Ph.D. Recipients

Maurizio Albahari (PhD, 2006)
Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame. His dissertation, entitled "Charitable borders? Religion, policing, and belonging at the southern maritime fringes of the new Europe," examines how the European Union and the Italian state manage borders, (im)migration, and identities through discourses and practices of (Catholic) charity. More broadly, his research interests include transnational migration; religion, secularism, and the public sphere; nationalism; politics of space and culture; national and supranational governance. During the academic year 2005-06 he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, UC San Diego. In 2004 he received the Art Rubel Prize for Outstanding Graduate Research Paper in the Department of Anthropology, UC Irvine, for his paper entitled "The Crucifix in the Italian Public Sphere, or, Is Catholic Secularism an Oxymoron?". He was awarded a Predissertation Fellowship by the Institute of European Studies-CGES (University of California, Berkeley) for fieldwork research in Europe. Preliminary and dissertation research were also founded by the School of Social Sciences and by the Department of Anthropology, UC Irvine. He was also the recipient of a Regents' Predissertation Fellowship (UC Irvine, Fall 2002) and of a merit scholarship by the Italian workers' organization INPDAP. In 2006-07 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Erasmus Institute, University of Notre Dame.

Susan Algert (Ph.D., 2000)
Dr. Algert is Assistant Professor in the Department of Nursing and Nutrition at California State University, Sacramento.

Alex Balasescu (Ph.D. 2004)
Program in Fashion Design, Royal University for Women, Bahrain. In fall 2004, Dr. Balasescu was a Lecturer at the American University in Paris and at the Center for International Education's Paris Center for Critical Studies.

He Received a Center of German and European Studies Graduate Merit Fellowship from the Fall of 1998 to Winter 2000 and a School of Social Sciences Dean's Summer Fellowship from UC Irvine for pre-dissertation fieldwork in the summer of 2002. His paper, "Democratic Inclusivity and the Commodification of Islamic Dress in France: Unveiling Modernity in the New Europe?" was presented at the Comparativists' Day Conference, Department of Comparative Studies, UCLA in February, 2002. "Orientalism and Fashion Design" was presented at a conference, Stereotyping Arabs, at the Lebanese American University, Beirut, in November, 2001. Echo in "The Guardian," November 13, 2001. He also published an article, "September 11. Nationalism and Violence in the Logic of Globalization" in Scholar Forum, The Journal of the Open Society Institute's Network Scholarship Programs, Special Issue, November 2001. His research on the commodification of hijab in France and Iran is "blurbed" in the 2004 Wenner-Gren Foundation Annual Report. His was one of 8 projects featured, out of a total of 173 awards in 2003.

Erica Bornstein (Ph.D., 2001)
Dr. Bornstein is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Her book The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe has been published by Routledge (2003) and republished by Stanford University press.

Yvonne Braun (Ph.D., 2005)
Dr. Braun is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon, Eugene.

Jennifer Chase (jchase at uci dot edu)
Jennifer Chase is currently writing her dissertation on gay and lesbian Turks in Germany, with support from a James Harvey Fellowship. Her research in Germany was funded by the DAAD, the Department of Anthropology and the Schoo of Social Sciences. She attended San Francisco State's Sexuality, Society and Health Institute. She received a Regents' Predissertation Fellowship (Winter 2003). She also contributed the "Berlin" entry for www.glbtq.com, an online scholarship resource for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer history and current issues. Her review of Arlene Stein's The Stranger Next Door can be found in the Summer 2003 issue of Anthropological Quarterly.

Jesse Cheng (Ph.D., 2007)
Jesse studies the use of cultural expertise in American death penalty sentencing. In particular, he tries to make sense of the play between the anthropology of law, anthropology in the law, and death as a metaphor for ethnographic failure. His research was supported by the Department of Anthropology and the National Science Foundation.

