2023-24 Fellows

Leyla Jafarova is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Boston University. Her dissertation project offers a critical exploration of the emergence and development of humanitarian ethics of care for unidentified dead bodies in a post-war setting of Azerbaijan, with a central focus on the complex interplay between morality, politics, and regimes of care. As a PoLAR Digital Editorial Fellow, Leyla is curating the series Knowledge, Truths, and Care in The Aftermath of Violent Losses, which draws attention to the multiplicity of ways that the living adopt to forge relations with their missing and/or departed kin after the acts of mass violence and to construct their truths in the absence of certainty.

 

Sana Malik is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Emory University. Sana’s dissertation, based on ethnographic fieldwork in urban Pakistan, investigates the agential practices of women’s rights activists and ordinary women in shaping the political landscapes in urban Pakistan. More broadly, her research engages with scholarship on social movements, feminist ethnography, and the anthropology of rights in the Muslim world. As a PoLAR Digital Editorial Fellow, Sana is curating an Emergent Conversation on “Everyday Indeterminacies in the Global South” that explores narratives of how people make everyday life livable amidst ongoing indeterminacies and crises in the Global South.

 

Hatim Rachdi (he/him) is a master’s student in the Women, Society, and Development program at HBKU. His research interests lie at the intersection of Amazigh indigeneity, sexuality, and sovereignty. His MA Thesis, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Athens, Greece, explores homemaking practices and community formations among queer identifying refugees from the Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region. As a PoLAR Digital Editorial Fellow, Hatim curates the series “Queer Longings and Belongings with/in Tamazgha.” This series challenges cis-heteronormative socio-political paradigms of relationality by examining queer forms of affective and material attachments to the region, navigating personal histories, and resisting power dynamics and colonial legacies. As a second-generation Arabized Amazigh from Morocco’s Souss region, Hatim is dedicated to the struggles of Amazigh and queer communities in SWANA. He is committed to feminist ethnographically informed scholarship and activist collaborations. Twitter/X: @Timrachdi

 

Yuda Rasyadian is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. His research interest lies at the intersections of development, inequalities, Indigeneity, and multicultural world-making. His doctoral research examines the processes in which political, social, and economic inequalities are reproduced and new modes of power are generated within the Special Economic Zone and NGOs and plantation projects in West Papua, seeking to understand how development projects are challenged and transmogrified by multiple forms of politics. As a PoLAR Digital Editorial Fellow, Yuda is curating the emergent series “Global Development Regime and the Indigeneity of the South,” which reflects and discusses Indigeneity in, of, and from the Global South as a mode of inquiry toward the diverse ways Indigenous people engage in alternative politics of development and other approaches to dealing with global development regime and its entangled effect.

 

Shivani is an urban anthropologist based in New Delhi, India. As an early career researcher, she is focused on building clean mobility practices, ecologically and climate resilient solutions to transport infrastructure and green environmental policies. Currently, Shivani is a research associate at India ZEV Research Centre of the ITS, University of California, Davis. She is researching on national and subnational policies, and initiatives for sustainable mobility and zero emission vehicles in India. As a PoLAR Digital Editorial Fellow, Shivani is curating an Emergent Conversation on “Socio-political discourses in sustainable urban mobility”. The feature explores sustainable practices in urban mobility, understanding it from anthropological perspectives, looking at everyday mobility practices at the intersection of political interferences and social ramifications.

 

2022-23 Fellows

Charles Dolph received his PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2022. His dissertation, titled “The Cultural Battle Against the Dollar: Struggles over Hoarding and Democracy in the Twilight of Argentina’s Soy Boom,” examines state monetary policies and their legal entailments against the backdrop of the Argentina’s material transformation into a major producer and exporter of soybeans and ongoing debates over its post-Cold War democratic transition. He is currently a Research Fellow in the Anthropology Department at University College London, where he is researching a new wealth tax introduced in Bolivia in 2020. As a PoLAR Digital Editorial Fellow he curated a feature on the reemergence of inflation as a topic of public debate, object of policy action, and collective experience, “The Politics of Inflation.”

 

Kulasumb Kalinoe (Kula) is a PhD candidate at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia. Her project PNG Heritage in the Archives: A Legal Anthropology of Cultural Property focuses on the cultural heritage issues concerning Papua New Guinean collections held in public institutions. This project will analyse issues regarding access, gender, repatriation, ownership rights and will also explore knowledge production, preservation, and protection in Papua New Guinea. As a PoLAR Digital Editorial Fellow, she is curating an emergent conversation Human Rights are Cultural Rights: Decolonizing Museums through Repatriation and Source Community Partnerships. This feature draws on the complexities of safeguarding cultural property held in western institutions. Kulasumb’s broader research interests are human rights, social justice, and Papua New Guinea.

