Manuscript Development Workshop Recipients

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.