Yoon S. Choi (yoonsc at uci dot edu)
Yoon completed her undergraduate studies in English Literature from Scripps College. She then went on to pursue an MA in Humanities at NYU, where she focused mainly on globaliztation, media, national image and how they related to contemporary Korean society. Her MA thesis (Riding the Korean Wave: Hanryu and the South Korean Imaginary) was about the current boom of Korean popular culture in different parts of East and Southeast Asia. Also related to the theme of the mediatization of Korean culture and national image, her work on Korea's hosting of the 2002 FIFA World Cup is due to be published as a chapter in Football Goes East, an edited edition by Routledge. She has presented papers regarding both of these topics at annual conferences held by UC Berkeley's Center for Korean Studies. She is currently conducting dissertation research in Korea with the support of the SSRC and the Korea Foundation.

Kimberley Coles (Ph.D., 2003)
Dr. Coles is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Redlands. Her essay "Election Day: The Construction of Democracy through Technique," appeared in Cultural Anthropology vol. 19, no.4. Her book, Democratic Designs: International intervention and electoral practices in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina, has been published in 2007 by the University of Michigan Press.

She conducted field research in Bosnia-Herzegovina supported by an Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation Ph.D. Dissertation Fellowship. Kim was selected to participate in the Law and Society Summer Institute in Chicago (June 2001) and in the Law and Society Graduate Student Workshop in Budapest (July 2001) and in Vancouver (May 2002). She will have a chapter in the edited volume, Bosnia: Picking up the Pieces, edited by Xavier Bougarel and Ger Duijzings. She won essay prizes in competitions of both the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe Student Paper Competition in 2001, and has an article in the Political and Legal Anthropology Review (2002) "Ambivalent Builders: Europeanization, the production of difference, and internationals in Bosnia-Herzegovina" [18.1 (2002): 1-81]. In 2002 she was named the Lauds and Laurels Campuswide Outstanding Graduate Student at UC Irvine.

Megan Crowley-Matoka (Ph.D., 2001)
Dr. Crowley has accepted a tenure-track position in the Departments of Medicine and Anthropology, VA Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion, University of Pittsburg. Dr. Crowley was a Fellow at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics and a Visiting Research Scholar, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Chicago in 2001-02.

James A. Egan (Ph.D., 1998)
Dr. Egan is an economic anthropologist who did his doctoral dissertation research in Yap State, Micronesia on the cultural topography of wealth, funded by a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. He is currently a lecturer for the UCI Department of Anthropology.

Karen Dalzell Drummond (Ph.D. 2007)
Dr. Drummond's dissertation, "Learning to Care for the Dying: An Anthropological Examination of Palliative Care Education in American Biomedicine," was based upon fieldwork conducted in a longitudinal palliative medicine training program for internal medicine residents at a major medical center in Southern California. Her continuing research interests include: ongoing developments in medical education, particularly regarding palliative medicine; biomedical attitudes and practices regarding aging patients; and the contentious issue of pain management for various patient populations. During the 2008-2009 year, Dr. Drummond is teaching courses in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in a one-year full-time instructor position, and is also serving as a seminar leader for the team-taught medical ethics course in the Division of Medical Humanities at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.

Thomas Douglas (Ph.D. 2004)
Tom Douglas's research has focused on Cambodian immigrants in both Long Beach, California and the Greater Seattle-Tacoma area of Washington State. His research addresses key immigrant issues of religious change and identification, economic adaptability and the affect of inner-city urban life. His research challenges the popular position that large numbers of Cambodians have affective disorders due to their Killing Fields experiences and instead suggests that the "crisis" in Cambodian-American communities stems from the ethnically subordinate position into which these refugees have been inserted in U.S. inner cities. He further claims that maintaining a fluid religious identity is one means by which Cambodian immigrants resist and even change their subordinate position in the American inner city. Tom Douglas was funded by an SSRC Fellowship for Religion and Immigration (2000-2001) and also a UC Pacific Rim Fellowship (2002-2003).