 

Katy Lindquist is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Emory University. Katy’s dissertation, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Kampala, investigates the role of young, middle-class professionals in helping shape future political landscapes in urban Uganda. More broadly, her research engages with scholarship on middle classness in Africa, the anthropology of the future, and African politics in the wake of neoliberalism. As a PoLAR Digital Editorial Fellow, Katy is curating an Emergent Conversation on “The Politics of Crisis” that explores how narratives of crisis are constructed within and through different political ecologies.

 

Abdulla Majeed is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. His work lays at the intersections of everyday statecraft, exile, citizenship, and temporality. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among Iraqi migrants in Jordan, his dissertation examines how the Iraqi exilic experience comes to be entangled with multiple statecrafts that (dis)order ordinary citizen-migrants aspirations for and constructions of political imaginaries for the future that transcend, or coexist along, traditional forms of governance and ethical citizenship. As a PoLAR Digital Editorial Fellow, Abdulla curated the series Remnants of Empire that reflects on the everyday relevance of empire and imperialism not only as an object of study, but also as a method for knowledge about futurity, citizenship, and sovereignty.

 

2021 Fellows

Kyle Craig is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University. His dissertation, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Amman, Jordan, examines the intersections of graffiti/street artists’ visions of the ideal future city, neoliberal logics of urban development, and state governance of public aesthetics. As a PoLAR Digital Editorial Fellow, Kyle is curating the series Aesthetics and Politics in Right-Wing, Authoritarian, and Populist Movements, which focuses on the under-examined topic of how aesthetic expressions and practices give form to right-wing, authoritarian, and populist politics across the globe. If you would like to contribute to this series, reach out to him at: kylecraig2023@u.northwestern.edu. Kyle’s series is titled “The Aesthetic Politics of Far Right Movements.” [https://wp.me/p68wh0-3Sz].

 

Nikola Garcia is a cultural anthropology PhD Candidate at Emory University, Atlanta, GA. Their research interests focus on whether cross-racial interdependencies provide the conditions through which participants can articulate, debate, and implement their visions of how to rectify historic inequalities and colonial legacies. Their dissertation project, “Emergent Citizenships: Mapuche (Indigenous) and Chilean (non-Indigenous) Politics and Belonging in the Peri-urban (Santiago, Chile)” examines how Mapuche and Chilean neighbors have cooperated since the 1960’s land occupation movements to develop organizations and manage shared resources. They utilize traditional ethnographic methods, archival methods, and visual ethnography and employ ArcGIS and online mapping to spatially represent the transformations in neighborhood projects. In doing so, their research tests the hypothesis that Mapuche and Chileans’ history of neighborhood co-management has led to the emergence of intercultural citizenship practices that enable residents to articulate broader visions of how social and political life should be organized in Chile that contrast to the national discourses of neoliberalism. As a Digital Editorial Fellow, they are curating the virtual edition, “Ethnographic Encounters with Destituent Power.” The Argentine Colectivo Situaciones and Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben define a destituent power as one which “doesn’t create institutions but rather vacates them, dissolves them, empties them of their occupants and their power.” In this virtual edition, anthropologists reflect on the social upheavals that have occurred in their field sites through ethnographic attention to the new theories of social change and societal wellbeing that undergird each disruption. Nikola’s series is titled, “Ethnographic Encounters with Destituent Power.” [https://wp.me/p68wh0-3F9].

 

Neil Nory Kaplan-Kelly is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. Kaplan-Kelly’s dissertation explores how elected officials use legislation to build peace and strengthen democracy in Northern Ireland. Prior to coming to UCI, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and received a M.A. with Commendation in Legislative Studies from Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. As part of this degree, Kaplan-Kelly worked for the Northern Ireland Assembly’s Committee for Finance & Personal and wrote a thesis about changing legal discourse in legislatures around the world around the issue of same-sex marriage. He received B.A.s from the University of Chicago in Anthropology and in the Law, Letters, and Society program. Kaplan-Kelly served as a University of Chicago Public Interest Fellow at the Office of Alderman Leslie Hairston in the City’s 5^th Ward. Working for the Alderman and experiencing the politics of Chicago’s city council inspired his career in legislative studies. An advocate for human rights issues since the age of 12, he has also volunteered for many campus LGBTQ organizations and transgender equality groups. A passionate teacher, Kaplan-Kelly was the 2019 recipient of UCI’s School of Social Science’s Kathy Alberti Prize which recognizes outstanding promise as an academic and university professor. Neil’s series is titled, “Reflective Conversation: Revisiting and Revitalizing Ethnographies of Legislatures.” [https://wp.me/p68wh0-3ws].

