In 2012, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review launched the Digital Editorial Fellows (def) Program for graduate students interested in enhancing their knowledge and experience in academic publishing and digital studies. The program continues the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology‘s tradition of graduate student mentorship in the field. Working with Associate Editor Kate Henne, Fellows develop themes for virtual editions, initiate spillover conversations, and create new initiatives.
Current Fellows
Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research focuses, in part, on the legal construction of gender and how legal conceptions of gender difference—and its intersections with theories of crime, punishment, and rehabilitation—construct women as improvable subjects in drug court and court-mandated drug rehabilitation.
Nathan Madson is a doctoral student in Cultural Anthropology at New York University and holds a J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School. His current work is on advocacy organizations in Hong Kong and their activism on behalf of the queer community. It touches on issues of human rights mobilizations in China, politically acceptable forms of embedded activism within Mainland China, and queer consumerist discourses in lieu of “political” activism.
Helena Zeweri is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at Rice University. She is interested in personhood, sovereignty, humanitarianism, and migration. Her dissertation examines modes of measuring and assessing violence and risk. She is studying Australia’s recent legislation and advocacy efforts around forced marriage, which are reshaping meanings of immigrant and refugee health and well-being, as well as coercion and consent in intimate kin relations.
Past Fellows
Chima Anyadike-Danes (2014) holds an MPhil in Social Anthropology from Cambridge and is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. His dissertation focuses on the Los Angeles municipal government, its attempts to address residents’ desires to claim ownership of space, and consequences for populations who do not conform to the assumptions underlying municipal law and policy.
Siva Arumugam (2012) completed his dissertation titled “Governing Social Bodies: Affect and Number in Contemporary Cricket” from Columbia University in 2012, after which he accepted a postdoctoral position at the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago.
Jessica Bray (2016) is a doctoral student in Anthropology at Rice University. Her work focuses on the cross-cultural study of sexuality, law, gender, and personhood online and in the physical world. Her work concentrates on South Asia and the United States. For her dissertation, she is researching the recent recriminalization of same-sex sexuality in Indian law and how it affects community formation and digital self-making.
Nathan Coben (2016) is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. His research examines the socio-legal constitution of a “recovered” property market and economy in Ireland. His dissertation looks at the border counties of Ireland and focuses on how contestations over real estate, revenue, and finance in post-austerity Ireland trace and reshape existing partition-based political formations.
Amelia Fiske (2014-2015) received her PhD in Anthropology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her dissertation explored questions of harm and evidence in relation to oil production in the northeastern corner of the Ecuadorian Amazon. She is a research fellow on a Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel collaboration (with King’s College, London), researching the social, ethical, and regulatory aspects of citizen science.
Katherine Fultz (2016) holds a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 2016. Her research interests include social movements, indigenous rights, political ecology, and media studies. Her dissertation looked at the strategies people employ when they engage in debates over transnational mining projects in Guatemala. She is currently an instructor in the Department of Modern Languages, Anthropology, and Geography at Southeast Missouri State University.
Natalia Guzmán Solano (2016) is a doctoral student in Sociocultural Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. She studies issues pertaining to post-liberal politics, social movements, the rule of law, and gendered patterns of political participation in the context of extractivism. Her research focuses on examining the nexus of gendered anti-mining activism and state enactments of legitimate politics in Cajamarca, Peru.
Sean Mallin (2014-2015) received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine. His research interests include property, municipal governance, and urban renewal in post-Katrina New Orleans. He is currently the Managing Editor of American Anthropologist and a Junior Fellow at the Social Sciences Research Network at UC Irvine.
Kathleen Mannard (2017) is currently a JD candidate at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, pursuing a concentration in environmental law. She has a bachelors degree in Anthropology, with minors in History and Legal Studies, from the University of Pittsburgh.
Kosi Onyeneho (2016) is a doctoral candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. Her dissertation examines how government infrastructural and institutional decay, caused by skewed government-oil industry relationships, impacts performance of state citizenship in Nigeria. Her research interests include infrastructure, citizenship, oil, and collective memory.
Natasha Pushkarna (2012-2013) received her PhD in Criminology, Law and Society with a Specialization in Anthropologies of Medicine, Science, and Technology from the University of California, Irvine in 2015. Currently, she is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Law at the University of Hong Kong.
Jamila Smith-Loud (2015) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests focus on intersections between law, power, identity and cultural change, particularly in relation to outsider groups’ struggles for rights. Her dissertation explores institutional dialogue, power structures and legal consciousness of African Americans in the early twentieth century.
Eduardo Ramírez Catarí (2012-2013) researches the delivery of development programming and accountability instruments in Indonesia. Currently a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the Australian National University, he holds law degrees from New York University, the National University of Singapore, and Universidad Católica Andrés Bello.
Negar Razavi (2015-2016) is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies issues of state power, political subjectivity, expert knowledge production, national security, human rights, and gender. Her dissertation looks at how policy experts based in think tanks and research organizations in Washington D.C. contribute to the shaping of U.S. security policies towards the Middle East.
Amanda J. Reinke (2014-2015) received her PhD from the University of Tennessee’s Department of Anthropology and Program on Disasters, Displacement, and Human Rights. Her interests include militarization, peacebuilding, human rights, gender, and political economy. She is currently an assistant professor of anthropology at Georgia College.
Stacy Topouzova (2013) is pursuing her DPhil in Law at University of Oxford. She is conducting research on immigration law, specifically the implementation of a Statutory Instrument concerning labor restrictions against Bulgarians and Romanians in the United Kingdom.
Lindsay Vogt (2016) is a doctoral candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She studies how IT sector entrepreneurs and institutions participate in influencing national politics and refashioning popular conceptions of social citizenship through philanthropic and NGO work on water in India.
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 