Tina Gehrig (Ph.D., 2005)
Tina is a researcher at the Swiss Academy of Sciences. Tina's research, entitled "Symptoms in/of Exile: the Afghan Experience of Asylum in Germany," examines German asylum and foreigner laws and procedures as they are experienced by Afghan refugees. It is funded by Dissertation Fellowships from the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. Achievements: German Marshall Fund of the United States, Dissertation Research Fellowship, 2002-2003; Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, Ph.D. Dissertation Fellowship 2002-2003; Fulbright Award 2002-2003 (declined); Social Sciences Research Council, Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, Dissertation Fellowship 2002-2003 (declined); Center for German and European Studies (Berkeley) Predissertation Fellowship 2001; UC Regents' Predissertation Fellowship, Fall 2001; W. Gnther Award of the University of Neuchtel (Switzerland) 1996. Presented papers at the American Anthropological Association Conference, Chicago, November 2003; the Mediterranean Ethnological Summer Symposium (MESS 9), Piran, Slovenia, 16-21, September 2002; the German Graduate Studies Conference of the University of Virginia, 1-3 March, 2002; the Center for Comparative Social Analysis, UCLA, 1 February 2002; the Summer School "Genealogies of Modernity" of the Interdisciplinary Network on Globalization, Amsterdam, Summer 2001.

Ester Hernandez (Ph.D., 2002)
Dr. Hernandez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Chicano Studies at California State University, Long Beach.

James R. Hess (Ph.D., 2001)
Dr. Hess is an economic anthropologist who did his doctoral dissertation research in the Marshall Islands and within the Marshallese community of Orange County. He was a Fulbright Fellow in the Marshall Islands from 1993-1994. He is currently a researcher in epidemiology for the UCI medical school.

Karen Holliday Gill (Ph.D., 2003)
She was a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow from 2003-2004. She was also awarded a grant from the California Program on Access to Care for her dissertation research on botanicas and healthcare alternatives in the Latino community of Orange County, California. She also received a Lilly Endowment Hispanic Fund Scholarship. She received the UC Mexus Dissertation Grant in 2000, and was named a Lilly Endowment Inc./Hispanic Scholar Fund Scholar in 2000 and 2001. She had been a researcher at UCLA, and had also developed an acting career before her untimely passing in 2009.

Justine Hyde (Ph.D., 2002)

Justine Hanson (Ph.D. 2007) is a social research consultant and writer based in Boston.

She conducted 15 months of field research in Nicaragua supported by an International Dissertation Field Research Fellowship (2003-2004) from the Social Science Research Council. Her dissertation, "Coaxing Capital and Re-Inventing the Nation: Promoting Investment in Neoliberal Nicaragua," examines the social and cultural practices deployed to attract foreign investment to Nicaragua. Her work argues that promoting Nicaragua as a destination for investment is less about actual foreign investment, and more about creating a neoliberal capitalist imaginary that produces the nation-state and its citizens in new ways.

Her research was also supported by a UC Regents' Dissertation Writing Fellowship (2006), a UC Regents' Pre-Dissertation Fellowship (2003), and in 2000 she was the recipient of a Global Peace and Conflict Studies Fellowship and a UCI Graduate Fellowship.

Jennifer Heung (Ph.D., 2005)
She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at St. Mary's College of California.

Edward D. Lowe (Ph.D., 1999)
Dr. Lowe is a psychological anthropologist who did his doctoral dissertation research in Chuuk State, Micronesia, on stress and coping among adolescents and youth, funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. He was an Assistant Research Anthropologist at UCLA and is currently Associate Professor of Anthropology at Soka University.

Victoria Luong (Ph.D., 2006)
She received a Fulbright IIE dissertation research award and a University of California Pacific Rim Research Grant for her project "In Pursuit of Modernity: The Making of Modern Mothers in Northern Vietnam."

Michelle Madsen-Camacho (Ph.D., 2000)
Dr. Madsen-Camacho did her dissertation research on the tourism industry in Mexico. She was a Fulbright Fellow in Bolivia in 1997. Dr. Camacho is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Ethnic Studies at the University of San Diego.

Juliet McMullin (Ph.D., 1999)
Dr. McMullin is a medical anthropologist who has conducted research with Latino populations of the United States and with native Hawaiians. She was a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow from 2000-2001. Beginning fall 2004, Dr. McMullin has joined the faculty of the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside.

