Turner Schulman Graduate Fellows

Carlos Aguilar, Sociology
Aislados: Undocumented Immigrants in Puerto Rico

Marco Aviles, Latin American Literature
Thinking Indigeneity Beyond Nation and Mestizaje in Bolivia

Kim Cardenas, Political Science
Unsung Activists: On LGBTQ+ Racial Minority Political Behavior

Ashleigh Cartwright, Sociology
“What a wonderful situation we have here with so few black people”: White Power and Profit in Northern Integration Efforts

Ornella Darova, Economics
Peer Effects, Isolation and Prejudices in a Diverse Class with Random Groups

Francisco Diaz, Anthropology
Becoming Mayanist: Revisiting the Invention of the Maya

Priyanka Goonetilleke, Economics
The Impact of Race on Perceptions of Attorney Credibility

Lotem Halevy, Political Science
Who Gets to Play? The Logic Behind Enfranchisement and Party System Development in Central Eastern Europe

Olivia Hu, Sociology
The Causal Effect of Race, Educational Attainment, and Educational Prestige on Romantic & Sexual Desirability in the Online Dating Market

Joyce Kim, Higher Education
Career Funneling Revisited: First-Gen, Low-Income Students’ Career Plans at Elite Institutions

Rithika Kumar, Political Science
Left-Behind or Left-Ahead? Implications of Male Migration on Women's Political Participation in India

Peizhu Liu, Educational Linguistics
Voices of Students, Teachers, and Parents: An Ethnographic Study on Language Ideology, Investment, & Raciolinguistic Socialization in a Chinese-English Dual Language School

Bonnie Maldonado, Africana Studies
Decadent Republic: Food, Embodied Memories, and Culture in the Dominican Republic and the US Post-1965

Daniel Morales-Armstrong, History & Africana Studies
Fire in the Cane: The Silenced Histories of Post-Emancipation Labor Contracts and Conflict in Puerto Rico (1873-1876)

Brett Robert, History
Disastrous Legacies: Guadeloupe, Puerto Rico, and Florida in the Hurricane's Eye in 1928 and Beyond

Marta Sanchis Ferrer, Psychology
Health Rituals in the Andean Worlds: Literature, Oral History, & Film

Charles Starks, City & Regional Planning
Migratory Urbanists in the Model Metropolis: Ethnic Chinese Guildhalls in the Making and Remaking of Singapore and Vancouver

Catalina Udani, Political Science
Migrant Human Rights Violations, Sending State Power, and Labor Demand

Shelley Zhang, Ethnomusicology
Li Delun in Philadelphia: Ethnography, Archives, and Music Across the Pacific

Hajer Al-Faham, Political Science
Contingent Citizenship: Muslims in America

Kimberly Cardenas, Political Science
LGBTQ+ Latinx and Black Activism: Identity Salience, Local Context, and Mobilization

Dylan Farrell-Bryan, Sociology
Deciding to Deport: Judges, Decision-Making, and the Bureaucracy of Removal from Immigration Court

Janay Garrett, Interdisciplinary Studies in Human Development
Work for the Day to Come: Motherwork, Identity Tensions & Black Women's First Transition to Motherhood

Austin Lee, Sociology
Black Women on Childlessness, Class, and Motherhood

Yezhen Li, Sociology
Race, Class, and Political Identifications Among Two Generations of Chinese Americans

Claire Ma, Political Science
Political Socialization in the Workplace: Asian Americans in the Tech Sector

Elena van Stee, Sociology
Family Safety Nets: Understanding Race, Class, and Intergenerational Support Through the Lens of the Covid-19 Pandemic

Jane Abell, Cultural Anthropology
How Arab Muslims in Philadelphia Self-Perceive, Think, and Talk About Race

The goal of this research is to shed light on racial dimensions of Muslim personhood today and to contribute to conversations on the racialization of Islam and the nexus of race and religion in the United States and in Philadelphia more specifically. Although Philadelphia is one of the most well-researched cities in the U.S., especially in terms of social scientific work, very little has been published about the city’s large and historic Muslim communities. Although statistics are unavailable on the total Muslim population in the city, Philadelphia ranks fourth nationwide in terms of number of mosques, which is a strong indicator of Islam’s great reach in the city. This project turns attention to the effects of racialized narratives on the thinking and subjectivities of Arab Muslims, an under-explored area for research.

