Recent Student Publications and Awards

Read "The Semi-Conductor Radio Made in Shanghai," published in Anthropology News by Skylar Kaat, Ph.D. student.

Read "People, Policy, and Praxis: Freirean Pedagogy and Local-Level Policy Implementation," published in the Current Issues in Comparative Education (CICE) journal by Elena Peeples, Ph.D. student.

Ambiguity in policy implementation guidance can result in discriminatio  and disenfranchisement.  Adult education programs grounded in Freirean pedagogy can be responsive to these situations through an open dialectic that provides for an exchange between internal program relationships and external organizational relationships. This case comes from my experiences as an educator in a Freirean, Spanish-language, high school equivalency (HSE) program in New Jersey during significant national changes to HSE credentialing  in  2014.  It describes policy implementation in the local context in relationships between governing institutions, service organizations, and the people policies are meant to govern. I construct a narrative for relevant policy environments and actions through the assemblage of primary sources, such as policy documents and internal organizational reports, as well as an analysis of 25 news reports and commentaries taken from  2013-2014.  I argue that all policies, even those initiated at the national level, are ultimately enacted locally through the dialectic relationships between policy makers, administrators,  program staff, and students at a variety of public and private organizations. I show how Freirean approaches to program design and operation respond to  political, policy, and programmatic complexities to address discrimination and disenfranchisement. In conclusion, I discuss implications for educators seeking to adopt a Freirean framework into their own program design and implementation. These include reflection and action at the local level within an analysis of larger oppressive structures, thoughtful design and critical flexibility to work closely with students in program operation, and engagement in dialectic relationships with existing or potential collaborators.

Read "An esthetic theory of the subversive sublime of Ital cuisine," published in the Food, Culture and Society Journal by Maria Noland, Anthropology & Education Ph.D. student.

This paper seeks to understand the relationship between esthetics and transformative projects for the material world through a comparative inquiry into the substance and form of French cuisine, especially French pastry, and Rastafari Ital, a vegan cuisine originating in Jamaica. Working from Kant’s esthetic theory of the beautiful and the sublime, I historicize and problematize both culinary traditions in relation to gender and species hierarchies as sites of colonial legacy. My argument is that these hierarchies, which are both psychological and physical, operate through culinary esthetics. If one is to understand the decolonizing potential of alternative foodways such as Ital, it is necessary to query the work being done by food both on the level of substance (ingredients) and form, which is indexical of hierarchies of group utility. It is when both substance and form point toward alternatives to colonial hierarchies that a food practice becomes restorative. Using Charles Sanders Pierce’s triadic relationship of the sign, I demonstrate how Rastafari Ital, in contrast to French cuisine, eschews the object of the nation-state in favor of Mother Earth through an alternative esthetics of the beautiful and experience of a primal sublime.

Read "From the Epicenter, At the Apex: A dispatch about birth and COVID-19 from New York City," published in the City and Society Journal by Sarah Vázquez, Anthropology & Education Ph.D. student.

Read "Biopower, mediascapes, and the politics of fear in the age of COVID‐19," published in the City and Society Journal by Noël Um, Applied Anthropology Ph.D. student.

Read the article "Along together or Online Together," published in Anthropology News by Sara O. Ahmed, Ph.D. student.

Ahmed discusses insights on virtual connectivity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This chapter explores the implications of global citizenship education in Egypt from the perspective of a small, international primary school in Alexandria. A qualitative study was conducted with parents to examine their perspectives on notions of global citizenship and “local” citizenship in relation to the international schooling of their children. Although global citizenship education is a pertinent contemporary priority—as emphasized by the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goal 4.7.—historical implications to global citizenship are considered. To explore tensions and potential challenges to global citizenship, the author explores the notions of “the clash of civilizations” as well as the “love–hate” relationship between the “Muslim East” and the “West.” Additionally, the author further explores the benefits of a multicultural upbringing and “third-culture kids” (Pollock, 2017).

In her chapter of Educação Popular e Letramentos, Ph.D. student Fernanda Vasconcelos Dias discusses critical pedagogy through the lens of Freirean tradition, as educational theory and practice, in the educational field in the United States. She seeks to present what she considers as the main political aspects of critical pedagogy as it has been developing in the country, demonstrating the importance of Freire's work for progressive and critical education. At the same time, the chapter explores some questionings that critical pedagogy and Freire's work have received in the US context over time. Dias discusses how critical and popular educators may learn and build up their educational praxis from both debates. 

