WGF - Support for Research Projects

DOCUMENT Full-Text Karen Hebert.

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. What does it mean to fight for environmental futures through the language and practice of care and collaboration? Which ways of interacting with the environment are valorized and cultivated, and who or what gains power? In the US state of Alaska, new livelihoods are increasingly prominent in rural regions, as historically dominant forms of state- and industry-driven resource extraction are joined...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Matthew Knisley.

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...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Anisha Chadha.

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...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Adam Kersch.

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...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Chuan Hao Chen.

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

DOCUMENT Full-Text Katyayni Seth.

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...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Joshua Franklin.

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...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Edward Dostaler.

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,...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Sarah Jackson.

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project investigated how Classic Maya individuals understood the objects that archaeologists characterize as 'artifacts,' and applied this Maya material perspective to modern archaeological practices in order to transform how we interpret excavations at Classic Maya sites. To accomplish this, the project focused on three activities: reconstructing elements of a Classic Maya perspective on the...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Bianca Chizzolini.

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...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Sharon DeWitte.

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Crisis mortality, a dramatic but temporary increase in mortality rate above the baseline level resulting from a single extraordinary factor, was an important phenomenon in past human populations and continues to affect living people in ways that might be preventable. One of the most important mortality crises in history was the Black Death; in Europe alone, the epidemic killed tens of millions of...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Jonna Yarrington.

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,...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Uploaded by: Rachel Fernandez

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Since 2011, the United States has classified an increasing number of migrants as 'criminal aliens' for the purposes of deportation. Recent studies have illustrated this policy's social toll: chronic insecurity among migrants, suffering among families torn apart, and alienation among those sent to an unfamiliar 'homeland' and as 'criminals' (e.g., Boehm 2016;Coutin 2016;Golash-Boza 2015;Khosravi...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Ramiro Barberena.

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Migrations are an intrinsic aspect of human societies, past and present. This global character can be used to build a comparative anthropological framework seeking to understand the drivers and consequences of migration. Within this agenda, we seek to comprehend what are the causes and social effects of a rapid migration pulse recorded between AD 1270-1420 in the southern Andes (Uspallata Valley,...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Telmo Pereira.

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The coarse and dispersed information on the western-most Iberia does not allow a detailed understanding of the human behavior ecology and ecodynamics during the Pleistocene. That problem can only be solved with an innovative project focusing a region rich in multiple resources that is an ecotone between different landscapes and where can be found sites with long sequences and good preservation of...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Matthew Chrisler.

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...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Fiori Sara Berhane.

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...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Irteza Binte-Farid.

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...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Nicole van Zyl.

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...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Maria Bonome Pederneiras Barbosa.

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...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Canan Cakirlar.

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Two species from different domestication centres – the Bactrian camel from central Asia and the Dromedary from Arabia – were deliberately brought together and bred to create new, more powerful, animals. Larger than both parents and double the strength of its contributory species, the hybrid camel was the world’s first engineered hybrid transportation. Creating the hybrid camel required...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Jill Pruetz.

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) living in a savanna environment at Fongoli, Senegal are the only known mammalian population besides humans that hunt with tools. Chimpanzees here use modified stick tools ('spears') to hunt nocturnal prosimians (Galago senegalensis) as they nest in tree cavities during the day. Additionally, females hunt significantly more than expected with tools, while males...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Ulla Berg.

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project examines the detention and deportation of South American migrants from the United States, with a focus on the largely understudied migrant populations from Ecuador and Peru. In contrast to studies of deportation that focuses mostly on the period of detention and the return itself, this project examines deportation as a set of social practices occurring over time and as a transnational...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Camila Galan de Paula.

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...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Melissa Manus.

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,...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Smiti Sam Nathan.

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...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Kathryn Eliza Williamson.

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...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Sofia Forss.

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Human behavior is characterized by the motivation to seek out new knowledge, often leading to discoveries or innovations. Already as infants, we are curious about the world around us. Paradoxically, scientific work on curiosity in non-human animals is surprisingly rare and we know remarkably little about the origins of curiosity and how the trait is distributed and expressed among non-human...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Annika Schmeding.

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...

DOCUMENT Full-Text J. Andrew Bush.

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. According to predominant norms among Muslims in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, sharia ("Islamic law") empowers a husband to divorce his wife by spoken repudiation. When husbands regret their repudiation, they often visit jurists at local Fatwa Councils seeking advice to restore their marriage. Having squandered the authority granted them by sharia, husbands try to restore that authority through...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Steven Dorland.

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project is grounded in a partnership with the Mississaugas of the Credit First nation to apply community-based archaeology in southern Ontario that focusses on learning about learning. There are two main goal of this project. First, we plan to bring together Indigenous methodologies and archaeological study to teach youths how to learn ancestral pottery making. This involves the integration...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Uploaded by: Rachel Fernandez

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...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Tariq Rahman.

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,...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Patricia de Freitas Lopes Rodrigues.

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...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Fernando Montero.

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...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Hallie Wells.

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...

DOCUMENT Full-Text R. J. Sinensky.

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...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Samuel Dinger.

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This research examines the processes through which the dilemmas of everyday life in exile contribute to the emergence of novel forms of moral community and ethical selfhood among young male refugees with no links to humanitarian NGOs. Specifically, it asks how masculine vocabularies, practices, and aspirations are and are not reconfigured when the violence of war and exile upset gendered...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Matthew Biwer.

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The goal of this project is to examine the relationship between food, identity, and culture contact in the context of imperial borderlands. More specifically, the proposed research uses ancient plant remains to address the role of food in the complex multi-directional social interactions between colonists and indigenous groups in the Wari Empire of the highlands of the Peruvian Andes....

