2013

CAS SUMMER LANGUAGE FELLOWS

Rachael Hill

PhD Student, History, Amharic

Kellen Hoxworth

PhD Student, Theater and Performance Studies, isiZulu

Stephanie Quinn

PhD Student, History, Silozi

Kathryn Takabvirwa

PhD Student, Anthropology, Shona

CAS SUMMER RESEARCH FELLOWS

Nisrin Elamin Abdelrahman

PhD Student, Anthropology

Contested Landscapes and Unstable Livelihoods: Examining the Impact and Politics of Large-Scale Land Acquisitions in Central Sudan

Laura Bloomfield

MD/PhD Student, Medicine/Ecology, Human-Primate Ecology

Human-Primate Ecology: Landscape Change and Cross-Species Disease Transmission

Annalisa Bolin

PhD Student, Anthropology

Safety Codes: International Tourism, Nature, and Heritage in Rwanda

Nadja Drabon

PhD Student, Geological and Environmental Sciences

Environmental Effects of Giant Meteorite Impacts in the Archean

David Hausman

PhD Student, Political Science

Segregation, Inequality and Violence in South Africa

Rebecca R. Hernandez

PhD Student, Environmental Earth System Science

Effects of a Mango-Shrub Intercropping System on Soil Microbial Structure and Function in a Semi-Arid Agroecosystem

Rebecca Gilsdorf

PhD Student, Civil & Environmental Engineering

Modeling Farmers' Wastewater and Biosolid Reuse Behaviors for Urban Farming in Uganda

Eugene Richardson

PhD Student, Anthropology

Comparing the Efficacy of a Cash Transfer Program with Pre-exposure Prophylaxis in HIV Prevention

 

 

2012

CAS Summer Language Fellows

Jacob Doherty

PhD Candidate, Anthropology, Luganda

Bri Evans

Junior, Anthropology, Moore

Rebecca Gilsdorf

PhD Student, Civil & Environmenal Engineering, Luganda

Stephanie Quinn

PhD Student, History, Bemba

Cas Summer Research Fellows

Darin Christensen

PhD Student, Political Science

Living in the City: Urban Bias in the Use of Repression

Sally Embrey

MS/PhD Student, Civil & Environmental Engineering

An Examination of the Impact of Loans for Water and Sanitation Services on Health and Hygiene Practices in Peri-Urban Kenya

Jessica Grembi

PhD Student, Civil & Environmental Engineering

Evaluating Water Access Impacts on Rural Health and Development: A Kenyan Case Study

Touma Kunjo

PhD Candidate, History

Politics and Personalities: Contemporary Memories about Fode Kaba Dumbuya from the Casamance/Gambia Borderlands

Vivian Lu

PhD Student, Anthropology

International Travel and Class Mobility of Nigerian Entrepreneurs

Sarah Quesada

PhD Student, Iberian and Latin American Cultures

Transforming Relationships: Benin-Senegal and the Cuban African Diaspora

Angela Rice

PhD Student, Engineering

Source Tracking Stored Water Fecal Contamination

Kathryn Takabvirwa

PhD Student, Anthropology

Powers in the Everyday: The Case Study of Chegutu Residents and Zimplats Mine

 

 

2011

 

JESS AUERBACH

Jess spent just under a month in Angola over the summer, where she conducted exploratory fieldwork relating to Angola's contemporary relationship with Brazil. Moving by bus from the capital city through various towns towards the Namibian border, she interviewed people about their knowledge of contemporary Brazil and whether or not speaking Portuguese allowed them to "cross" national boundaries in any way. In so doing she established the groundwork for a much longer-term multicited ethnographic study between Luanda and Rio de Janeiro which she will conduct during the coming four years as part of her doctoral dissertation in anthropology.

 


HILARY CHART

Over the summer, Hilary spent two months in scorching Gainesville, Florida where this year's Summer Cooperative African Language Institute (SCALI) courses took place. Studying Setswana for four hours a day (with only one other student in the class!) enabled her to speak at an advanced level by the time she left to begin her dissertation research in Botswana this fall.

Hilary is currently living in this Southern African nation's capital city of Gaborone, researching small business and entrepreneurship not as economic activities or occupational identities, but as historically specific and highly contested cultural productions. Her ethnographic work takes her into small business promotion institutions, and extends to research with street vendors and other self-described "business people" in the city. Her Setswana language skills are crucial to this anthropological dissertation fieldwork and to making friends, of course.

 

 

 

JEANNETTE LARAMEE

My research at Stanford University focuses on resource recovery and reuse from waste and in particular, the economic and environmental benefits of biogas digesters in sub-Saharan Africa. During the summer of 2011, with the support of a CAS fellowship, I conducted field research in the Arumeru Region of Northern Tanzania, with the aim of assessing the extent to which households with domestic biogas digesters have realized potential energy, financial, time savings and agricultural benefits that biogas systems can offer. Additionally, through implementation of in-situ biogas metering equipment at households, I evaluated biogas production rates in order to determine the environmental benefits of domestic biogas digesters in terms of reducing in GHG emissions.

 

 

CHAD MCCLYMONDS

Chad participated in the Summer Cooperative African Language Institute (SCALI) at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida.

He studied advanced Akan language and culture for a full summer, to prepare him for future research in Ghana.

 

 

 

 

EDA PEPI

The Center for African Studies Fellowship enabled Eda to pursue three weeks of archival research at the National Archive & Library in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Between 1998 and 2000, Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a border war which led to the denationalization of over 75,000 Ethiopians of Eritrean origin. A PhD student in the Anthropology Department, Eda's project sought to follow stateless Ethiopians of Eritrean origin to Amman, where they settled via Egypt and Yemen. The research built on tensions between the “stateful” and the varied “stateless” to reveal how this tension informs the conceptualization of state, nation, and community.

In Addis Ababa, Eda used the archive to explore through government documents and legal casework the legal history and legal anthropology of the denationalizations during 1998 and the law of 2005 that opened the door for renationalization but of which few stateless Ethiopians have availed themselves. This research revealed that these group of stateless people are to this day politicized and problematic to the Ethiopian government's authority not because of their "Eritrean" ethnicity but because of their internationally accepted status as stateless persons.

 

 

LAUREN PRATHER

Lauren spent six weeks over the summer in Rabat, Morocco. She studied classical Arabic at the Qalam wa Lawh Arabic Language Center. The center provided 4-6 hours a day of instruction and also organized guest lectures and excursions for the students. When not in school, Lauren began laying the foundation for field work in Morocco.

She is interested in public and elite opinion in developing countries on foreign economic engagement. To this end, she met with a number of individuals involved in international development, survey research, and local citizens, to gauge their views on her project. She will hopefully conduct a survey in Morocco and at least one other country in Sub-Saharan Africa over the next few years as a part of her dissertation research.

 

 

KORY RUSSEL

Kory traveled approximately 10,000 kilometers around Mozambique over three months this past summer. As part of a multi-disciplinary team of researchers, he helped to complete a 1600-household impact evaluation of an ongoing rural water improvement project. Kory specifically studies how improved levels of water supply service impact the caloric cost of water fetching within rural Mozambican communities.

As part of this evaluation, data on anthropometrics , terrain classification, GPS points, water container volumes and much more were collected for synthesis into his greater research goals. Additionally, Kory trained six students and two professors from the Universidade Lúrio in Nampula, Mozambique to perform water quality testing of both source water and stored water for E. coli . These students will continue to be involved in ongoing work concerning caloric calculations of load carrying. Kory is planning to return several more times to Mozambique while completing his dissertation over the next three years.