Citation:  Dias, F. V. 2019. A pedagogia crítica nos Estados Unidos: possibilidades para pensar a prática educativa crítica e popular (Critical pedagogy in the United States: possibilities for considering critical and popular educational practice). In Peres, Selma Martines and Alves, Maria Zenaide (eds.). Educação Popular e Letramentos. 1. ed. Jundiaí, SP: Paco, p. 19-42. Print (book) and E-book 

Read the article "Jordanian Female Teachers Activism in the Latest Teachers Successful Strike," by Afaf A. Al-Khoshman, Ph.D. student.

In this article, Al-Khoshman looks into the dynamics of the female teachers' activism in the latest Jordanian teachers strike, which ended successfully early October. Drawing on the teachers' testimonies, she highlights the strategies and the repertoire the teachers employed and their relevance to the social and feminist movements discourses worldwide. The article highlights the teachers' perspective on state's aggressions against them and how teachers viewed it as a hegemonic and patriarchal apparatus. 

Read the article "Privacy protection as a core human rights issue for women in Jordan," by Afaf A. Al-Khoshman, Ph.D. student.

In this Article, Al-Khoshman discuses how a case of a breach of privacy calls for engagement with the priorities and discourses of women's activism in Jordan. 

Last May, an anonymous group of Jordanian activists publicly issued what they titled “The Privacy Statement”. This statement primarily called for civil society and public support for a legal framework that would protect the privacy of all members of society, especially women. The statement was issued in the backdrop of a leaked recording that allegedly revealed a powerful official in the Jordan Royal Guard blackmailing and sexually assaulting a woman. The leak and subsequent discussions have illuminated the vulnerability of women in Jordanian society, and the resonance of the case is a testament to the prevalence of this issue. The female victim—despite being blackmailed and repeatedly threatened—was surprisingly regarded as the main offender since women are not supposed to talk to unfamiliar men in the first place, although in the case of this particular woman the details were not fully revealed and the public based their opinions—widely expressed on social media platforms—on conjecture and assumption. The activists’ statement, which calls for legal repercussions in similar instances of breached privacy and public disclosure, was circulated in the name of Jordanian men and women concerned with the lack of privacy protections in Jordanian society and the harsh reality of women’s victimhood. 

Read the article "How Teachers Can Use Anthropology in Classrooms" by Afaf A. Al-Khoshman, Ph.D. student.

From her experience as a teacher in Jordan, her home country, Al-Khoshman has come to see how education can bring out the strength that young people have within them. As a teacher in a small Jordanian town and later in the capital, Amman, she taught students from a variety of backgrounds—among them rural and town-settled Bedouin, Syrians, Palestinians and Iraqis. She saw the need for education to make students feel confident and capable, whatever their background. To achieve this, ideas taken from the social sciences in general, and from anthropology in particular, can be useful.

Read "Caste in a Tamil Family: On Purity and Pollution in Post-war Jaffna" by Zehra Hashmi and Prashanth Kuganathan (Ph.D. student).

Written using the voice of Zehra Hashmi, an ethnographic narrative examines caste in transition in Jaffna, centred around a Vel.l.āl.ar family that lived in the peninsula throughout the duration of the Sri Lankan Civil War, which came to an end in May 2009. Based on field research and interviews conducted between 2011 and 2013, the authors find that interlocutors struggle to make meaning of post-war changes.

Read ‘What can one do against democracy?’ The co-construction and destruction of ‘Student Democracy’ in a Chilean public high school by Rodrigo Mayorga, Ph.D. student. 

This article examines how the actors of a Chilean public high school navigated the political scenario produced when its students decided to occupy their school to protest a national Educational Reform. Using ethnographic data and interviews with high school students, it proposes to understand this process in the context of a figured world directly linked with youth activism and student contentious politics: that of ‘Student Democracy’. The article argues that this figured world is constantly being produced by students, teachers and parents engaging in contentious local practices and that, in doing so, they create new opportunities for political action and citizenship education within school settings. It also argues that, by engaging with this figured world, students are participating in both ‘Student Democracy’ and the broader societal democracy, learning to be citizens in the present, and to deal with the possibilities, risks, and responsibilities that democratic participation always entails.

