Manata Hashemi, Iranian Studies
Tarnished: Labor, Stigma, and Social Worth in Iran
Dr. Hashemi's second book, Tarnished: Labor, Stigma, and Social Worth in Iran examines how stigmatized workers in Iran struggle to be seen as worthy and what their efforts reveal about the possibilities of cross-class solidarity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews conducted over an eight-year period with more than sixty precarious service workers across Iran, Tarnished shows how they reframe their so-called degrading labor as a virtue essential to the welfare of their communities. But in recasting themselves as heroes, workers also condemn the "lazy poor" and the "snobby rich," hardening social boundaries and fostering resentment of those above and below them. This is what the book calls the recognition bind: workers' efforts to secure worth can paradoxically reinforce inequality, revealing both the promises and limits of everyday emancipatory projects.
Annabel Ipsen, Department of Sociology
Dr. Ipsen studies inequality at the nexus of food, labor, and the law. Her work discusses timely issues in moments of sociopolitical change, such as the political economy of genetically modified corn, gender and work, and agricultural labor during COVID-19. Her project draws on multi-sited ethnography and centers the role of place in food system inequality.
Emily Upczak, Department of Film &. Media Studies
Life Without End / Narrative Feature Film
Set in a near-future Southwest ravaged by water and power shortages, Emery, a botanist from Navajo Nation, joins two developers on a perilous Colorado river expedition in Grand Canyon, as they seek tribal approval for a controversial dam project. As suspicions grow, mounting tensions and the unpredictability of the river threaten their survival. Blending environmental quest with moral reckoning, Life Without End explores power—who has it, who takes it, and who chooses to walk away from it. At the heart of it all: a river that refuses to be tamed and a woman who makes her place within it.
The Doors of Perception: William Blake, Benjamin Britten, and the Movement of Vision
This project explores movement as a powerful force that begins in the radical vision of William Blake (1757–1827) and continues through the music of Benjamin Britten (1913 1976) into a contemporary performance setting. At its center is Britten’s Songs and Proverbs of William Blake for Voice and Piano, Op. 74 (1965), a work that translates Blake’s ideas into sound. Through research and performance, the project traces how Blake’s engagement with social movements—abolition, labor rights, revolution, and religious dissent—continues to move across time, artistic forms, and communities today. The project culminates in a lecture-recital with AI-enhanced visual projections, presented in collaboration with the Oklahoma City Museum of Art and performed at the Noble Theater at the museum. The museum functions not only as a venue but as an active partner in shaping how the work is presented and received. Designed for a broad audience—including museum visitors, students, local artists, and community members who may not typically engage with academic or concert settings—the project creates a shared space for reflection on how art produces social awareness and historical understanding.
Maria Kaoutzani, School of Music
Voices/Bodies/Beings
Movement is not only the act of traveling through space, but a process of becoming—a continuous shifting between identities, emotional states, and ways of understanding the world. Voices/Bodies/Beings is an interdisciplinary installation that explores movement as a psychological, artistic, and embodied experience. Drawing on interviews with Norman-based artists, the project transforms recorded voices through abstraction, layering, and sonic manipulation into an immersive sound environment. This evolving sonic landscape is combined with video, dance, and live music performance, culminating in a public-facing installation.
Austin Hartel & Boyko Dossev, School of Dance
Movement Matters: Embodied Learning and Dance for Norman Elementary Students
This project is a collaboration between the University of Oklahoma School of Dance and Norman Public Schools to bring interactive dance experiences to students in grades K–5. Through lecture demonstrations and classroom-based movement workshops, the project introduces children to dance as both an art form and a way of learning. Students will experience live performances in ballet and modern dance, participate in guided movement activities, and explore concepts such as rhythm, space, and expression. By combining performance, discussion, and hands-on participation, the project makes dance accessible and relevant to young learners while supporting creativity, physical awareness, and collaboration. The classroom residencies will be developed in partnership with teachers to align with educational goals and enhance learning across subjects. The scholarly outcome of this project is the development of a replicable model for school-based dance outreach that integrates choreography, pedagogy, and community engagement. The project will also inform future research and curriculum development in dance education and embodied learning. Its broader impact includes increased access to arts education, strengthened partnerships between the university and local schools, and greater public awareness of the role of dance in education and community life.
Maxwell Yamane, School of Music
Powwow in the Capital: Sounding Sovereignty in Washington, DC
"Powwow in the Capital" is a collaborative humanities project that brings together scholarly and Native community voices to examine how powwow in Washington, DC asserts sonic sovereignty in the heart of U.S. federal power. I analyze performances at the Capitol, Pentagon, Smithsonian, and Kennedy Center to theorize powwow as "sonic acts of resurgence" that regenerate Indigenous sovereign worlds and "sonic acts of interference" that disrupt settler colonial soundscapes, transforming federal spaces into Indigenous ones. The project reframes sonic sovereignty as a simultaneous disruptive and generative, future-oriented process. In consultation with DC Native community leader and powwow singer Mary Phillips (Umonhon/Laguna Pueblo) and lead round dance singer Cornel Pewewardy (Comanche/Kiowa), I will co-conduct six in-depth interviews and a talking circle with DC-based powwow singers; co-curate a community-based digital archive of their songs and stories by, with, and for the DC Native community; and co-organize a Southern-style round dance on June 21, 2026 that publicly centers DC Native voices as they define what sovereignty and futurity mean on the eve of the U.S. 250th anniversary. Embedding Tribal data sovereignty, collaborative ethnography, with scholarly and public-facing humanities, "Powwow in the Capital" advances ICAST's theme and commitment to Native Nations' sovereignty and futurity.
Leticia Bajuyo, School of Visual Arts
Event Horizon Ad Infinium
This project is a new site-specific sculptural installation for a four-gallery solo exhibition at the University Museum on the University of Mississippi campus, September 2026 through February 2027. Building on Bajuyo's ongoing transformation of discarded CDs and DVDs, the project examines how technologies of storage, communication, and circulation shape memory, value, attention, and belonging. Once central to how people preserved music, images, movies, and data, these obsolete media now function as material evidence of technological acceleration, culture, desire, and waste.
This project extends Bajuyo's established sculptural language while more explicitly engaging the fellowship theme of Technology and Society. She is interested in how technological systems shape not only objects, but also habits of attention, structures of value, and ways of relating to one another. Through this site-specific installation that links media residue with bodily and architectural experience, Bajuyo aims to create new work that will be visually compelling and critically reflective.
Du Fei, Assistant Professor of Classics & Letters
Local Women, Global Histories
Local Women, Global Histories is a critical study of Indian Muslim women’s economic life of transregional trade and finance from the height of the Mughal Empire in the 1600s to the consolidation of British colonial rule in the 1850s. For this period of South Asian history, current scholarship portrays Muslim women as ‘local’, that is, immobile, and thus excluded from cross-cultural economic exchanges supposedly dominated by male merchants, diplomats, adventurers, and scholars travelling across the Indian Ocean and over the Eurasian land trading routes. In contrast, Fei's manuscript argues that free and enslaved Muslim women from merchant and landholding households played increasingly central roles in India’s globalizing economy by creatively engaging with Islamic law as property owners, investors, arbitrators, estate managers, and laborers. Some travelled afar to the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Most others stayed at home yet turned their local households into nodes in vast financial, legal, intellectual, and kinship networks. Being ‘local’ and ‘domestic’ was thus not antithetical to living a transregional economic life. Rather, the ‘local’ household was the key site through which Muslim women’s transregional connections took place. These local lives transformed early modern commerce and empire-building as the seeming dominance of male merchants and statesmen relied on appropriating instead of simply restricting women’s capital, labor, and agency.
James Zeigler, Department of English
Doorstop Comics: Knowing Graphic Novels
An academic monograph-in-progress, Doorstop Comics: Knowing Graphic Novels investigates how, in recent years, the medium of comics has proven resourceful for the composition of a literary genre, the historical novel, that originated in English in the early 1800s. More specifically, Zeigler examines a selection of works published in the United States in the twenty first century that have reinvented a variant of historical novel that has been labeled encyclopedic (Mendelson 1976), systems (LeClair 1989), mega- (Karl 1985; Letzler 2017), modern epic (Moretti 1996), “big, ambitious” (Wood 2000; Greif 2009), or maximalist (McGurl 2009; Ercolino 2014; Levey 2017). These designations and my "doorstop" aim to characterize how, over time, novels of this kind have employed oversized scale and dizzying complexity to tell stories that engage with the unprecedented quantities of information transmitted, in turn, by newspapers, radio, film, television, and the computer technologies of the digital age.
Diana Denham, Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability
Indigenous Markets and the Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Urban Mexico
“Indigenous Markets and the Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Urban Mexico” is an ethnography and historical account of a mainstay of urban foodways since precolonial times—open-air markets held in streets and plazas best known by their Nahuatl name, tianguis. Against the tide of urban renewal and a supermarket explosion that has taken hold in cities across the global South, Indigenous markets have not only survived but also multiplied, in rhythm with growing cities across Mesoamerica. Exploring the food cultures, gendered labor, and insurgent urbanisms that sustain this surprising persistence, the book situates the tianguis within a broader movement for urban and Indigenous food sovereignty. The book explores how Indigenous resurgence through foodways produces urban space in ways that counter the dispossession that is foundational to and ongoing in the making of the modern city while also exposing the tensions and contradictions that constitute the terrain of struggle for both food sovereignty and resurgence as urban projects.