 

Monika Lemke is a doctoral candidate in Department of Socio-Legal Studies at York University, Canada. She is working towards the completion of her doctoral dissertation, entitled ‘The strip search, sight unseen: A sensori-legal study of the search of persons at the Toronto Police Service’, with the aim of assessing how Canadian constitutional and criminal law impacts the practicalities of police work. Her research interests focus on everyday legal performance, policing, embodiment and the senses, and the theorization of power, but also on emergent approaches to the study of law and bureaucracy. As a PoLAR Digital Editorial Fellow, she is curating a feature on the everyday life of bureaucracies, drawing on themes of embodiment, affect, and the senses. She can be contacted by email at mlemke(at)yorku.ca. Monika’s series is titled “Virtual Edition on Bureaucracy and Tactics.” [https://wp.me/p68wh0-3Tv].

 

Jennifer A. Zelnick is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at University of California Irvine. Her dissertation, “Life and Death After America: Deportee Transnationalism Among Cambodian American Refugees,” examines the sociolegal processes through which deportees, deportable refugees, and their families create and participate in transnational movements and networks. Jennifer’s research and writing has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship, the Center for Khmer Studies, and the Center for Engaged Scholarship. As a PoLAR Digital Editorial Fellow, Jennifer is developing a toolkit for APLA’s website on how academics can become involved in expert witnessing.

 

2020 Fellows

María Lis Baiocchi is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. Based on ethnographic research in Buenos Aires and its Metropolitan Area, her dissertation examines the reconstruction of the juridical status of household workers from “servants” to “workers” in Argentina and its implications for household workers’ everyday lives. As a PoLAR Digital Editorial Fellow, she is curating a feature for the Speaking Justice to Power series, examining gender politics in the current context of resurgent patriarchal authoritarianism worldwide through the prism of migration, gender, and sexuality studies. If you would like to contribute to this Speaking Justice to Power collection, email her at: baiocchiml@pitt.edu. Maria’s series is part of the Speaking Justice to Power series, and is titled “Gender and the Sexual Politics of Contemporary Patriarchal Ethnonationalist Authoritarianism.”

 

Christopher Brown is a Lecturer in Global Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, having recently completed his doctorate in the Department of Anthropology at The Ohio State University. His dissertation, “The Cultural Logic of Strangerhood”, is a multi-sited ethnography of subjectivity and belonging among Ghana’s transnational Zongo community. The PoLAR feature he is working on aims to bring together a range of perspectives on recent popular uprisings throughout contemporary Africa, asking what possibilities these revolutions hold for emergent forms of democracy and subjectivity.

 

Todd Ebling is a doctoral candidate in the anthropology department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he also teaches courses that focus on cultural anthropology, medical anthropology, and global violence. His dissertation explores the labor, affects, and ethics of care at two nonprofit organizations in an American Midwestern city. To contribute to PoLAR as a Digital Editorial Fellow, Todd is developing a project that examines housing and homelessness in the United States.

 

Meichun Lee is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at University of California Davis. Her dissertation, “Code for an Open Government: Digital Activism and the Uprising of Civic Hackers in Post-authoritarian Taiwan,” examines a Taiwan-based hacker community and their political experiments translating the idea of openness from technologies to governance. Meichun’s series are titled “Virtual Edition on Digital Politics” and “Fake News and Anthropology: A Conversation on Technology, Trust, and Publics in an Age of Mass Disinformation.” She also conducted an author interview with Tamar Shirinian on “Digital Fakeness in Armenia.” [https://wp.me/p68wh0-2Mx; https://wp.me/p68wh0-3tG; https://wp.me/p68wh0-2Az].

 

Anna Kirstine Schirrer is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology and a certificate fellow with the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University. She is currently curating a PoLAR Online series on the politics of reparations for slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. Her dissertation project focuses on how international claims for redress for transatlantic slavery and native genocide in the Caribbean converge on or diverge from national organizations’ claims for land titling in Guyana. Anna is the recipient of the Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant and the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Grant from the Cultural Anthropology and Law and Social Science Programs (Award Abstract #1823901). Her broader research interests are international law, reparations, race, human rights, and postcolonial Western Europe. Anna’s series it titled “Special Series: Reparations for Slavery and Colonialism.” She also conducted an interview with Kamari Clarke on “Affective Justice.” [https://wp.me/p68wh0-2Vt; https://wp.me/p68wh0-2ya]