Sylvia Martin (Ph.D., 2009)
Dr. Martin is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Babson College. Her dissertation, "Fantasy at Work: The Culture of Production in the Hollywood and Hong Kong Media Industries" is based on her participant observation and interviews at various film/TV studios and production companies in Hollywood and Hong Kong, and was supported by the University of California Pacific Rim Research Program. Dr. Martin's dissertation examined commercial media production as a cultural practice at both a macro and a micro level. On a macro level, Dr. Martin investigated how postcolonialism and trade agreements impacted the career trajectories of media workers and their industries. On a micro level, she explored the social relations on the "production floor" of film sets, where Dr. Martin worked and observed. Martin demonstrates that in the immediate space of the film set, media workers simultaneously produce and receive imagery. Martin argues that despite the profit-orientation of commercial film/TV industries, the imagined, abstract audience "out there" recedes from the commercial production sites, with media workers mediating the imagery for their own pleasure and purposes. She also explored how media workers contend with the cultural and ontological complexity of laboring across worlds of fiction and non-fiction, life and death, in the pursuit of spectacle. Publications include a book chapter translated into Chinese, published by Oxford University Press, as well as an article in Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies. Chapters in edited volumes on the concept of risk and on media production are forthcoming. Future research projects include a study of how religion figures in the production processes of commercial film/TV.

Shellie McKinley (smasri uci dot edu)
Shellie's dissertation research focuses on the scientific and cultural production of knowledge at archaeological sites. She is attempting to understand those processes and micro-processes by which artifacts become objects of signification of cultural and national identity. Her work examines scientific practice, cultural heritage, and the production of Italian and European identities. Shellie has extensive archaeological training and has been working closely with a team of archaeologists in Pompeii, Italy. Her dissertation research on archaeological practice in the new Europe was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Caroline Melly (PhD 2008)
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Smith College
Dr. Melly conducted field research in Dakar, Senegal, supported by the National Science Foundation (Law and Social Science and Cultural Anthropology programs) and by the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program. Her dissertation was entitled "Anticipating Returns: Investment, Migration, and Urban Futures in Dakar, Senegal," and it considered the complex and contradictory expectations, regulations, and logics that govern neoliberal development in urban Dakar, Senegal. She is particularly interested in how increasingly restricted international migration policies (particularly in Europe and the United States) collide with open market pro-investment policies in Senegal to produce particular ideas about economic participation and future possibility in urban Dakar.

Amanda Moore (PhD 2008)
Amanda Moore spent 2008-2009 as a visiting professor for the Student Recommended Faculty Program at UCI, where she is the resident expert in an academic topic chosen by the undergraduates, "the anthropology of blood sports." Over the last five years, she has taught at several local colleges and universities.  Her dissertation "Whale Stories: An Ethnography of Late Modern Nature" was funded by the UC Pacific Rim Grant (2001/2002) and the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (2001/2002). She is currently working on developing the thesis as a book.

Sheena Nahm (snahm uci dot edu)
Sheena Nahm graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001, where she received Bachelor of Arts degrees in Biological Basis of Behavior (biopsychology) and Anthropology. Since then, she has also received her Masters in Public Health from Drexel University, with an emphasis in Community Health and Prevention. During that time, she was involved in several research projects ranging from health issues among refugees and asylum seekers to food insecurity among urban African American women. Her master's thesis evaluated the effectiveness of hepatitis B multi-media education among Asian immigrant youth in Philadelphia. In the summer of 2005, she conducted preliminary field research in New York and Los Angeles, working with the US headquarters of Mdecins Sans Frontires (MSF), an international human rights organization that provides emergency medical relief in nearly 70 countries. For her preliminary fieldwork, she received a 2004-2005 UCI grant, funded by the Regents of the University of California and the State of California. Her current research interests relate to the adaptation of medical programs from the United States to parts of East Asia; in particular, she is focusing on the implementation of play therapy programs in South Korea for children diagnosed with attachment disorders. In addition to issues of transnational knowledge production and regulation of medical program protocols across borders, she is interested in how the adaptation of a play therapy program affects local caretakers' and practitioners' perceptions of nature-culture, normal-abnormal, and work-play with respect to the malleability of social behavior. She is currently in Korea conducting dissertation research with the support of the Korea Foundation.