Cori Simon Rasmussen, Department of History
Shadowland: Indian Territory’s Contested Past and Uncertain Future, 1800-1910
Shadowland: Indian Territory’s Contested Past and Uncertain Future, 1800-1910, examines the history of Indian Territory as a place—a place that no longer exists on contemporary maps of North America. It considers where, how, and why it was created, who created it, how it evolved over the nineteenth century, and why it vanished. Most historians treat the so-called “Indian Territory” as a corollary to the present-day state of Oklahoma. However, unlike official U.S. territories, the unorganized Indian Territory did not have set boundaries, nor was it ever placed on a path toward statehood. It encompassed at first a much larger geographical region than present-day Oklahoma—and by the end of its history a much smaller portion. The tentative title—Shadowland—refers to how outside perceptions and ambitions have overshadowed what Indian Territory meant for the diverse peoples who lived there. Shadowland captures the contingency of Indian Territory’s history by disentangling it from the history of the states and territories carved from it—including Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and, ultimately, Oklahoma.
Du Fei, Assistant Professor of Classics & Letters
Local Women, Global Histories
Local Women, Global Histories is a critical study of Indian Muslim women’s economic life of transregional trade and finance from the height of the Mughal Empire in the 1600s to the consolidation of British colonial rule in the 1850s. For this period of South Asian history, current scholarship portrays Muslim women as ‘local’, that is, immobile, and thus excluded from cross-cultural economic exchanges supposedly dominated by male merchants, diplomats, adventurers, and scholars travelling across the Indian Ocean and over the Eurasian land trading routes. In contrast, Fei's manuscript argues that free and enslaved Muslim women from merchant and landholding households played increasingly central roles in India’s globalizing economy by creatively engaging with Islamic law as property owners, investors, arbitrators, estate managers, and laborers. Some travelled afar to the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Most others stayed at home yet turned their local households into nodes in vast financial, legal, intellectual, and kinship networks. Being ‘local’ and ‘domestic’ was thus not antithetical to living a transregional economic life. Rather, the ‘local’ household was the key site through which Muslim women’s transregional connections took place. These local lives transformed early modern commerce and empire-building as the seeming dominance of male merchants and statesmen relied on appropriating instead of simply restricting women’s capital, labor, and agency.
Kayhan Nejad, Assistant Professor of Iranian Studies
From the Oilfield to the Battlefield: Revolutionary Internationalism on the Iranian, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands, 1904-1921
Nejad’s book, From the Oilfield to the Battlefield: Revolutionary Internationalism on the Iranian, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands, 1904-1921, explores the persistence of monarchical rule in Iran. In the early twentieth century, revolutions swept across Iran, the Russian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. Although revolutionaries from these states initially collaborated in pursuit of common goals, their alliances fractured during World War I. In its aftermath, Russian and Turkish revolutionaries installed socialist and republican governments, respectively. But Iran’s democratic aspirations were cut short in 1921, when a coup in ushered in another six decades of monarchical rule. Using original Russian, Persian, and Turkish-language sources gathered across eight countries, this book asks why Iranian revolutionaries did not achieve the political transformations realized by their Russian and Turkish counterparts. In so doing, it questions the limits of revolutionary internationalism during the First World War and the shift to nationally bounded reform projects in its aftermath.
Emily Warner, Assistant Professor of Art History
Abstraction Unframed: Abstract Murals at Midcentury
This book manuscript in its final stages examines how artists expanded the reach of one of modernism’s most notoriously difficult art forms: abstraction. Across the midcentury years, abstract painters from Ilya Bolotowsky to Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner turned to muralism as a way to ‘unframe’ their abstractions: to free them from the spatial confines of the easel painting and the social confines of the elite art world. The resulting artworks transformed living and working spaces into dynamic, immersive art environments, and declared abstraction’s true audience to be the broad masses of people who moved through and lived in the modern world. Using archives, blueprints, and digital reconstruction, the book returns abstract murals—often removed from their original sites—to the architectural spaces where they first met their viewers. It shows how abstract murals were engaged in significant American cultural projects, from New Deal populism to the ideology of the midcentury home to the seeming crisis of humanism in postwar corporate culture. Located at the interface between art, architecture, and daily living, abstract murals embody one of modernism’s most enduring fantasies, to bridge the domains of art and life.
Elizabeth Browning, Associate Professor of History
Cultivating Careral Grounds: Agricultural Labor in the Federal Prison System
Integrating environmental history, carceral studies, and environmental justice scholarship, "Cultivating Carceral Grounds: Agricultural Labor in the Federal Prison System" examines the historical relationship between agricultural prison labor and environmental exploitation in the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and the Federal Prison Industries (UNICOR). The project focuses on connections between USP Leavenworth’s farming operations in Kansas (one of the three original federal penitentiaries and a model for other prison agricultural programs) and the specialized dairy program of the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution in Oklahoma (one of only two remaining BOP dairy facilities). Interrogating how the federal carceral state used agriculture as both punishment and “rehabilitation” from the origins of the federal prison system in 1891 through the rise of mass incarceration, this research will inform a digital exhibition reflecting insights from Browning’s larger book project, Carceral Natures: Reclaiming Lives and Lands in the U.S. Federal Prison System. In the book, Browning examines how Department of Justice officials, criminologists, and UNICOR administrators drew upon ecological theories and sociocultural understandings of the natural world to design rehabilitation programs in agriculture, manufacturing, and conservation initiatives. This study of deep histories of the federal carceral landscape will make clear how the U.S. carceral state became a key driver of modern state-building by conserving or “reclaiming” both American lives and landscapes in service of strengthening American capitalism and state power.
Nahuel Telleria, Assistant Professor of Drama
De/Composing Site-Specific
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, professional theatres in the United States have struggled to remain open. As a response to this crisis, playwright Annalisa Dias has called upon the industry to re-imagine institutional collapse through the ecological perspective of decomposition. How, then, should theatre conservatories—with their pedagogical training deeply rooted in the status quo—teach young artists to flourish outside brick-and-mortar institutions? To answer this question, Dr. Telleria turns to the work of Argentine performance creator Fernando Rubio, who came of age in a professional landscape that, like its national economy, has perpetually been in crisis. Like many in his generation, Rubio took to the streets with site-specific dramaturgy, a new model of creation composted from the grounds of old traditions. The proposed Forum project seeks to acquaint OU students with site-specific theatre and stage Rubio’s most well-known artistic intervention, Everything by My Side(2012). When set on the contested clay dirt of Oklahoma—the biological, geographical, and cultural remains of forcible displacement and oil production—this situated meditation on grief and gratitude affords local audiences a chance to reflect on our shared past and potential future on the prairie.
Andreea Marculescu, Assistant Professor of French
Agents of Pollution: Witches in Pre-Modern French Literature
Agents of Pollution: Witches in Pre-Modern French Literature examines how witches were imagined as figures of physical, moral, and political contamination in French texts from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Departing from traditional studies focused on witch trials and demonological treatises, this project uncovers the presence of the witch as a polluting figure across a wide range of literary forms ranging from medieval theater, late-Arthurian romances, Renaissance poetry, to polemical political pamphlets produced during the French Wars of Religion. This project includes a public humanities component consisting of a curated exhibition titled All of Them Witches!: Witchcraft through the Ages. Hosted at OU’s Bizzell Memorial Library in collaboration with local partners, the exhibition and accompanying community events aim to foster public engagement with the historical and literary legacies of witchcraft.
Maria Kaoutzani, School of Music
Pearls, A Monodrama for Mezzo-Soprano
Pearls, A Monodrama for Mezzo-Soprano, amplified Pierrot ensemble with percussion, and fixed media explores the inner world of the artist through the lens of mental health. Structured as a series of songs and instrumental interludes, the piece reflects the shifting mental states of an artist living with a personality disorder. The performer embodies a range of internal landscapes—from catatonic depression and obsessive spirals to manic highs and a fragile hope for healing.
Blending classical and singer-songwriter idioms, Pearls employs a non-operatic vocal style, drum set, amplification, and fixed electronics to create a genre-fluid, emotionally direct sound world that will appeal to a broader audience. The text includes collages and edited excerpts from public domain sources, including artists’ diaries as well as early psychology manuals, while visually integrating video and scenographic elements to deepen narrative and heighten immersion.
Hunter Heyck, History of Science, Technology & Medicine
Artifice: Creating a Chosen World
From climate change to AI and online disinformation to pandemic disease to populist revolts against both expertise and globalization, the great issues facing us today are socio-technical challenges. That is, they are the products of our past choices, embedded in the technological systems that give shape to how we work, play, live, and love. Solving such problems is never a simple matter, for technology and society each make each other, all the time. Artifice: Creating a Chosen World explores this relationship between technology and society from Gutenberg to genomics. Its central thesis is that we have created an increasingly artificial, chosen world in which our encounters with ‘first nature’ are mediated by layer upon layer of artifice. This framing connects the history of technology to social and cultural history—to the world of human goals, values, and choices—and to the history of our ideas about and interactions with Nature.
Asa Randall, Department of Anthropology
The Old Shell Road: Making a New Florida with the Remains of the Past
The Old Shell Road: Making a New Florida with the Remains of the Past about the legal, social, and economic systems that enabled and encouraged settler colonists to appropriate Native American places (shell mounds in particular) for the purpose of building out modernity’s footprint. The committee found this to be a fascinating project with compelling implications, and were especially impressed by the well-articulated ties between archaeological past and social present. In terms of headwinds, the committee recognized that guiding a large department through the COVID-19 pandemic had most certainly impacted the trajectory of this project, and wanted to express gratitude to you for your service.
