2013-2014 Fellows

Faculty Fellows 

Libby Garland
Assistant Professor of History, Kingsborough Community College, CUNY.
Email: Libby.Garland@kbcc.cuny.edu
Libby Garland is Assistant Professor of History at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY.

Irina Carlota (Lotti) Silber

Silber-Photo

Associate Professor, Anthropology, CCNY
Email: isilber@ccny.cuny.edu
Lotti Silber’s overarching work explores postwar processes in one of El Salvador’s former warzones and a region known for its peasant revolutionary participation. She documents what she terms the entangled aftermaths of war and displacement, aftermaths that have produced postwar deception and disillusionment and an “obligated” migration. Among her publications, Lotti’s book, Everyday Revolutionaries: Gender, Violence, and Disillusionment in Postwar El Salvador (2011) http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/product/Everyday-Revolutionaries,71.aspx received the 2013 International Latino Book Award in the Best First Book, Nonfiction category. Lotti remains committed to pursuing various ethnographic genres. For example, she has been recognized for her poetry as evidenced in a first prize poetry award for her poem “Nanita,” from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association. Currently she is pursuing two projects. The first builds from her longitudinal research and explores the Salvadoran diaspora in the United States and Europe with an attention to the tensions between militant logics and humanitarianism. The second project, The Texture of Illness, is a new ethnographic study of childhood genetic difference.

Postdoctoral Fellow

Christina Heatherton

Christina-picChristina Heatherton is a historian and interdisciplinary scholar of social movements. Her work explores the intersections of race, class, and gender. She is the author of The Color Line and the Class Struggle: The Mexican Revolution, Internationalism, and the American Century (forthcoming) and is currently editing a volume entitled The World Refuses: Global Struggles Against Racism and Imperialism, 1893-1933. Her work will appear in the volume Rising Tides of Color: Race, Radicalism, and Repression on the Pacific Coast and Beyond edited by Moon-Ho Jung (University of Washington Press, 2014) among other places. She is the co-editor with Jordan T. Camp of Freedom Now! Struggles for the Human Right to Housing in LA and Beyond (2012). She received her Ph.D. from USC’s Department of American Studies and Ethnicity in 2012 and is currently a member of the Global Advisory Board of the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership.

Dissertation Writing Fellows 

keithmiyake-20130930Keith Miyake
PhD Candidate in Earth and Environmental Science
Email: kmiyake@gmail.com
Keith Miyake is a Geography doctoral candidate in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Program. His work crosses the fields of political economic geography, environmental justice and environmental governance, critical race and ethnic studies, American studies, and Asian American studies. His dissertation research looks at the institutionalization of environmental and racial knowledges within the modern capitalist state as a spatialized form of biopolitics.

Preeti SampatPreeti
Right to Land and the Rule of Law: The ‘Exceptional’ Case of Special Economic Zones in India
Email: PSampat@gc.cuny.edu
Preeti Sampat is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Anthropology at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her dissertation examines land and resource rights and conflicts with respect to infrastructure and urbanization policy in India. With a legal ethnography of the Special Economic Zones Act 2005 that traces its policy genesis and successful resistance against its implementation in Goa, her research interrogates contemporary capital accumulation processes, infrastructure and urbanization policy, changing relations to land and resources, social movements, and negotiations of citizenship and the state refashioning the ‘rule of law’ in India’s ‘liberalizing’ democracy. Before joining the doctoral program at CUNY Preeti was an activist with the rural collective of peasants and workers in Rajasthan in India Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) and worked on state and national campaigns for the Right to Information, Employment Guarantee for Rural Workers and the Right to Food.

Publications:

  • 2013. ‘Limits to Absolute Power: Eminent Domain and the Right to Land in India.’ EPW. Vol. XLVIII. No. 19.
  • 2010. ‘Special Economic Zones in India: Reconfiguring Displacement in a Neoliberal Order?’ City and Society. Vol. 22. No. 2
  • 2007: ‘‘Swa’-jal-dhara or ‘Pay’-jal-dhara—Sector Reform and the Right to Drinking Water in Rajasthan and Maharashtra.’ 3/2 Law, Environment and Development Journal. Available at http://www.lead-journal.org/content/07101.pdf
  • 2003: Economic Globalization Today. Bangalore: Books for Change.

Stephen McFarlandSteve-portrait
Doctoral Candidate in Geography, CUNY Graduate Cente
Email: stephenmcfarland@gmail.com
Steve is a PhD candidate in Geography in the Earth and Environmental Science program at the Graduate Center. His dissertation is on union halls in the 20th Century US labor movement, a project he has undertaken under the advisement of Ruth Wilson Gilmore and the late Neil Smith. His research interests lie in urban and cultural geography, labor studies, and GIS.

Jacob LedermanJacob pic
PhD Candidate in Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center
Email: jlederman@gc.cuny.edu
Jacob Lederman is a PhD candidate in Sociology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. His work focuses on urban restructuring and social change in the aftermath of economic crisis in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Of central importance to his project is the way in which new configurations of touristic and cultural production have become the object of state innovation from above and a form of economic resource, conflict, and survival among everyday residents of the city. Jacob also teaches in the Sociology department at Hunter College, City University of New York.
Recent Publications:

  • 2013. “‘But this is a park!’ The Paradox of Public Space in Buenos Aires ‘No-Man’s’ Land”, Citizenship Studies, Vol.17, no.1, pp.16-30.