Sheila O'Rourke (sorourke at uci dot edu)
She has a Master of Fine Arts (UCSD) in video and performance, and applies these skills to experimental approaches to ethnographic research. She conducted dissertation research in south central Anatolia on identity formations, gender, and relations of power in the household setting through the venue of cyberspace. Four participants of her study have posted autobiographical video web pages on the Internet and more are in production. She has received funding for this project, including preparatory summer grants, funding from UCI's Spring Fellowship for Anthropology Graduate Students Advanced to Candidacy (2002), and funds from a philanthropic donor. She is currently a Lecturer in Anthropology at UC Irvine.

Martin Otanez (Ph.D., 2004)
Dr. Otanez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Coloado, Denver. Previously, he was been awarded a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Tobacco Research and Education, University of California-San Francisco (2004-2006). His dissertation addresses tobacco workers and practices of U.S. tobacco firms in Malawi (Africa). His paper on economic dependence and the tobacco industry in Malawi is included in a publication by the Malawi-German Programme for Democracy and Decentralization (forthcoming). In 2003, he directed the film UP IN SMOKE about tobacco labor in Malawi that aired on BBC World Television in Fall 2003. He was awarded a U.C. President's Dissertation Fellowship in 2003-4.

Erind Pajo (Ph.D., 2005)
Dr. Pajo's dissertation is entitled "International Advancement, or The Essence of Emigration. An Ethnography of the Albanians of Greece." This work has been supported by the Program on Global Security and Cooperation of the Social Science Research Council, the Cultural Anthropology Program of the National Science Foundation, the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, and the School of Social Sciences and the Department of Anthropology of the University of California, Irvine. He is currently a lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, UC Irvine.

Judith Pajo (Ph.D., 2008)
Dr. Pajo's dissertation, "Recycling Culture: Environmental Beliefs and Economic Practices in Post-1990 Germany", is based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin. Her project was funded by the National Science Foundation's Societal Dimensions of Engineering, Science, and Technology Program (Award 52229); the Center for German and European Studies, Institute of European Studies, University of California, Berkeley; the Newkirk Center for Science and Society, University of California, Irvine; and the Department of Anthropology and the School of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. She now lives in New York City, where she continues to teach, as well as research and write, comparatively, involving recycling in the United States.

Kyriaki Papageorgiou (Ph.D., 2007)
Dr. Papageorgiou's dissertation is entitled "Seeds of Doubt: Genetic Narratives and Ethnographic Sequences in Contemporary Egypt." Her field research was supported by the National Science Foundation, Science and Society Program (2004-5), the Wenner-Gren Foundation (2005), and the Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation (2003-4). In 2006, Papageorgiou received the Regents Dissertation Writing Fellowship and a Graduate Student Fellowship from the Newkirk Center for Science and Society. In 2007, Dr. Papageorgiou received UNESCO fellowship to return in Egypt and begin revising her dissertation into a book manuscript. Dr. Papageorgiou was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, at the Virtual Knowledge Studio, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science in Amsterdam in the spring of 2008. She is currently working with the Science Counsellor the Delegation of the European Commission in Egypt. Her position in the Delegation brings her dissertation research into more policy-oriented work and analysis. She can be reached at kyriaki.papageorgiou@ec.europa.eu