Kathy Brosnan, Department of History
Napa Nature
Napa Nature explores how Napa Valley wines traveled a historic arc from ethnic elixirs and skid row tonics to socioeconomic trophies, analyzing the implications of this journey for workers and the environment. A core aesthetic of American capitalist culture offered a vision of the good life in which success provided access to cultural amenities and material purchases. Napa’s reputation grew because its vignerons produced good wines, but also because they tied those wines and the valley to a vision of the good life. Shaped by the multi-faceted entities of consumers, industry, and government, modern wine consumption drove environmental change, halting suburban expansion but prompting infestations and diminishing biodiversity. Climate change, which once fostered growth, threatened success by the 21st century. And the burdens of ecological change were never borne equally. Initial commercial production as part of settler colonial schemes dispossessed the indigenous Wappo. And the immigrants who provided the necessary labor for more than a century experienced the dangers of farming but never enjoyed the wealth that underwrote Napa’s accoutrements.
David Anderson, Classics & Letters
Shakespeare at the Still Point
Dr. Anderson specializes in the Tudor-Stuart period in English literature. His current project, Shakespeare at the Still Point, argues for the ethical and metaphysical centrality of agape (altrustic Christian love) to Shakespeare’s imaginative bedrock. Through detailed readings of a dozen plays, the book contends that understanding Shakespeare means taking seriously, as he and so many of his fellow early modern writers did, the Biblical conception of love as a totalizing moral imperative that harmonizes human action with transcendent reality. The playwright that emerges from this study is neither serenely pious nor a Christian triumphalist. Rather, the book explores the "deep theology" of his plays in order to trace the phenomenology of a worldview as it is experienced and wrestled with.
Nian Liu, Department of Modern Languages, Literatures & Linguistics
Between Words and Worlds: Gender, Language, and Cognition in Chinese
Between Words and Worlds: Gender, Language, and Cognition in Chinese explores how the Chinese language encodes and reinforces gendered ideologies through grammar, metaphor, and cultural cognition.
Daniela Garofalo, Classics & Letters
Untitiled
In this manuscript, Dr. Garofalo studies the generative conjunction in Austen's work of comic and realist forms and characters. Austen's novels are replete with jokes, comic sequences, and comic characters as well as realist character developments and forms of narration. While comedy traffics in surfaces, clichés, caricatures that recur across time, realism is a modern genre usually associated with historical specificity, the creation of psychological interiority, and character development. Such generic forms would seem to fit awkwardly together but this book contends that Austen conjoins the forms of realism and comedy to manifest and analyze the condition of the modern alienated self. A focus on hybrid genres yields a new understanding not only of her realism but also of the significance of her marriage plots.
Jake Skeets, Department of English
Dawnhouse
Dawnhouse follows three intertwined lives—Dawnhouse, his aunt Vera, and his uncle Oree—as they navigate the emotional and cultural terrain of family, ambition, and belonging. Set between present-day White Cliffs, a newly established township on the Navajo Nation, and pivotal moments in the late twentieth century, the novel explores how personal desire, tribal politics, and historical memory shape contemporary Diné life. Inspired by Momaday's House Made of the Dawn, the story centers on Dawnhouse, a queer Diné man grappling with grief and self-destruction while confronting his family legacy and discovering new love. Woven alongside his narrative are the stories of Oree, a Navajo soldier stationed in Germany during the 1980s, and Vera, a former high school basketball star searching for fame. Spanning decades and landscapes—from the queer clubs of West Berlin to the gospel circuits of the Navajo Nation—the novel examines enduring questions of identity, inheritance, and the price of survival across generations
Diana Denham, Assistant Professor of Geography & Environmental Sustainability
Indigenous Markets and the Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Urban Mexico
Dr. Denham’s project "Indigenous Markets and the Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Urban Mexico" is an urban ethnography and historical account of the survival of a mainstay of urban foodways since precolonial times - open-air markets held in streets and plazas best known by their Nahuatl name, tianguis. Against the tide of urban renewal and a supermarket explosion that has taken hold of global South cities, Indigenous markets have not only survived but also multiplied, in rhythm with growing cities across Mesoamerica. The surprising persistence of these markets, I argue, is due to a combination of survival tactics, organized resistance, and cultural resurgence. Together, these factors constitute both a movement for food sovereignty in the city and a form of Indigenous production of urban space. The book project reflects two years of ethnographic research conducted in Oaxaca, Mexico that aims to historicize tianguis while offering a contemporary account of the lived experiences of the marketgoers, cooks, activists, farmers, and vendors who propel their resurgence. Focusing on one of Mesoamerica's most ancient urban foodways, the book casts new light on the history of spatial exclusion of Indigenous people from Mexican cities while foregrounding Indigenous struggles against peripheralization and erasure.
Stephanie Pilat, Gibbs College of Architecture
Cultivating Creativity
Cultivating Creativity draws on the newly created American School archive to tell the story of how a small group of faculty at the University of Oklahoma developed a radical approach to teaching architecture in the mid-twentieth century. Through a narrative non-fiction account of the American School’s history, the book details how the faculty built a culture and a curriculum to reflect their shared values. Cultivating Creativity highlights the dramatic and at times tragic human story at the heart of this history by centering on Bruce Goff, chair of the school from 1947-56. Goff led the faculty to design a remarkably successful curriculum that prized originality instead of imitation. Recent scholarship on teaching and learning is woven throughout to help explain why these new methods were effective; we now know, for example, that the harsh learning environments typical of architecture schools negatively impact student learning. Examining the history and pedagogy of the American School, the book considers, how is creativity taught? What kinds of learning environments, practices and assignments best cultivate it? Cultivating Creativity is a book about the history of the American School and a book for the future of design education.
Sarah Hines, Department of History
Glacier Fathers and Mother Earth: Race, Gender, and Climate Change in the Bolivian Andes
The pace of glacial retreat since the end of the Little Ice Age (approx. 1500–1850) has been faster in the tropical Andes than anywhere else on the planet. My book project uses a historical approach to investigate Indigenous Aymara communities' experiences and understandings of climate change in the Bolivian Andes since the end of the Little Ice Age. It examines how warming temperatures as well as racial and class oppression, gender relations, imperial power, cultural practices, and spiritual beliefs shaped and were shaped by Aymara communities’ relationships and responses to a changing climate. The book will be the first full-length investigation of the history of Indigenous experiences of climate change in the Andes. Its findings will be transferable to policymakers and civil society organizations in the Andes, other mountainous regions, and beyond in their efforts to construct policies inclusive of and attentive to frontline communities’ views and experiences. Its investigation of changing human-nature relationships in the Andes, where climate change has been highly visible in the changing composition of glaciers and terraced fields laid out before people’s eyes, will provide a lens onto broader global experiences of a warming climate over the last nearly two centuries.
Melinda Chen & Heyjie Jung
Cyborg Networks: The Social Hierarchy of Artificial Intelligence at Work
Discourse among the general U.S. public has largely conceptualized artificial intelligence (AI) as a replacement for human workers in organizations, sparking debate on the ethical ramifications of such substitution particularly on marginalized workers. However, AI researchers agree that the ways that AI impacts work requires further study. This project seeks to understand one such pressing gap: the effects of AI on human-to-human workplace social networks. Although AI at work has been theorized extensively, to date no study has explored how AI can (re)shape human-based organizational social networks. This is an important gap because humans do not work in isolation from one another; rather, they work with and through their relationships. Drawing on feminist technoscience theories and interviewing methodologies, we seek to understand the social consequences of AI on human networks. We envision a “cyborg” network, liaising the technology and human in a future-oriented, mutually co-existent workspace. Through the Forum Public Fellowship, this project will organize an open forum through which community members can express their perspectives of AI’s influences on workplace social networks. This gathering will serve as an initial conversation between a community partner and the co-PIs to co-develop a critical and feminist participatory action research project.
Julia Abramson, Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics
AI Salon
In her research, Dr. Abramson takes a literary-theoretical approach to the ethics of deception and authorship in relation to generative AI, such as the text generator ChatGPT. This research provides the intellectual framework for Dr. Abramson’s public project: a collaborative seminar on campus with area French K-12 educators. The seminar will provide time and space to address in community their individual experiences with AI and French and to establish best practices for the AI-informed French-speaking classroom. The project works to revitalize and strengthen the community of French language educators, benefitting schools and students as well.
Rebecca Huskey, Department of Classics and Letters
Pandora’s Black Box: Is Artificial Intelligence a Tool of Hope or Horror?
Are artificial intelligence tools cause for concern or celebration? The answer depends largely on who gives a response. Some experts in the field say that AI will usher in a utopian future. Other experts are more cautious, arguing that AI tools can be used to further inequality and prejudice. I propose that by bringing together opposing viewpoints we can create “Hopeful AI.” Dr. Huskey’s project builds on previous work where she has argued that human beings are inherently hopeful creatures. To have genuine hope (i.e., to go beyond mere ‘wishful thinking’) humans must actively seek out solutions, collaborations, and critiques from the community. This is the case for any human endeavor, including the use of AI tools. This project will support a public symposium to discuss “Hopeful AI.” Three experts will come together to discuss the nature of hope, what AI tools can and cannot do, and why there is need for guidance and caution in the development of hope as a virtue. The discussion will help frame a roadmap for ethical AI use in the arts, medicine, education, political messaging, and business.
Lucia Colombari, College of Visual Arts
Training the Eye: The Intersection of AI, Visual Literacy, and Art Historical Analysis
This project explores how artificial intelligence (AI), our ability to understand images (visual literacy), and the study of art history come together to help us navigate today’s visually driven society. The project addresses the proliferation of AI-generated images and the challenges they pose regarding authorship, authenticity, and societal implications. Through the 2024-2025 Public Fellows Program, the project aims to progress scholarly work by supporting the writing of a journal article, developing pedagogical resources for K-12 educators, and facilitating community engagement on the intersection of AI and the humanities. The project contributes to a deeper understanding of challenges and opportunities presented by AI in society through collaboration and innovation while empowering individuals to navigate and interpret images more effectively.