Negotiating contradictions: educación among Dominican transnational mothers in New York City

Read "Negotiating contradictions: educación among Dominican transnational mothers in New York City" by Aldo Anzures Tapia, Rodrigo Mayorga (Ph.D. student), Gabrielle Oliveira, Lesley Bartlett, Chelsea Kallery, Cynthia N. Carvajal, and Victoria Martínez-Martínez.

This paper examines how a transnational orientation shapes Dominican mothers’ contradictory attitudes towards education in New York City. Through this ethnographic study, which draws on 36 interviews, community walkabouts, and participant observations in community-led adult education classes, we show how Dominican mothers struggle with conflicting values; on the one hand, they embrace the idea of schooling for individual advancement, integration in the US, and critical thinking, while on the other hand, they regret the diminution of a collective, family orientation and respect for parents. Overall, this study shows that contradictions are not a sign of confusion or denial, but rather a struggle to transform cultural practices that satisfy multiple worlds. A deeper understanding of these contradictions could help educators and educational institutions consider how these transnational tensions motivate parent engagement and their hopes for their children’s education.

Read "Specter of the Fraud: Muslim Sexual Minorities and Asylum in the Netherlands" by Sarah French Brennan, Applied Anthropology Ph.D. student.

Sarah French Brennan explores the many tribulations minority asylum seekers face, and the narrow patterns and behaviors they must conform to in order to be granted safety.

Sara Ahmed, current Ph.D. student, received the Center for Islam in the Contemporary World (CICW) grant for Fall 2020. More information about this grant can be found on the CICW website here.

Andrew Wortham was awarded the Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund as part of the generous work of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.  The Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship provides academic year support to advanced doctoral students in East Asian studies who are completing coursework, pursuing dissertation research, or at the dissertation write-up stage. Priority is given to students whose research focuses on Southeast Asia and on regional or cross-national issues in East Asia.  Wortham will be using the funds to conduct his doctoral dissertation research in the Chinese provinces of Sichuan and Yunnan on the creation of LGBT communities surrounding HIV/AIDS organizations. 

The Education Policy Dissertation Research Fellowship is open to matriculated TC doctoral students, in ALLTC departments and programs, whose dissertation research has the potential to inform societal efforts to improve educational opportunity, achievement, or equity.  This research should be focused on an important policy issue at any level of government, reflect potential for policy utility, and show a strong likelihood of being accepted in the most well-respected journals. Their view of policy relevance is a broad one, encompassing research that affects policy indirectly by shifting public understanding of societal challenges and opportunities for effective intervention.

Mayorga has been awarded the EPSA fellowship to support his dissertation research on citizenship in Chile. He is the first Anthropology student to receive this fellowship.

Rodrigo Mayorga was named a 2018 Graduate Fellow of the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict and Complexity at the Earth Institute, Columbia University. This program provides its fellows with the possibility of conducting research projects linked with social change, conflict resolution, development, and sustainable peace, all around the world. 

Mayorga's research explores how high school students have become relevant actors in the Chilean political scene during the the last decade, demanding the eradication of the neoliberal pillars sustaining the educational system since the 1980s, more inclusive schools and non-sexist education. It also examines how this context of student protests has affected the traditional citizenship education provided by the State, and produced several new informal citizenship education practices, both inside and outside the space of the school. This project hopes to understand the ways in which citizenship education within and outside the school come together in an assemblage that informs the experience of being a student and a citizen in contexts of social violence, protest and turmoil, like that of contemporary Chile, and how, in the process of engaging with this assemblage of practices, students can strive for social change. With his research, Mayorga also expects to illuminate how educators and researchers can recognize the different citizenship education practices students engage with when trying to build a more peaceful and democratic society and, more important, how they can engage productively with these youths as transformative social actors.

Amelia Simone Herbert has been awarded a 2017 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Abroad Fellowship by the US Department of Education for her project “A Ticket to Life?: Schooling, Mobility, and Transformation in a No-Fee Independent Township High School." The Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship provides grants to colleges and universities to fund individual doctoral students who conduct research abroad in modern foreign languages and area studies. The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.

As a Fulbright-Hays Fellow, Herbert will conduct 12-months of ethnographic research at a peri-urban high school in Cape Town, South Africa. Through participant observation, interviewing, and focus groups she seeks to understand how students, families, alumni, and school staff perceive the role of schooling in achieving individual mobility and social transformation in the “new” South Africa. In South Africa, education is cited as both driver and potential solution for disparities consistently ranked among the starkest in the world. Post-apartheid reforms have birthed a controversial sector of nonstate and public-private schooling providers that serve low-income families and claim to interrupt entrenched “cycles of poverty” by producing upwardly mobile subjects who will act as change agents in their communities. Through in-depth ethnography, Herbert will explore how participants take up these claims in a no-fee independent high school that serves Cape Town’s oldest township community. 