Hajer Al-Faham, Political Science
Contingent Citizenship: Muslims in America

Aldo Anzures Tapia, Educational Linguistics
The Promise of  Indigenous Early Childhood Education in Mexico

Early childhood education (ECE) has been branded as a social equalizer that will reverse poverty trends in Mexico. When language is included in ECE debates in Mexico, it is often used as a proxy for “school readiness” – as in, students are prepared to attend classes in Spanish, the actual language of instruction – precluding discussions on multilingual education and overlooking the impacts of these policies in Indigenous communities. This study provides an ethnographic account of how different stakeholders in one Indigenous community in the Yucatan Peninsula respond to language policies and ECE initiatives that promise quality education under the guise of social justice, inclusive education, and economic returns. Moreover, situated within a region coping with migration and mass tourism, this research also traces the impact of these processes on the compromises parents and teachers make in regard to their children’s education.

Veronica Brownstone
Art and Feminized Informality in El Salvador Today

Kimberly Cardenas, American Politics
Beyond Linked Fate: Identity Politics in Latinx LGBTQ Organizations

I seek to incorporate gender and sexuality in my analysis of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) identifying Latinxs by asking what it means, politically, to simultaneously identify as an ethnic and sexual minority. Other questions that drive this study are: How do sexual orientation and ethnic identity inform political ideologies, why, and when? Is there a tension in identifying as both Latinx and queer, or is the espousal of these two designations instead suggest “an affirmative identification that suggests a progressive approach to racial and social issues?” In this project, I will develop and test a theory of LGBTQ Latinx political identification by examining in-depth two Latinx LGBTQ organizations in Philadelphia and New York City.

Andres Castro, Sociology
Multi-State Models: Life Course Analysis from Event Histories and Panel Data

In this 4-day course, participants were introduced to the concept of multi-state models. Learning involved how to estimate the essential quantities in the two most frequently encountered data situations: Event-histories, for which the exact times of transitions are known, and panel data, where observations are only made in (more or less) regular intervals, leading to interval-censored data.

Yara Damaj
Race, Class, and the Feminization of Migration Through the Lens of Migrant Domestic Workers in Lebanon

Conor Donnan, History
An “Empire of Liberty?”: Irish Immigrants, Native Americans, and American Imperialism in the Trans-Mississippi West Between 1840 and 1924

My research reconstructs the interactions of Irish Catholics and Native Americans against the backdrop of American expansion, industrialization, the growing capitalist economy, and questions surrounding citizenship in the trans-Mississippi West between 1840 and 1924. Irish Catholics and indigenous peoples became intertwined socially, politically, and economically in ways that both reinforced and shifted the paradigms of the U.S. empire. Native Americans and Irish immigrants negotiated their identities and shaped their social and political ideas based on their interactions with each other, American structures of power, and the transnational influence of Irish nationalism. Irish immigrants forged alliances and traded with Indians, married into indigenous families, and even became leaders of nations. Irish people attempted to rid themselves of the power of federal authority by moving out West in order to live the rough and tumble lifestyle of the West. However, they also fought against Native Americans in brutal military campaigns such as Little Big Horn, advanced the causes of imperialism and capitalism in the West, and economically benefited from the subjugation of Indians. These interactions, which were built upon imperial expansion, forced national discussion on the meanings of democracy and citizenship in the United States.

Lisette Enumah, Teaching
Racial Pedagogical Content Knowledge in Teacher Education

This study uses grounded theory methodology to explore the practices of teacher educators who teach about race and racism. Specifically, the researcher inquires about how teacher educators across a range of contexts conceptualize the knowledge and pedagogy that are essential to engaging issues of race and racism in their teacher education classrooms. The focus of inquiry in the study is to develop a more concrete framework for “racial pedagogical content knowledge.” Through interviews, focus groups, and artifacts from teaching, participants reflect on their teaching goals, pedagogical practice, and successes and challenges in teaching about race and racism.