Cedric Toliver, Deparment of English
Spook(ed): African American Literature, National Security, and the Fictions of Statecraft
Spook(ed) analyzes the complexities and contradictions of the nearly seventy-year project of racial integration into the U.S. state apparatus through a reading of African American political memoirs and spy thrillers. While rarely considered in African American literary fiction and mainstream thrillers, this integration and its tangle of issues (racism, patriotism, political persuasion, and geopolitics) are thoughtfully explored in African American memoirs and thrillers. Ultimately, “Spook(ed)” tells the understudied and overlooked story of African Americans who used their access to opportunity within the government to bend a state apparatus toward serving a population, African Americans, that had been viewed almost exclusively as an internal subversive threat for most of the state’s nearly two hundred and fifty years of existence.
Andreana Prichard, Honors College
Orphans and Demons: What One Missionary’s Conviction Can Tell Us About Centuries of Global Aid to Africa
Prichard’s manuscript, “Orphans and Demons: What One Missionary’s Conviction Can Tell Us About Centuries of Global Aid to Africa,” uses the 2014 federal legal case against a 19-year-oldOklahoma missionary to examine the history and effects of the “orphan industrial complex” in eastern Africa. While these horrific charges made headlines across the globe, questions about the system that allowed an unlicensed orphanage to host unvetted and untrained foreign volunteers, and about mounting evidence of illegal activities at the orphanage—including that the children had been coerced to fabricate these allegations—barely entered the public narrative. Regardless of whether the assaults occurred or whether the allegations were an elaborate hoax carried out by staff running an illicit operation, the “orphan industrial complex” is a central culprit. Indeed, “Orphans and Demons” does not ask who is guilty but asks how this tragic situation—both this individual case and the broader “orphan crisis”—came about. Prichard’s book argues that both are the result of a long history of Western engagement with African “orphans,” and that the case offers an illuminating entry point into the complex colonial genealogies of faith, care, and doing good that dominate the orphanage industry.
Wendy Malette, Department of Religous Studies
Lesbian Feminist Killjoys: Sin, Pessimism, and Queer Histories
Dr. Wendy Mallette’s book project responds to denials of inherited guilt in anti-critical race theory and anti-trans legislation and uncovers what is gained by bringing the doctrine of sin into queer studies. Her archival analysis of 1960s-1980s lesbian feminism centers on Beverly Smith, Andrea Dworkin, Pat Parker, and Jill Johnston, who theorize sex’s imbrication with racism, capitalism, and anti-Semitism. Their pessimism motivates the book’s reappraisal of sin and historical complicity. Engaging contemporary Black and queer Christian thought, “Lesbian Feminist Killjoys” traces how sin and innocence are leveraged to manage fears of racial and sexual contagion from nineteenth-century colonial discourses to debates over same-sex marriage. This project’s queer account of sin provides a means to grapple with sex’s relation to histories of oppression.
Joanna Hearne, Department of Film and Media Studies
“Media That Nurtures Us” Public Media Cultures of Indigenous Instruction, 1967-1981
This project traces the rise of Indigenous short-form educational media and the public mediation of Indigenous childhood across the long 1970s. It is by design a book about small media, setting out to re-value the fragments, segments, micro- and unfinished projects produced with public funding, and circulating on public television and in educational spaces for youth and general audiences, rather than the feature films made for theatrical distribution by independent and for-profit entertainment industries. At a transformational mid-century moment in the midst of renewed Indigenous rights movements and expanded access to the press and to media production and distribution, the 1970s gives us another archive and another origin story in North American Indigenous media history. Taking up lost and orphaned films, overlooked televisual media, and early-career efforts extends a genealogy of Indigenous and women’s filmmaking and media production. Each chapter tracks a flashpoint across an expanding field of educational media by artist-activists from Abenaki director Alanis Obomsawin’s early career work for the National Film Board of Canada to Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko’s unfinished film and television projects.
Deonnie Moodie, Department of Religous Studies
Business School Hinduism
Over the past thirty years, it has become common place to find books on leadership strategies from the Bhagavad Gita or management wisdom based on Vedanta. Some of these are produced by faculty at the world’s most prestigious business schools. In this monograph, I draw on ethnographic and historical source material to account for this seemingly anomalous phenomenon. By tracing a transimperial history of business schools and the knowledge they produce, I argue that what I am calling “Business School Hinduism” is far from an aberration but is instead commensurate with the subject-forming project that is management education. Professional business schools were founded in the U.S. - and fought for in India - in the late-nineteenth century under the imperial logic of a world comprised of distinct civilizations, divided according to the divinely-bestowed capacity of inhabitants of each to be economically productive (or not). The creation of management as a “science” throughout the twentieth century continued the pedagogical project of reforming so-framed unproductive populations and was now explicit in claiming universality. This was the science actively sought by newly-independent nations like India in their quest for economic independence. In other words, management education has, since its inception, been about transforming subjectivities under the banner of civilization and/or nation.
Warren Metcalf, Department of History
Native Pygmalion – The Mormon Attempt to Recast American Indian Identity
Native Pygmalion examines the long history of interaction between American Indian peoples and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, popularly known as the Mormon Church. From the earliest origins of the Church in New York State, to Ohio, to the borders of Indian Territory, along the overland trails, and to the destination of the Latter-day Saints in Utah Territory, church leaders and members interacted with Native populations. Once ensconced in the Great Basin, these interactions became transformative, as Mormons attempted to recast American Indians into the Book of Mormon “Lamanite” people that they imagined them to be. It is a story relatively well known to members of the Church and those familiar with its history.
There is another side to this story, the American Indian side, and it is less well known. American Indian people, from the Shawnee communities of the Ohio Valley, the Omahas at Council Bluff, Iowa, to the modern-day Southern Paiutes, Utes, and Shoshones of the Colorado Plateau, have dealt with Mormon efforts to redefine, convert, and assimilate them since the earliest days of the church in the 1830s. Like most stories of the frontier, it is also the story of attempted conquest through spiritual, cultural, and territorial encroachments, and like most frontiers, it has multiple points of contact and conflict. This account of the story includes both Mormon encroachments and Native strategies of resistance and accommodation.
Emily Burns, School of Visual Arts
The American West in the Humanities Colloquium
Colleagues working on the American West in various ways across the humanities at OU are often siloed by department and disciplinary boundaries. This colloquium offers an interdisciplinary venue to enable more fluid conversation and collaboration among those working on the American West in history, art history, Native American studies, African American studies, and film and media studies. With presentations by faculty at various levels and graduate students, the colloquium will share work in progress on particular case studies and theoretical framing. Attendees will come away with a broad sense of current approaches to the topic of the American West.
Peter Soppelsa, Department of History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Francophone World Workshop
Building on OU community ties dating back to the 2010-2012 French Culture Workshop, this group’s main goal is to build positive visibility and intellectual community for OU scholars engaged in research and teaching about French-speaking societies across the globe. We also hope to contribute to defending the value of foreign language study and of the humanities amid recent critiques and cuts. For faculty and graduate students, the FWW increases access to up-to-date research findings from OU faculty and outside scholars, and helps connect experts in French across eras, disciplines, and regions. Presenters will find the workshop a supportive and welcoming place to receive feedback on their work, while faculty presentations model research presentations and professional expectations for graduate students
Farina King, Department of Native American Studies
Emerging Visions in Native American and Indigenous Studies Colloquium
This colloquium provides a forum and opportunity for diverse scholars and public intellectuals to come together from across the University of Oklahoma (OU) to share and support emerging visions in Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS). With Oklahoma, specifically, the homelands of the Hasinais (Caddo Nation) and Kirikirʔi:s (Wichita & Affiliated Tribes), as the home to 39 Native Nations and this region being at the confluence of many Indigenous peoples from throughout the world, this forum will be at the center of emergence for new directions and sustained pressing issues for scholars and the communities that they are connected to. Their visions relate to themes of sovereignty, land and water, presence, and futures of Native Nations and communities throughout Native America. While the OU Department of Native American Studies serves as a hub for NAIS, this colloquium strengthens this connectivity by featuring students, faculty, and staff from various departments, programs, and interdisciplinary backgrounds who all envision Indigenizing academia and a bright future for Native Nations and peoples. Scholars and community are invited to discuss and learn about different developing projects that adhere to Indigenous protocols and amplify voices that have been historically muted. Most importantly, we dedicate this intellectual space and time to our relationality as a circle of respect and understanding.
Rienk Vermij, Department fo History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Medieval and Renaissance Period Colloquium
The medieval and Renaissance period, roughly the 6th to the early 17th century, is one of the most important and dynamic periods in history. From a pretty marginal region, Western Europe grew to become a dominant player on the world stage, passing through a major crisis in the 16th century. In most cases, people working in pre-modern studies have more in common with pre-modern scholars in other disciplines than with the people in their own discipline. And interdisciplinary colloquium therefore is essential to bring work in this field forward and build intellectual community among medieval and Renaissance scholars at OU and in Oklahoma more broadly.
Waleed Mahdi, College of Internaional Studies
From Drones to Travel Bans: US Violence and Yemeni Visual Narratives of Resistance
Dr. Mahdi's project explores how US security, diplomatic, and cultural sites of influence have produced visual modes of seeing Yemen that renders the country and its people unseen, or more accurately, seen through the global war on terror. He also offers a multi-layered analysis of the aesthetics of Yemeni and Yemeni American visual artists’ responses, ranging from street art campaigns and political cartoons to films, posters, and art exhibitions. The context of his research draws from US-Yemeni cultural politics at the interplay of the tragic attacks of 9/11 (2001) and the revolutionary fervor of the Arab Spring (2011). Seeing Yemen moves us beyond a US-securitized lens characterized by violence and imperial amnesia to a Yemeni lens marked by witnessing, grieving, and defying erasure.