DOCUMENT Full-Text Lauren Deal.

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This dissertation research investigates if and how Argentine actors are inverting Latina American racial ideologies of mestizaje to 'de-whiten' Argentine identity and produce a mestiza Argentine identity. Specifically, this project analyzes the linguistic and material practices by which Argentine actors construct and perform a mestiza Argentine identity in order to elucidate the potentially...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Sara Shneiderman.

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. How do we imagine the ideal state that we aspire to live in? I address this question in anthropological terms through a multi-sited ethnography of state restructuring in Nepal since 2006. In the wake of a decade-long civil conflict between Maoist and state forces in this erstwhile unitary Himalayan kingdom turned secular democratic federal republic of nearly 30 million, I transpose Victor Turner's...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Karen Hebert.

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. In the fishing town of Dillingham, Alaska, poet Gary Snyder once found the raucous epitome of “the working bars of the world” (1983:91). These days, however, Dillingham’s mood is decidedly dimmer as its workers develop and debate plans to restructure the Bristol Bay salmon industry, which has swung from unprecedented profitability to near insolvency in little over a decade. Although the...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Anthony Rizk.

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This research examines salvage: its different meanings, the theoretical directions it leads to, and how it contributes to understanding social life in Lebanon -a country that, for some time now, has been described as being on the brink of collapse. Among scientists repurposing microbial samples in laboratories, physicians using salvage therapies in clinics, and political activists constantly...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Zoltan Gluck.

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. My project is a study of Kenya's 'war on terror,' examining how security practices and counterterrorism are affecting urban space and state power. In recent years Kenya has experienced a number of terrorist attacks that have profoundly impacted the country, placing security at the center of national politics and transforming the very institutions of state security. Through historic and...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Gabriel Torres Colón.

This resource is an application for the Engaged Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This research project broadly explores how Afro-Puerto Ricans in Piñones, Loíza resist structural racism, struggle for social equality, and pursue a more prosperous future. In collaboration with the Corporación Piñones se Integra (COPI), a a community-based non-profit, we will employ ethnographic methods to understand how Afro-Puerto Ricans experience race, practice environmental conversation of...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Katherine Maddox.

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. To answer the question of how exiled Syrians forge their own lifeworlds in Paris, France, this study employs ethnographic methods to explore the unique conception of Syrian-ness that emerges from biographies shaped by the legacy of French colonialism, Syrian nationalism, and the ongoing violence in Syria. While categories such as "refugee," "asylum seeker," and "French citizen of Syrian...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Ilana Gershon.

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Even as unemployment rates fall, contract and freelance work is on the rise, and job tenures are short - the current median tenure is 4.2 years. The changes in work follow a historical shift in how Americans understand the employment contract. Under contemporary capitalism, people increasingly see themselves in business terms: they are the "CEO of me." In this perspective, hiring resembles a...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Sophie Pascoe.

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. While environmental governance initiatives, such as climate change mitigation mechanisms, are often framed in scientific and economic terms, they are entangled with diverse processes of socio-environmental change that cross ontological and epistemological borders. This research is an attempt to complicate the stories that are told about environmental governance and develop a narrative...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Lake Polan.

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project examines the technological reconstitution of privacy in America through an ethnographic study of the efforts of Silicon Valley area corporations to 'save' privacy on the Internet using technology. Such efforts respond to the widespread perception that the reorientations of global business and governance around increasingly cheap, pervasive, and powerful forms of digital...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Claire Webb.

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The question 'Are we alone?' has shifted in the past few decades to 'Where else is life?' Answers to both questions--an intelligent alien and lively signs of earthlike biology--have yet to surface. This dissertation seeks to illuminate how two communities of scientists construct experimental systems around these missing objects, operating at the edges of knowledge, through familiar metaphors...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Kristin Doughty.

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Over the past ten years, the Rwandan government has intensified efforts to extract methane gas from Lake Kivu, a 2500 square kilometer lake that straddles the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The methane extraction project has two stated aims: to reduce dangerous levels of unstable gasses dissolved in the lake and thus prevent it from exploding, and to provide much-needed...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Marian Hamilton.

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. While the fossil record captures many crucial details of our evolutionary past, it does not preserve social behavior. Certain aspects of spatial landscape use, such as dispersal and home range size, have major consequences on social organization. An accurate reconstruction of landscape use by fossil hominins would therefore be an empirical proxy for otherwise-elusive social behaviors....

DOCUMENT Full-Text Luisa Rivera.

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. What can anthropology do to reconcile the ubiquity of generational resilience with the growing science of heritable alterations to the stress response to adversity? Engaging a critical biocultural approach, I investigate the intergenerational embodiment and transmission of trauma in the wake of the Guatemalan genocide. My work is rooted in three generations of indigenous genocide survivors...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Lara Rosenoff Gauvin.

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Seven years after the guns ceased to thunder in Northern Uganda, and four years after people left the squalid displacement camps to return home to their 'ancestral' lands, clans in rural areas in Acoliland began to create their own non-profit foundations. In doing so, many clans have had to contemplate, debate, and finally write their foundations' constitutions, mobilizing, translating, and...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Nicholas Caverly.

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project examines how the destruction of built environments reconfigures economic and environmental inequalities in the postindustrial United States. It does so by investigating the demolition of vacant buildings in Detroit. Estimated to number between 70,000 and 100,000, vacant buildings index decades of racially motivated population decline and deindustrialization. Such structures are...