Gaps in higher education access in South Africa have received international attention due to ongoing protests, but Herbert's study aims to investigate important dynamics of secondary education that help produce this widely publicized asymmetry. By focusing on the experiences of youth and families that navigate uneven schooling landscapes in a post-apartheid city, she hopes to foreground important perspectives that are often missing from academic literature.

Andrew Wortham has joined the Cowin Financial Literacy Project as an Associate Project Manager and Doctoral Research Fellow.  He will be working with Joyce Cowin, Anand Mandi, Maureen Grolnick and Rob Shand on their work to develop and teach a course on financial literacy that high school teachers can teach in their classrooms.  The project emerged from the 2008 financial crises when Joyce Cowin felt that many Americans had been misled due to a lack of understanding about their financial situation and options.  This course seeks to move beyond simply lecturing students about financial terms and use case studies to teach students how to critically evaluate situations and make better financial decisions.  It also hopes to empower lower-income students to understand the financial systems, and advocate and work for broader structural changes. Wortham will be helping to write the curriculum and launch the new online classes that begin in January 2017.

Amelia Herbert has been awarded the 2016 Predoctoral Fellowship by the Ford Foundation and National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. These awards are made to individuals who have demonstrated superior academic achievement, are committed to a career in teaching and research at the college or university level, show promise of future achievement as scholars and teachers, and are well prepared to use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students.

Herbert's research focuses on the ways that the transition from high school to university transforms the subjectivities of black youth from townships in Cape Town, South Africa. She also seeks to understand the social production of university spaces and the experiences of black youth on the campuses of selective universities. This focus relates to her broader interest in how educational attainment affects the ways people see and situate themselves in relation to power, privilege, and authority, especially in contexts of marked disparity in access to resources, including South Africa and the United States. In the context of current calls to decolonize and diversify universities, Herbert seeks to illuminate the quotidian experiences of the students driving this movement and to supplement institutional notions of diversity (often articulated in terms of enrollment data, policies, and programming) with a focus on the lived realities of students who are navigating the cultural dimensions of the university from a marginal positioning.

Shana Colburn has received the the V.K. Wellington Koo Fellowship, awarded through the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. This fellowship will support Colburn's in completing her dissertation writing. Her study is a person-centered ethnography based on 8 months of fieldwork conducted in China's first Internet radio station. Through the medium of the station, the study probes the construct of the Chinese state at the intersections of youth, technology, and the market. Within the analysis, Colburn grapples with the role of the individual in narrating and creating meaning to how the party-state is presently recognized and understood. She situates the individual as not only a unit of analysis within the larger framework of the project, but also as a phenomenon under study within Chinese society at large (Yan 2009). By doing the work of ethnography, the project sheds light on the lived realities of a Chinese media organization operating in a time of heightened market competition, declining state support, and within an urban environment that is increasingly open to, as well as at the whims of the logics of neoliberal policies and practices.

Sarah French Brennan's dissertation research examines how the processes of claiming asylum as a sexual minority produces rather than simply represents a specific type of subject, with a specific focus on Muslim asylum seekers. In the context of the largest influx of refugees in Europe since the Second World War, as well as resurgent xenophobic nationalism in the Netherlands and across Europe, Islamophobia has become a real political force, and the supposed exceptional homophobia of Muslim communities in particular has ignited a moral panic over "tolerating intolerance." Muslims who apply for asylum as sexual minorities thus inhabit a unique space. A successful asylum claim involves the telling of a narrative credible to the asylum system, using the ideological idioms of sexuality, experience, and culture that are intelligible and recognizable to Dutch officials. What is the role played by formalized social networks and small non-governmental organizations in producing and constituting communities of Muslim “LBGT asylum seekers” and refugees? What are the contexts in which strategies, stories, and social lives are shared between asylum seekers?

The Council for European Studies has supported this research with the 2015 Pre-Dissertation Research Fellowship, helping to fund initial stages of fieldwork, offering the opportunity to publish in the journal, Perspectives on Europe, and providing professional development activities, including participation in the annual CES Conference.