Tess Elliot, School of Visual Arts
Ultimate Sim
Ultimate Sim is an interactive artwork, online game, and speculative design tool to tackle the climate crisis. It sits at the intersection of two important contemporary art movements: critical art games and climate-activist art. The project reimagines the popular 1990’s video game SimCity, mimicking its graphics and game mechanics while inverting the overall narrative structure and gameplay of the original. Climate change is a “hyperobject”: an immense, structural force that we cannot comprehend, but strive to, through computer modeling. By shrinking space and time scales of climate change and its array of challenges to the size of a standard 2D video game in a layout that provides its players a gods-eye perspective and modular control, the hyperobject becomes accessible for a broad public to play/test emerging and speculative climate solutions for real world locations. This framework energizes active participation in imagining climate futures and solutions for one’s local environment. Ultimate Sim will be free and accessible online to engage a global, general audience.
Melinda Chen, Deparment of Women's & Gender Studies
Killing Radicalism: Neoliberalism, Normativity, and the Anti-Rape Movement
Dr. Chen’s project, Killing Radicalism: Neoliberalism, Normativity & the Anti-Rape Movement, explores diversity in rape victim advocacy. Victim advocates are designated anti-rape workers at nonprofit rape crisis centers who emotionally validate survivors’ experiences with sexual violence and connect survivors to resources, such as counseling and housing support. While advocates are overall helpful at reducing survivors’ trauma, many scholars have overlooked the ways that advocates can hurt underrepresented ‘marginalized’ survivors, such as people of color and LGBTQ+ people, when they separate anti-rape work from activism against interlocking oppressions. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 63 victim advocates and queer methodologies, Killing Radicalism illustrates that even the best intentions can have dire consequences when they are not thoughtful about minority cultural representations.
KT Duffy, School of Visual Arts
“1 v 1”
KT Duffy has been awarded a Forum Public Fellowships for their project 1 v 1. As a visual artist who works in digital media and performance, KT collaborates with communities to address themes around queerness and gender. In their current project, KT exhibits performances that follow the format of one-on-one soccer matches, where the artist challenges other non-binary, transgender, and gender-non-confirming people to matches. This work is responsive to an era of legislation that bans trans athletes and kids from participating in sports that match their gender identity. It also amplifies a history of queer craft through the creation of each performer’s uniform/soccer gear, their individual “kit” leveraging creativity and joyfulness as resistance. The performances of 1 v 1 take place in a gallery setting to challenge us to think about how we perceive sport, emphasizing cooperation, expansive definitions of gender, joy, creativity, and freedom of queer bodily expression and autonomy. Initial performances of 1 v 1 will take place in states without anti-trans legislation in order to protect the safety of all who participate and attend.
Farina King, Department of Native American Studies
Indigenous Truthtelling in Boarding Schools
In this collaborative project, Dr. Farina King leads a team of scholarly and community collaborators to develop a curated space of contents that helps to connect information housed in existing archival collections for easier access to introductory educational resources about American Indian boarding schools through different angles. Bringing together scholars from various disciplines, librarians and archivists with boarding school survivors/alumni and their descendants, this project aims to build a digital edition framework that is usable for educators and learners of a wide spectrum of ages and backgrounds. The goal of the digital edition is to become a hub for linking simple classroom adoption plans and materials about Indian boarding schools with possibilities for usage from local, national, and international levels. The main goal of the project is to highlight different kinds of schools and backgrounds through similar modules to show the variety of school experiences and why these diverse Native American experiences and impacts of Indian Boarding Schools matter to understanding the present and directions for the future.
Carol Rose Little, Deparment of Modern Languages, Linguisitics, and Literatures
Student Perceptions of Indigenous Languages through a Mayan-Language Film Series
Dr. Little is a linguist with a specialization in Mayan languages like Ch’ol, and an interest in the ways that increasing the visibility of minority languages may affect both outsider attitudes toward these languages and the speakers’ own perceptions. Dr. Little’s FPF project builds on this interest with two main goals. First, she will organize a public-facing Mayan-language film series during November 2023. This film series will be open to the public and will feature the full-length documentary Tote/Abuelo (2019) in the Tsotsil language with Tsotsil filmmaker Maria Sojob. It will also feature the screening of two short films Campesino (2022) in the Ch’ol language and Chuj Boys of Summer (2021) in the Chuj language. She will use these film screenings to study perceptions of minority languages among students at OU.
Emily Burns, School of Visual Arts
Preforming Innocence: U.S. Art and Culture in fin-de-siecle Paris
Dr. Emily Burns’ book project “Performing Innocence” traces an intellectual and visual history of pervasive constructions of U.S. innocence —a visual and verbal culture of naïveté—which many expatriate U.S. artists and writers markedly projected in Paris during the late nineteenth century. While thousands of artists went abroad after the Civil War to mature artistically, the majority performed a studied and self-conscious cultural immaturity that pandered to European expectations that the United States lacked history, tradition, and culture. Through analysis of art, visual and material culture, letters, diaries and print materials, Dr. Burns argues that many of the U.S. Americans who traveled to Paris performed a paradox: knowing innocence. Perpetuating this trope in international settings, many Americans traded in nationalist and racialized codes that affirmed dominant narratives of U.S. society as centered in white, Anglo-Saxon identity but that also circulated constant contradictions.
Lewis Eliot, Department of History
Neither Men no Brothers: Enslaved Rebellion, Abolitionism, and Imerialism in Britain's Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World
Dr. Lewis Eliot’s book project argues that the pre- and post-emancipation British Empires were in reality fused into continuous imperial white supremacy. Through an examination of the context, progress, and consequences of enslaved revolts in the nineteenth century, this book explains how the nature of slavery in the Atlantic world created a subaltern community and consciousness among those of African descent that whites failed to recognize or understand. Ultimately, Neither Men nor Brothers shows that the justification for enslavements to save Africans from themselves and the validation for emancipation to save Africans from exploitation both served to further British colonial domination. And when judged by territory under the Union Jack, colonialism in the service of abolitionism produced a far larger empire than colonialism in the service of slavery.
Joseph Mansky, Department of English
Political Representatioin: A Literary History, 1558-1651
In this manuscript, Dr. Joseph Mansky charts a new genealogy of political representation from Elizabethan humanism to the English Revolution (1558-1651). He argues that the early history of political representation is in large part a literary history. Centuries before it became a political term of art, representation described instead the kind of virtual or symbolic presence conjured by drama, painting, and poetry. At the heart of the book Dr. Mansky grapples with the central paradox of representation: that it makes present in some form something which is, in fact, absent. By recovering the rhetorical frameworks that shaped representation from poetry to parliament, this book demonstrates how the collision between juridical and rhetorical concepts of representation gave rise to the demand for electoral accountability that remains at the core of modern representative democracy.
Erin Duncan O'Neill, Art History
In Jest: Satire and Politics in the Art of Honoré Daumier
This book traces the centrality of literary and theatrical sature in the political expression of artworks by Honoré Daumier. Most famous as a political cartoonist in nineeenth-century Grance, Daumier developed a deep and abiding engagement with the seventeenth-century satire during periods when explicitly political material was censored in the illustrated press. Duncan-O'Neill examines how Daumier drew on theater and literature at moments of intense repression, contextualizing his citations withing the broader popular revivals of the authors, to show that they offered important representational strategies to the visual arts in the face of stifling censorship.
Seeds of Sedition: Plays, Libels, and the Public Sphere in Shakespeare's England
This book tracks libels through and around the early modern theater. In the 1590s, a series of crises--simmering xenophobia, years of dearth and hunger, surges of religious persecution--sparked an unprecedented explosion of libeling. The same years also saw the first appearances of libels on the London stages. These defamatory, seditious texts were launched into the sky, cast in a window, affixed to a statue, recited in court, read from a pulpit, and seized by informers. These overlooked representations of libel have much to tell us about England's nascent public sphere and the place of drama within it.
Peter Soppelsa, History of Sicence, Technology, & Medicine
The Fragility of Urban Modernity: Living with Infrastructure in Paris, 1870-1914
This book examines the lived experience of housing, transportation, water, and sanitation infrastructures as complex and fragile networked systems that are social-technological-environmental hybrids. During this period of intensive infrastructure development known as “Haussmannization,” infrastructures inspired new political conflicts due to their complexities, failings, fragility, and risks. Cascading infrastructure failures, critical resource shortages, physical accidents, and the upheavals of demolition and construction demonstrated the challenges of deepening dependence on infrastructures in a highly networked city. These challenges called into question what scholars call the “modern infrastructural ideal,” the idea of standard, ubiquitous infrastructure networks bringing social progress, which owes much to Paris’s experience of Haussmannization.
Katherine Pandora, History of Science, Technology, & Medicine
"Open Notebook History” and Scientific Knowledge in the Vernacular"
Throughout her career as a noted Historian of Science, Dr. Pandora has been studying the porous nature of the circulation of scientific knowledge across a diverse array of participants, both within and across professional and public spheres. In particular, her focus has been on how scientific knowledge is generated, expressed, interpreted and disseminated within the everyday world. As an outgrowth of her current research into the way that public engagement with natural history has formed a critique of professional science, Dr. Pandora’s project takes inspiration from open-notebook science. In Cat’s Cradle: Humanities and the Sciences – Collaborative Ideas at Play, she uses the free, open source publishing platform Scalar to host her “open notebook” history work. Her project creates modules of topics that are designed for research access by a diverse range of participants, accompanied by links to primary source materials.
