through which highly specific ethical-moral subjects come to be formed" (Mahmood, 2005, p.120). I consider this process as well as how it becomes racialized and gendered in the...
Exit Wounds: Colonial Legacies of Subject Formation in Present-Day Parole in South Africa (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2021)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project proposes a legal historical ethnography of the liberal legal institution of parole as a site to explore the assimilation of colonial subjectivities into post-apartheid governance and social relations. It poses the question of how the institution mediates between the universalist liberal aspirations of law, and continued racial oppression and hierarchy in post-apartheid South...
Finding Oneself in the Loss: An Arapaso Perception of their Lost Culture (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2021)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. More than ever, the problem of cultural borders is a prominent theme in political and social debates around the world. The perception of culture as an object has effects on the emergent cultural conservation and restoration policies, as well as generating disputes concerning their authenticity and origin. Contributing to this debate, this research project explores the question of "culture...
Indigenous Blood: A Study of Indigeneity and Family in Northeast Brazil (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2021)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This proposal investigates people in northeastern Brazil who claim to have "indigenous blood" ("sangue de índio"), but do not classify themselves as Indigenous people. In the southeast of Piauí state (unlike other regions), no parts of the rural population claim Indigenous status or land rights, yet many people refer to their "indigenous blood." Preliminary data suggest that this refers to...
The Influence of the Social Environment on the Infant Skin Microbiome (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2021)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The human microbiome -the collection of microorganisms (and their genes) that live in, on, and around us- represents an interface through which contact with the environment impacts human biology. More specifically, contact with the social environment shapes host microbial communities, which in turn influence host physiology and immune system development. Despite these important connections,...
Ingenuity in the Oasis: An Examination of Early Bronze Age Agricultural Communities in Oman (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2016)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project will investigate the socio-economic foundations of oasis communities during the Early Bronze Age (EBA, ca. 3100BCE - 2000BCE) in southeastern Arabia. These relatively small-scale communities demonstrate strategic organizational and subsistence choices in extreme environments and climates that led to the establishment of widespread oasis agriculture communities across the...
Instituting Care: Reproductive Health Governance and the Ethics of Humanizing Birth in Brazil (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2015)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project set out to understand how the paradigm of 'humanized birth' is implemented in Salvador, Brazil, through Rede Cegonha, a government program to improve maternal and infant healthcare in Brazil's public health system. Over the course of twelve-months of multi-sited ethnographic research, the project followed Rede Cegonha from the federal Ministry of Health to the local health...
Islamic Ecumenism? Novel Approaches in Internal and External Public Negotiation of Difference in Afghanistan's Sufi Council (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2018)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The ethnographic dissertation research explores the communication and negotiation among Sufis and ulema, and their role in the public sphere and peacebuilding in present-day Afghanistan through the lens of the newly formed Sufi-Islamic council in Herat. The council brings together different Sufi associations (tariqas), local ulema as well as Sufi adherents to respond to the changing religious...
The Life of the Dead: Linguistic Infrastructure and the Signs of War in Post-Colonial Algeria (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2018)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The dead create our social worlds. Their names constitute our sense of place, their images watch over us from monument perches, and their stories build the foundation of our polities and societies. In Algeria, after 50 years of independence, material and linguistic vestiges of the dead of the War of Liberation (1954-1962) continue to exert power over Algerian society, reflecting the enduring...
Liquid Land: A Diasporic Market and the Making of Lahore (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2020)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. In the city of Lahore, Pakistan, plots of land are increasingly traded like stocks. Though land has long functioned as inherited wealth or a long-term investment, in recent years it has become liquid, or a good that can be quickly bought and sold as prices change. Across a diasporic market, plots of land circulate between local residents and overseas Pakistan living in the Middle East,...
Marshaling the Past: Indigenous Regimes of Ownership in Amazonian Ecologies (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2020)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project investigates how people marshal the past to secure a sustainable future. I ask how Amerindian people in Amazonia attribute historical and ecological values and meanings to anthropogenic landscapes, while simultaneously building an understanding of themselves within a complex set of changing relations between humans, nonhuman agents, and the environment. I propose an ethnography...
Militarization and Extraction in the Afro-Indigenous Miskitu Coast of Nicaragua (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2015)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. My research examines new configurations of sovereign power in Central America in the context of two momentous transformations currently taking place on the Afro-indigenous Miskitu Coast of Nicaragua. The first of these is the escalating militarization of the coast by the neo-Sandinista regime of Daniel Ortega, allegedly in response to high volumes of cocaine trafficking. The second is the...
Moving Words: Malagasy Slam Poetry at the Intersection of Performance, Politics, and Transnational Circulation (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2014)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Initial findings suggest that recent developments in who can speak and what can be said in kabary (Malagasy oratory) show that the form does not, as has been suggested, solely serve to rigidify social hierarchies; it is also a means of reflecting and improving current realities. Nonetheless, a critical component of kabary remains substantiating one's claims by referring to the razana...
Niche Construction and Common Pool Resource Management in Marginal Environments: A Diachronic Approach (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2018)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Anthropologists have long been concerned with the immense variety of collective institutions developed by small-scale societies to foster solidarity, inculcate values, and manage resources. Long-term studies tracking the development and maintenance of such institutions would greatly benefit a range of social science disciplines, but are unfortunately rare. To this end, the proposed project...