Adam Garnick, Law
Know Your Rights in Honduras

Lotem Halevy
Democritization and Domestic Migration in the Habsburg Empire

Taylor Heath

Elizabeth Jacobs
Institutions and Skilled Migration: How Companies, Universities, and the State Regulate and Constrain the Development and Retention of Foreign Skill in the United States

Jin Kyeong Jung
Reconnecting to the Heritage Language and Culture Through a Digitally-Mediated Trans-Border Network

This study calls attention to the role of the digital in creating accessible and equitable opportunities for immigrant youth in the field of language and literacy education. Utilizing digital tools in a digitally mediated transnational network, this research was designed to (re)connect a group of Korean American immigrant youth with their heritage language and culture by engaging in mediated composing with peers in their home country, South Korea. Through mediated multimodal and multilingual communications, this research reinforces Korean heritage language learners’ linguistic and cultural repertoires. The goal of this research is to provide a digitally-infused curriculum for immigrant youth so that they can leverage their linguistic, cultural, and historic resources and contemporary lived experiences with a networked audience beyond their local community and school.

Maryam Khojasteh, City and Regional Planning
Place-Making for Health: How Do Immigrant Food Entrepreneurs Contribute to Community Well-Being in a Hyper-Diverse Community?

This project investigates how immigrant food businesses contribute to health and community well-being in a multi-ethnic community. This research employs a mixed-method approach and relies on historical research, ethnographic methods and cross-sectional surveys to explore how such businesses contribute to community economic development, impact the community food environment, and shape food shopping and consumption patterns of different groups of residents (native vs. foreign-born). This work highlights human agency and social processes within built environment that shape food shopping patterns and makes a case for the significant role of small grocery stores in community building, workforce development and provision of healthy and affordable food. The findings have implications for public health interventions and public policies designed for incorporation and integration of new Americans.

Daniel Morales-Armstrong

James Morone, American Politics
Activist Populations and Possibilities for Organizing in High-Poverty Black and Latinx Urban Neighborhoods

This project examines political and civic activism in high-poverty neighborhoods of U.S. cities.  Through field work in two neighborhoods of Chicago (one a mostly black neighborhood and one a mostly Latinx “point of entry” neighborhood), I examine how public policy, foundations, educational institutions, and other forces created and reproduce populations of neighborhood activists with particular perspectives on racial and economic justice—from socialist visions of redistribution and public provision, to neoliberal visions of market-driven real estate development.   I consider how these activist populations respond to opportunities to participate in politics, and thus determine which kinds of political projects take root in, or emerge from, their neighborhoods.

Sonita Moss
A Place in Paris? Formulations of Citizenship, Culture, and Identity in the Black American Parisian Community

Joao Victor Nery Fiocchi Rodrigues, Sociology
Slavery, State Formation and Citizenship: A Comparative Historical Analysis of the United States and Brazil

This research project seeks to analyze how the legal systems of two slave societies (the United States and Brazil) defined who belongs to the body politic. The specific empirical concern is to understand the legal status of the black enslaved and freed populations in the United States and in Brazil and whether and how they were granted the right to “migrate”. In order to so, archival data (legal documentation, slavery abolition collections, historic newspapers) will be analyzed through the comparative-historical method. This investigation attempts to empirically operationalize Goldberg’s theory of the racial state, which argues that race is a central category to understand the development of the modern racial state, and also its historical and current inequalities.

Angie Ocampo
Social Acceptance: Reconceptualizing Latino Immigrant Incorporation

Joshua Reaves

Marlén Rosas, History
Indigenous Activists’ Archives and Power in Twentieth-Century Highlands Ecuador

For this project, I have developed contacts in Cayambe, including school directors and teachers, to help with archival documents listing students enrolled in indigenous schools from 1946. With the help of the great-granddaughter of the Governor of the Pesillo community in Cayambe and member of the political indigenous group Pueblo Kayambi, I will spend 4 months, (March 2019-June 2019) interviewing former students to learn about their education in makeshift classrooms. Additionally, Pueblo Kayambi promotes their own vision for grassroots indigenous education through leadership workshops for directors of Cayambe’s communities. I will interview members of the organization to inform the discussion of current education projects.

Carmen Torre Perez, Hispanic Studies
Counter-Hegemonic Mestizaje on a Changing Island: Bearing Witness to a Punk Culture in Cuba

As part of an ongoing research project, video footage will be recorded in Cuba consisting of interviews and shows about the Cuban punk scene. Music files will be gathered as well in order to create a documentary on Cuban punk and a digital punk music directory.