"A Heritage Partnership to Acknowledge, Protect and Preserve Acoma’s Cultural Inheritance and Tribal Sovereignty in 'The Lands Between.'"
Dr. Duwe is an archaeologist who focuses on integrating archaeological methods, oral history, ethnography, and archival analysis into his research into the Puebloan world of the American Southwest. In this project, he explores the porous historical, intellectual, and philosophical boundaries between Indigenous communities and Western academic researchers by facilitating a burgeoning archaeological and heritage partnership. This partnership brings together academic, non-profit conservation, and tribal archaeologists from the Pueblo of Acoma, along with a group of respected Acoma community members. Its aim is to fill in the unbroken timeline from the Acoma ancient past to the Acoma present in a part of southeast Utah locally known as “the Lands Between” by facilitating Acoma community visits to the area. These community visits, in dialogue with the archaeological team, will help to define community-based research questions for the team in this place, which the Acoma regard as their sacred place of emergence. As such, the project contributes to a growing field of Indigenous Archaeology, that is- archaeology by, with, and for Native people.
Sang Ryu, School of Visual Arts
Town and Gown: Codesigning Community Disaster Relief and Preparednes
Dr. Ryu develops codesign methodology supporting interorganizational communication between the first responders of a natural disaster in Norman, Oklahoma. He participates as a member of the Community Needs Network, a group of community partners concerned with improving the Norman and Cleveland County area, to explore collaborative opportunities in a natural disaster situation. He leads the design of charettes, a collaborative planning activity set out to approach a stakeholder problem, using arts-based methods and tools for the project. In this process, he explores new approaches to formulate, exchange, and expand first-response knowledge used in emergency disaster operations.
Model Desert: A Cultural History of the Sandbox
Dr. Zinguer is an architect and architectural historian who’s current book manuscript explores the ubiquitous space of the sandbox from its pedagogical beginnings in 19th century Berlin , its adoption worldwide as a tool of post-war urban regeneration, subsequent concerns about hygiene leading to its decline, and its ultimate rebirth as a significant trope of land art. Perhaps the ultimate porous material, Dr. Zinguer also explores the scale of sand, at once encapsulating both our ideas of the miniscule and our ideas of limitless vastness, and she explores sand as an increasingly scarce natural resource. For her project, Dr. ZInguer also breaks through the porous barrier between the academy and the public, presenting a public lecture about her work at the art gallery “ARTSPACE at Untitled” in downtown Oklahoma City and hosting a public reception in order to further the opportunity for possible academic and public partnerships.
Lauren Duval, Department of History
The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Creation of the American Republic
The Home Front analyzes households in and around British-occupied Boston, New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Savannah, and Charleston during the American Revolution to investigate how diverse civilian populations experienced military occupation and understood its implications for their lives, families, and property, and the legacies of this turmoil for the nascent American republic.
Victoria Sturtevant, Film and Media Studies
Fertile Ground: A Critical History of Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy
Fertile Ground traces the history of pregnancy in American film and television comedy, linking the social evolution of American attitudes toward pregnancy with mainstream representational strategies that transformed social discomforts into comedy.
Kalenda Eaton, African and African American Studies
Black Women Writers and the New Plains Narrative
Dividing Lines: Black Women (Re)Writing the Great Plains examines historical fiction by contemporary Black women in the United States and Canada representing key moments of conflict and contact on the Great Plains in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The fictional accounts position the Great Plains as space where ideals of democracy and freedom for African Americans were imagined, attempted, but not fully realized. The writings enhance historical research andprovide expanded discussionsof "race," identity, and displacement through their concern with communalism and economoc self-sufficiency on the frontier.
Laurel C. Smith, Geography and Environmental Sustainability
The Emergence and Agency of Tribal Environmental Professionals in Oklahoma
My project examines the cultural and political geographies from which Tribal environmental programs emerged in Oklahoma during the 1990s. It also documentsthe activities, aims, and partnerships of the Tribal environmental professionals (TEPs) who design and deliver theservices these programs currently provide humans as well as the more than human actors (e.g., plant and animals) sustained bythe land and waters under Tribal jurisdiction. This project explores community resilience and environmental justice and mobilizes a geographical approach to study the cultural and political entanglements characterizing Native nations, sovereignty, and partnershipsin Oklahoma.
Kari A. B. Chew, Educational Leadership and Policy Studies
Enacting Relationality in Online Indigenous Language Revitalization Efforts
Indigenous language revitalization and reclamation (ILR) responds to enduring legacies of colonization that have threatened natural processes of intergenerational knowledge sharing and the continuance of Indigenous languages. Within this work, Indigenous cultural values of relationality are of the utmost importance. Indigenous understandings of relationalisty hold that people are related to one another, the land, the spirits, and to language itself. Utilizing an Indigenous methodology rooted in a relational epistemology, this research explores how Indigenous communities enact relationality in online space which support ILR efforts.
Jill Hicks-Keeton
"Repair- or Reparations? White Evangelicals, The Bible, and The Other"
"The Reception of the Parai Drum by Diasporic Tamil Communities in the U.S."
Laurel Smith, Geography and Enviromental Sustainablity
"Public Screening of Restoring Neske'emane"
Sarah Trabert, Anthropology
"Documenting Allotment Era Wichita Community Gathering Spaces"
Red State Reclaimed: The Transrhetorical Recovery of Resistance in Oklahoma
Red State Reclaimed argues for critical attention to local rhetorics and characterizes Oklahoma as a unite site for understanding their impact on student writers and writing instruction. Despite its absence from dominant historical narratives, Oklahoma encompasses a unique racial history that offers regional insight into how local activity rhetorics cross cultural boundaries and yield cooperative alliances between distinct cultural groups.
Nancy LaGreca, Spainsh
"Latin American Women Novelists of Modernismo: The Dawn of the New Woman"
"Latin American Women Novelists of Modernismo: The Dawn of the New Woman" is the first book-length study of women narrators of Latin American modern-ismo from the 1890s to the early 20th century (not to be confused with Anglo modernism). Few scholars are aware that women wrote modernista fiction, infamous for its risqué, morally questionable content. LaGreca’s study makes a new contribution by raising awareness of bold women novelists from across the continent who dared to tell the untellable, availing themselves of the literary tropes of the modernista novel. The primary texts present the free-thinking New Woman through a heroine who is a breadwinner; eschews marriage; self-reflects on her non-conformist feminine identity; and/or leads a life independent of men. Women fiction writers of modernismo, riding the rule-breaking wave of the movement, explore the freedoms and dangers that women faced in a moment of cultural transition, between an era dominated by the traditional image of the Angel of the House and the dawn of the New Woman in print culture.
Aparna Nair, Assistant Professor, History of Science
Lives Worth Living: Disability Histories of the Global South, 1900-1980
Dr. Nair's project, "Lives Worth Living: Disability Histories of the Global South, 1900-1980," asks how disabled people in India in the 20th century understood and experienced technology? Since the 19th century, technology has routinely been presented as a particularly important ‘panacea’ to the 'problem' of disability, whether it was artificial limbs that promised the restoration of function and form or devices for the deaf that promise to 'cure' deafness. Technology is often seen as central to global development ventures targeted at disabled populations, as it is believed to facilitate anti-poverty efforts, increasing social and economic participation and improving access. But is technology truly liberatory or transformative for disabled people in spaces like India, and if so, to what extent? This project examines the complicated relationships between disability, technology and biomedicine in India, by focusing on the histories and use of prosthetic limbs, Bharatiya Braille presses and texts, hearing aids and orthotics. Using mixed methods, including research in multiple archives as well as oral histories, this project will create a public physical exhibit and an online digital exhibit on disability, technology and experience in the spaces of the Global South from the period between 1900 to 1980.
Jennifer Saltzstein, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation Presidential Professor of Music (Musicology)
"Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France: Toward an Environmental History"
Dr. Saltzstein's book, "Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France: Toward an Environmental History," investigates how northern French vernacular poets and musicians writing in the late middle ages expressed relationships between people and their environments during the last major era of climate change—the shift from the temperate Medieval Climate Anomaly to the Little Ice Age. By integrating an analysis of medieval French songs, many of which feature outdoor settings, within the context of medieval farming and land management, urban studies, landscape architecture, and climate history, the book positions medieval song as a privileged vehicle through which songwriters expressed relationships between nature, place, and class.
Zoe Sherinian, Professor, Ethnomusicology
"Drumming Our Liberation: The Spiritual, Cultural, and Sonic Power of the Parai Drum"
The parai frame drum is still considered “untouchable” in Tamil Nadu, India. Yet, activists in the contemporary Dalit (outcaste) civil rights movement have embraced it as a tool and symbol of liberation. Dr. Sherinian's book "Drumming Our Liberation: The Spiritual, Cultural, and Sonic Power of the Parai Drum" is grounded in contemporary ethnomusicological theories of the study of instruments and phenomenology (experience of the body) showing how Dalits have shifted the parai’s understanding from a ritual object to a political symbol, which empowers Dalit youth and women, expresses political agency, and through which sonic impact creates social change. In this study, Dr. Sherinian uses historical iconographic and textual data, film as a template for phenomenological music-dance analysis, and ethnographic research including self-study. She shows how the parai has become a political tool in the public sphere of caste politics, invoking catharsis to transform internalized casteism, sexism, and cultural identity within the oppressed. The broader humanities impact of this book is on intersections of caste and gender oppression, film in activist ethnography, and distribution through a digital humanities package of the book, films, and a website
Anthony Levenda, Geography and Enviromental Sustainablity
Runpturing Pipelines, Reconciling Risk
Dr. Levenda's project explores how infrastructural breakdowns fuel techno-political change. We specifically focus on the three aspects of anti-pipeline activism. First, we analyze how risk is framed and mobilized by activists to become an important resource in resisting pipeline expansion. Second, we trace how activists use infrastructural breakdown and regulatory failure to contest the legitimacy of development initiatives and corporate governance regimes. Third, we investigate the way pipeline ruptures and associated environmental disasters mobilize fossil fuel resistance through social movement networks and circulating imagery. Throughout the project, we work directly with indigenous groups and environmental activists with the goal of advancing a more just energy future.