Noelia DIaz
PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature, CUNY Graduate Centerprofile picture
Email: noeliadz@hotmail.com

Noelia Diaz is a PhD candidate in the Comparative Literature department at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research investigates how contemporary theater in Argentina and Ireland contributes to a more committed citizenship through its critique/s of the rise in inequality in both countries under Menem in the former, and the Celtic Tiger period in the latter. Argentina and Ireland lend themselves to parallel critiques because similar aggressive neoliberal economic policies were implemented in the 90′s in both countries that weakened their welfare states. The unresolved, dark endings of the plays can be interpreted as new points of departure for alternative discourses, communities, and social orders, and in doing so, create new forms of empowerment for the recently marginalized citizenships of Argentina and Ireland. Her research contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how theater’s intervention into the social sphere has the potential to generate a more critical understanding of transnational systems and interactions. Noelia Diaz currently teaches at John Jay College in the Theater and Communications Department.

Visiting Scholars 

Dimitris Dalakoglou

Dimitris

Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Anthropology, Sussex University (UK)
Email: d.dalakoglou@sussex.ac.uk
Dimitris Dalakoglou is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Anthropology at the University of Sussex. He is the co-editor of Revolt and Crisis in Greece and of Roads and Anthropology. Since 2012 holds an ESRC-Future Research Leaders grant for the project The City at a time of Crisis [www.crisis-scape.net]. He is the author of various articles and book chapters e.g. neo-Nazism and neoliberalismthe crisis before the crisisBeyond Spontaneity or the Road from capitalism to capitalismMigrating-remitting-’building’-dwelling and the Road.  His PhD thesis was titled an Anthropology of the Road (UCL, 2009). Since 2007 is member of the editorial collective of the journal Occupied London and the weblog ‘From the Greek Streets’. See also Athens Social Meltdown and Landscapes of Emergency.

José Raimundo Sousa Ribeiro Junior

JoseDoctoral student at the Geography Department of the University of Sao Paulo (USP), Brazil.

Email: sousaribeirojunior@gmail.com
My current research is about the relation between the deterioration of food practices (production, purchase, preparation and consumption of food) and proletarianization. The key aim is to understand the existence of hunger and various forms of deterioration of food practices, by way of an interpretation that takes into consideration the role played by critical urbanization in our society. The first moment of the research is a critical review of the literature on hunger and food and then it focuses on the need for overcoming current understandings of these phenomena based on a critique of political economy that takes into account the production of space and everyday life. To carry out this research, we have selected two areas in the city of Sao Paulo (Bras and Grajau) with the aim of understanding how spatial differences in access to food have an impact on the proletariat’s daily life and on their diet.

Jarrett Martineau (Cree/Dene)

JarrettPh.D. Candidate, Indigenous Governance, University of Victoria (Canada)

Email: jarrett.martineau@gmail.com
Jarrett Martineau is Cree/Dene from Frog Lake First Nation in Alberta and a Ph.D. Candidate in Indigenous Governance at the University of Victoria. His research examines contemporary Indigenous political communication at the critical intersections of media, technology, art, aesthetics, music, and performance. His dissertation focuses on the role of art and creativity in Indigenous struggles for nationhood and decolonization. His work seeks to articulate strategies for resurgence and community renewal, through the dissemination of decolonial thought and practice, that are based on a commitment to Indigenous teachings and lifeways. Jarrett received an MA in Indigenous Governance from the University of Victoria, he is the co-founder and Creative Producer of Revolutions Per Minute (RPM.fm), a global new music platform to promote Indigenous music culture, and an organizer with the Indigenous Nationhood Movement. He is currently a 2013-14 Fulbright visiting scholar at Columbia University and CUNY’s Center for Place, Culture and Politics.

Murat Senturk

Murat

Assistant Prof. Department of Sociology, Istanbul University (Turkey)
Email: muratsenturke@gmail.com, murat.senturk@istanbul.edu.tr
Murat Senturk received his MA from Istanbul University, Department of Sociology. His MA thesis was entitled “Life Strategies of the Indigent: The Districts of Küçük Mustafa Paşa and Balat (Istanbul) as Cases in Point.” Then, at the same department, he completed his doctoral dissertation entitled: “Urban Intervention in The City of Istanbul (1980-2010).” His research interests include urban interventions, the urban and politics, gentrification, housing, poverty, media and work. He is the editor-in-chief of the Turkish Journal of Business Ethics. While at CUNY, he will be studying “Motion, Reproduction and Standardization: Modernization and Secularization of Urban Spaces.” His research will focus on spaces of consumption, their relationships and values in Istanbul.
Selected Publications: 

  • Şentürk, M. (2009). Poverty studies in Turkey [Türkiye’de Yoksulluk Çalışmaları]. The Journal of Sociology of Istanbul University, Volume 3, Issue 18, 205-233.
  • Şentürk, M. (2011). Urban renewal or sanitary engineering? Local attitudes toward intervention in Fener-Balat-Ayvansaray [Yenilemeye karşı sıhhileştirme: Fener-Balat-Ayvansaray’da kentsel müdahalelere yaklaşımlar]. The Journal of Sociology of Istanbul University, Volume 3, Issue 22, 395-422.
  • Şentürk, M., & Turğut, M. (2009). The professionals in Turkish media and their perceptions on the family. In M. Turğut & A. Abduşoğlu (Eds.), The research on family (pp. 53–96). Ankara: Turkish Republic Ministry of Family and Social Policies and General Directorate of Social Services.
  • Şentürk, M., & Turğut, M. (2009). The TV programs, advertisements and children. In M. Turğut & A. Abduşoğlu (Eds.), The research on family (pp. 97–133). Ankara: Turkish Republic Ministry of Family and Social Policies and General Directorate of Social Services.