Carolina Rudea, Film and Media Studies
Oklahoma Mon Amour
The film "Oklahoma Mon Amour" tells the story of the Gaertners, a family of five separated by a tragedy that left them in solitude –in Oklahoma, Mexico City, and London. While addressing the characters’ rupture and conceivable reconciliation, Dr. Rueda's film also touches upon political tensions affecting the world today. Instead of relying on expected Mexico/United States migratory flows, this essay-film proposes a radical variation by showing the American character Sebastian traveling south into Mexico, dissatisfied with the politics of his country (late 2016) and hoping to reconcile with the family.
Screenings will take place at universities and national and international film festivals. It will be distributed through traditional and online outputs.
Claiming My Egypt
"Claiming My Egypt" examines the fractured Egyptian identity that Dr. Seidelman inherited through her mother who was born in Alexandria in 1946 to a tight-knight Egyptian-Jewish family and fled with her parents and siblings in 1955. The questions Dr. Seidelman asks in this study are: What of Egypt is left in the children of Egypt’s Jewish diaspora? What claim, if any, do we have to the country that has shaped who we are? Are we at all Egyptian?
This project is inspired by, and continues in the tradition of, scholarly, autobiographical reflections of women intellectuals of Middle Eastern descent. Dr. Seidelman argues that the history and wounds of Egypt did not stop with our parents; it continued on to the next generation, contributing layers of identity that are at once rich, transnational and displaced.
Samer Shehata, Colin Mackey and Patricia Molina de Mackey Associate Professor of Middle East Studies
Egypt's Moment of Democracy
Dr. Shehata’s project is a short documentary film about Egypt’s first and only democratic legislative elections after the 2011 Egyptian “revolution.” Although intended to set the country on the path to democracy, the elections turned out to be the first — and last — free and fair parliamentary elections in the country’s history. Egypt’s democratic experiment abruptly ended in July 2013 when a military coup ousted the country’s first freely elected president. Shehata’s project, entitled "Egypt’s Moment of Democracy," is based primarily on original footage he filmed in Egypt in 2011 during the elections, and examines a pivotal moment of rupture in the country’s history.
Mirelsie Velazquez, Educational Leadership and Policy Studies
Space, Place, and Schooling: African American and Indigenous Oklahoma, 1865-1925
Fitting with this year’s theme, “Space, Place, and Schooling: African American and Indigenous Oklahoma, 1865-1925” speaks to the need to place both Oklahoma and communities of color (African American and American Indian), into a larger conversation within the history of American education and the U.S. more broadly. By centering and documenting schools and schooling Dr. Velazquez hopes to challenge monolithic readings of schools as not only sites of oppression within Oklahoma and Indian Territories, but similarly speak to how both groups enacted agency to situate these spaces as sites of liberation prior to statehood.
Elyse O. Singer, Anthropology
Legalizing Sin: Reproductive Citizenship and Mexican Abortion Care
In "Legalizing Sin: Reproductive Citizenship and Mexican Abortion Care," Dr. Elyse Singer considers how recent transformations in Mexican reproductive governance bear on the ways that women experience their bodies and their relationship to the Mexican state amidst an ongoing national struggle for democratic citizenship.
Rangar Cline, Associate Professor of Religious Studies
Sacred Travel in the Roman Empire and the Origins of Christian Pilgrimage: Data Digitization and Forum Discussion
Dr. Rangar Cline’s current book project examines the origins of Christian pilgrimage with the context of Greek, Roman, and Jewish pilgrimage traditions and considers the motivations and economic consequences of pilgrimage in the later Roman world. Dr. Cline will be creating an on-line database for hosting open-access data related to the economics of late antique pilgrimage and he will be presenting a public forum for invited scholars, OU faculty, and students to discuss the origins of Christian pilgrimage.
Joyce Coleman, Rudolph C. Bambas Professor of Medieval English Literature and Culture
The Illuminated Author: The Iconography of the Book in Late Medieval Secular Manuscripts
Dr. Joyce Coleman will complete her monograph that focuses on how illustrations in early medieval manuscripts depicted the origins and uses of books, and on how that imagery migrated over to and was adapted for secular texts, in a process linked to the birth of lay literacy and vernacular literature.
Joshua Frydman, Assistant Professor of Japanese
Word on the (Ancient) Street: Premodern Graffiti and the Origins of Literary Transmission
Dr. Joshua Frydman explores the appearance of inscriptions of literary works (loosely defined) on objects and architectural elements across various premodern societies. Through comparing examples of graffiti and other inscriptions that quote or appear similar to literature, we can understand how people in premodern societies composed, transmitted, and enjoyed important works in their own time.
Paulo Moreira, Associate Professor of Portuguese
Latin America: A Journey Into the Origins of an Idea
Dr. Paulo Moreira's project aims to investigate Latin America as an identity and as an imagined place by tracing the use of botanic tropes when writing about Latin America and the terminological disputes between competing names for the continent.
Ping Zhu, Chinese Literature
The First U.S.-China 'Trade War' (1905) and the Diasporic Origin of Chinese Nationalism
Dr. Ping Zhu's project explores the transpacific connection between the building of an interracial-democratic nation in America after the Civil War and the rise of Chinese diasporic nationalism culminating in the 1905 anti-American boycott (the first US-China trade war). By comparing the public sentiments, policies, and literature surrounding the Chinese Exclusion Act on both continents, Dr. Zhu demonstrates that the resistance of diasporic Chinese played a pivotal role in supplying the strength, ideas, material support, and even martyrdom for the rise of nationalism in their homeland. Overall, this project shows the complex picture of how the transpacific formation of racism worked as a shaping force for modern nationalisms and identities.
Erin Duncan-O'Neill, Art History
Media and the Politics of Satire in the Art of Honoré Daumier
Dr. Erin Duncan-O’Neill's book project, "Media and the Politics of Satire in the Art of Honoré Daumier," investigates the role of satire in the multimedia art practice of the 19th-century French artist. Examining Daumier’s engagement with celebrity culture, theatrical performance, and scenes from the literary past, this book will expand the literature on an artist best known for political caricature and demonstrate that the politics of satire motivated his long-standing investment in problems of representation.
Revolution, Property, and Community in Twentieth-Century Bolivia
Dr. Sarah Hines will present her manuscript, "Water for All: Revolution, Property, and Community in Twentieth-Century Bolivia." Her project is a social, political, and environmental history of water access and hydraulic engineering in Bolivia from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first. The book concentrates on the Cochabamba Valley, the site of intense conflict over water tenure, hydraulic infrastructure, and attempts to reform both over this period, especially after the 1952 Bolivian Revolution.
Bill Endres, Assistant Professor of English
The Three-Dimensional Nature of Surfaces: Building a Portable Virtual Reality Workstation for Experiencing and Studying Medieval Manuscripts
To experience the splendor of illuminated manuscripts, it is time for students and scholars to step away from the limits of a computer screen and into the dynamic realm of virtual reality (VR). For this project, Dr. Bill Endres will work with Matthew Cook (OU Libraries) and Brandt Smith (manager of OU FabLab) to build a travelling two-person VR workstation. With it, he will engage conservators and scholars across the world, the Lichfield Cathedral community (home of the illuminated St. Chad Gospels), and students at OU to explore digital features and tools that will make VR an even more inspiring space for studying the visual wonder of illuminated manuscripts.
Jill Hicks-Keeton, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
Stable Surfaces for Unstable Scripture: Art and Artifact at the Museum of the Bible
In this project, Dr. Jill Hicks-Keeton analyzes the Museum of the Bible, a brand new museum blocks from the National Mall in Washington, D.C., from the perspective of academic Biblical scholarship. Visitors to the museum encounter “the Bible” on a series of surfaces: ancient manuscripts and artifacts, contemporary art displays, and the usual interpretive trappings of explanatory placards and decorative façades. Yet the MOTB overlays a singular narrative about a singular Bible upon its diverse biblical manuscripts and artifact collection, covering over a subterranean landscape of diversity and competition that lies beneath the surface of a seemingly stable Bible.
Sherri Irvin, Women's and Gender Studies
Understanding the Surfaces of Contemporary Art
Dr. Sherri Irvin will complete her book Immaterial: A Philosophy of Contemporary Art, in which she discusses what is required to understand the surfaces of contemporary artworks. Many contemporary works are governed by rules about how objects should be displayed, conserved, or interacted with. Irvin argues that these rules are in fact part of the work, and knowledge of the rules helps us understand what the work is and what meanings it might have.
Robert Lemon, Associate Professor, German
Surface Tensions and Thick Descriptions: Ethnography and Ethnology in the Works of Franz Kafka
Dr. Robert Lemon’s project argues that to crack the hermetic surface of Franz Kafka's prose we must read his texts anthropologically. This interpretation draws on the anthropologist Clifford Geertz's notion of "thick description," or a hierarchy of meaningful structures, to plumb the depths of the complex cultural codes at work in these texts. By emphasizing the ethnographic and ethnological premises and ramifications of Kafka’s oeuvre, this project challenges the notion that his writings present riddles to be solved, and instead places the entire hermeneutical enterprise, the very issue of interpretation itself, front and center as a fundamental thematic preoccupation.
Monte Albán’s Main Plaza: A Virtual Exploration of Mesoamerica's First City
Dr. Marc Levine's digital archaeology project will create a virtual interface representing the ancient capital of Monte Albán (500 BCE – 800 CE), located in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Participants will be virtually transported to the surfaces and spaces of the city’s Main Plaza, surrounded by monumental pyramids, palaces, and temples featuring carved stone monuments with hieroglyphic writing and elaborate iconography. This virtual environment will be developed from data recently obtained during an extensive UAV or “drone” survey of the site carried out in the summer of 2017.
Deborah Richards, Architecture
Surface Flux
Dr. Deborah Richards’ project, “Surface Flux,” investigates the ways in which the physical environment can be understood and shaped through different philosophical perspectives. Three unique surfaces will be computationally designed and digitally fabricated as part of a final exhibit. The first surface will explore networks, the second will explore objects, and the third will explore the tension between the two, while also engaging the viewer as part of the built environment narrative. An April exhibition of “Surface Flux” is planned for Oklahoma City.eaturing carved stone monuments with hieroglyphic writing and elaborate iconography. This virtual environment will be developed from data recently obtained during an extensive UAV or “drone” survey of the site carried out in the summer of 2017.
Gabriela Raquel Rios, English
Decolonizing Ontologies
This book project intervenes in a conversation about the embeddedness of humans in the natural world to offer a perspective on human and nonhuman relations from indigenous philosophies from the Americas. Dr. Gabriela Raquel Ríos argues that these versions of humanity can provide avenues for healing and bringing balance to relations that were/are severed, challenged, or altered during colonial domination.
Kathleen Tipler, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Reflexive Governance: Democratic Legitimacy and Legal Institutions
In Reflexive Governance, Dr. Kathleen Tipler examines the relationship of judicial review — that is, when judges review and potentially invalidate laws — to democracy. Through its case studies of conflict between courts and elected officials, the book develops a concept of democratic governance rooted in the idea of reflexive contestation over different institutionalized representations of the people. The purpose of Reflexive Governance is not justificatory, however: it argues that courts’ democratic potential is latent, given how legal officials are not held to democratic standards, and given significant limits on popular access to courts.
David Anderson, Associate Professor of English
Shakespeare, BC: Ethics, Religion, and Historical Contingency in the Greco-Roman Plays
Dr. David Anderson will undertake work on Shakespeare’s last tragedy, Coriolanus. He will argue that Coriolanus depicts a world where sovereignty — personal and political, conceptual and material — is regarded as the highest good and where social bonds are conceived of purely in terms of power. He hopes by the end of the year to have produced a full chapter on this theme for his current book project on Shakespeare’s Greco-Roman plays, as well as a related journal article which focuses on the common ground between Coriolanus and Satan from John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Edgar Heap of Birds, Professor of Native American Studies
Genocide, Sovereignty, and Democracy
Artistic visual and conceptual expressions are an excellent vehicle for public consideration and contemplation regarding challenging issues and concepts. Via his Forum Grant Dr. Edgar Heap of Birds plans to forge an intellectual presence that will illuminate the timely themes of genocide, sovereignty, and democracy for today. This presence will be realized through the execution of an ambitious suite of poetic ink on rag paper lithographic mono prints for museum exhibition and originally produced in Santa Fe, New Mexico; the exhibition will be expanded via public events at OU. MPR News Story
Waleed F. Mahdi, International Studies
Arab Americans in Film: Representations of Citizenship and Belonging in Us
Dr. Waleed F. Mahdi has been awarded a Forum Grant for his book project examining the representation of Arab Americans in Hollywood, Egyptian, and Arab American filmmaking. He will compare the politics and portrayal of identity, belonging, and citizenship in each of these three cinemas. The comparative framework locates the sovereignty of this country's 3.5 million Arab Americans at the disjuncture of the sustained relevance of nationalism in today’s globalized context and the solidifying demand by diasporic communities for hybrid identities.
Kimberly G. Wieser, English, Native American Studies, & Enviromental Studies
Gathering at Our Headwaters: Poetry and Prose from the 25th Anniversary American Indian Indigenous Storytelling and Literary Festival
Dr. Kimberly Wieser's Forum project intends to demonstrate change in a writing community of color over the course of time. The Returning the Gift Festival will take place at the University of Oklahoma during the 2017-18 academic year; its focus will be “Gathering at Our Headwaters,” which connects directly with the Humanities Forum’s theme of “Sovereignty in Performance, Poetics, and Politics.” One of the culminations of this event (and demonstrated transformation in the Native writing community) will be the development of an anthology of Indigenous creative writing, including poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, drama, and other forms of expression. This year’s festival will mark the 25th anniversary of the first Returning the Gift conference, which took place in Norman in 1992.
Kimberly Marshall, Anthropology
Erasing the Erasure of the Boise Valley People: The Poetics and Politics of Representational Sovereignty
In her research, Dr. Kimberly Marshall traces the outlines of the erasure of the Boise Valley people from the landscape of this metropolitan center of Idaho. As an anthropologist, she is interested in how this erasure informs Boise’s contemporary culture, particularly as it manifests in expressive form: in contemporary folklore, visual arts, public artwork, musical culture, festivals, museums, and dance. Her research also aims to use Indigenous methodologies and an “Ally” mindset to partner with contemporary descendants of the Boise Valley people in projects that help to re-assert that which has been erased. In particular, her research aims to create projects and conditions which allow contemporary descendants of the Boise Valley People to re-assert "representational sovereignty" over the Boise Valley landscape. Under the auspices of the OU Arts & Humanities Forum she aims to host a workshop for contemporary Native Idaho artists in Norman, bringing them into conversation with Native Oklahoman artists, in order to foster discussion around the theme of representational sovereignty. Cross-tribal discussions will provide artists from all tribes with a broader context for local struggles for representational sovereignty and help foster continuing alliances.
Negotiating Womanhood: The Peril of Infertility and Kañeleng Women in Gambia
Kañeleng refers to a woman who cannot bear children, whom Gambian society considers infertile, or whose children die at an early age. Dr. Balo Saho’s study seeks to understand the traditional processes and mechanisms by which the kañeleng struggle to cope with and challenge the issues of childlessness in the Gambia by participating in rituals, prayers, performances, songs, and the inversion of roles. In order to explore the history and to reach an understanding of the kañeleng women, their associations, and their traditional coping mechanisms, this book will examine how the kañeleng attempt to reconfigure female-male relationships, and how these infertile women assert themselves in a social order that rejects them. Dr. Saho will also explore how the infertile women’s societies function as ways of generating a sense of worth and solidarity.
Kathryn Schumaker, Assistant Professor of Classics & Letters
Civil Rights at the Schoolhouse Gate: Student Protest and the Struggle for Racial Reform
In Civil Rights at the Schoolhouse Gate: Student Protest and the Struggle for Racial Reform Dr. Kathryn Schumaker examines how high school student activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s led to the development of students’ constitutional and civil rights. Before 1969, the courts largely deferred to local school officials and boards of education on matters concerning student speech, disciplinary practices, and school curricula. But landmark Supreme Court decisions between 1965 and 1980 marked out the contours of a new regime of students’ rights. Many of these decisions were rooted in protests staged by students of color who challenged discriminatory practices at school. Dr. Schumaker argues that as the courts articulated constitutional protections for all students they narrowed conceptions of educational equality while building the foundation for other rights on ideas of order. This project explores how, in an era marked by youth protest movements, riots, and “law and order” politics, ideas about order and disorder were inextricably linked to concerns about race and made students of color vulnerable to being excluded from public schools entirely even as they gained new rights protections.
Aparna Nair
Andrew Porwancher
Julie Ann Ward
Dan Mains, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Under Construction: Technologies of Development in Urban Ethiopia
Dr. Dan Mains' book project, "Under Construction: Technologies of Development in Urban Ethiopia," explores the intersection between development and governance through an ethnographic examination of conflicts surrounding specific infrastructural technologies - asphalt roads, cobblestone roads, three-wheeled motorcycle taxis, and hydroelectric dams. In each case Dr. Mains takes the process of construction and regulation as a site for ethnographic research and as a means of theorizing the present in terms of encounters between ideologies of development, citizens, states, technologies, and the people who provide infrastructure. Contrasting materials, like cobblestone and asphalt, create different limits and opportunities for states to assert their legitimacy through infrastructural development. The state also seeks to regulate and manage the people who build and deliver much of the infrastructure in urban Ethiopia. "Under Construction" is based on long-term ethnographic research with government administrators, engineers, construction laborers, three-wheeled motorcycle taxi drivers, and the residents of rapidly changing neighborhoods in the Ethiopian cities of Jimma and Hawassa.
Mirelsie Velazquez, Educational Leadership and Policy Studies
Winning Means Hope
Dr. Mirelsie Velazquez’ book-in-progress, Winning Means Hope, analyzes the educational experiences of Puerto Ricans in Chicago following their initial mass migration to Chicago in the 1940s until 1977. The book chronicles the ways in which the racialization of Puerto Ricans in Chicago has resulted in schooling inequalities, and has forced community response. Chicago becomes the space that this population comes to navigate, negotiate, and embody as a marker of who they are as a racialized group. City schools then become the place where Puerto Rican Americans can begin to gain a sense of security, share their lived experiences, and hope to meet their practical needs. The book offers a narrative of the intersectionality of schools, oppression, and liberation in terms of Puerto Ricans in the diaspora.