Robert Phillips (Ph.D., 2008)
In February 2009, Dr. Phillips was appointed a Postdoctoral Writing Fellow at the Centre for Asia Pacific Social Transformation Studies (CAPSTRANS) at the University of Wollongong, Australia. His dissertation, "Queering Online: Transnational Sexual Citizenship in Singapore," is currently being revised into a manuscript. In it, Dr. Phillips begins with the idea that homosexual acts are still illegal in Singapore and most public gay events are prohibited. As such, a significant number of gay men have chosen to interact in cyberspace. The introduction of the Internet has permitted these gay Singaporeans to create websites that allow them to network with one another and to discuss issues that affect their communities; it has also facilitated interactions with gay men on a global level. His research shows how such virtual encounters not only conflate the local and the global, but act as a third domain of sexual identity, one that in combination with regional and Western notions of sexual identity, has led not just to new ideas of what it means to be a gay Singaporean, but fundamental reconceptualizations of the Singaporean nation itself. He argues that gay Singaporeans are not inauthentic exceptions; their lifeworlds illustrate how for Southeast Asians more generally, contemporary "globalization" works through regional as well as global imaginaries and is powerfully shaped by the Internet.

Dr. Phillips's next research project will focus on the role of the Internet in influencing social policy in Singapore. Beginning in mid-2007, several civil society organizations challenged longstanding governmental policies dealing with sexual minorities and the role of the church within civil society. Organizations representing opposing viewpoints on these issues are utilizing an array of new and emerging technologies including blogs, online videos, "twittering," and podcasting in order to get their messages heard. Dr. Phillips will examine these and other religiopolitical movements in greater detail to further understand the manner by which the Internet is facilitating social change within Singapore.

Andres Salcedo (Ph.D., 2006)
Dr. Salcedo Fidalgo is a professor of anthropology at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogota. Admitted in 1998. Fulbright Grant recipient for graduate studies in the US in 1998. Received the Regent's Dissertation Writing Fellowship in 2005. He is Assistant Professor of the Department of Anthropology at Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogot. His dissertation entitled "Politics of Memory and Reconstruction: Forced Internal Displacement in Contemporary Colombia" analyzes the particular ways in which in the current Colombian context of war Andean, Afro-Colombian and indigenous groups resettle in the city of Bogot focusing simultaneously on the material world that these communities had to abandon as well as on the new environments they build when they move.

Christina Schwenkel (Ph.D., 2004)
Dr. Schwenkel is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Riverside. She was a post-doctoral teaching fellow in the Introduction to Humanities (IHUM) program at Stanford University. Dr. Schwenkel was also awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship at the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.

Her dissertation addressed the visual practices of memory and the cultural politics of transnational commemoration in Vietnam. Her research has been supported by grants from the UC Pacific Rim and Association for Women in Science. She also received a DAAD grant in 2001 to carry out archival work in Berlin on Vietnamese films, and she was awarded a Regent's Dissertation Writing Fellowship (fall 2001). Her book appeared in 2009 with Indiana University Press.

Victor Torres (Ph.D., 1998)
Dr. Torres is Associate Professor in the Department of Chicano and Latin American Studies at California State University, Fresno.

Astrid Ulloa (Ph.D., 2003)
In April 2004, Routledge Press accepted for publication Dr. Ulloa's book manuscript The Ecological Native: Indigenous Peoples' Movements and Eco-governmentality in Colombia. Dr. Ulloa is currently a Researcher at the Instituto Colombiano de Antropologa e Historia in Bogota. In the words of a reviewer for the Press, "This is a brilliant work that frames the by now well-worn link between indigenous peoples' identities and rights claims with the environmental movements at the global and local level. It properly and effectively, in my view, utilizes a Foucauldian approach to governmentality to delineate and evaluate the struggles and contradictions generated by contemporary challenges to existing institutional power relations in the state and state system by non-state and transnational social agents, and then, in turn links this analysis to the construction and reconstruction of indigenous identities."

She received funding from the Inter-American Foundation to support her graduate training. She conducted field research in Colombia supported by COLCIENCIAS-Colombia and Instituto Colombiano de Antropologa e Historia-ICANH. She is a researcher at the national institute of anthropology in Colombia, Instituto Colombiano de Antropologa e Historia-ICANH.

Neha Vora (Ph.D., 2008)
In July 2008, Dr. Vora became Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M University, where she is also an Associated Faculty with the Women's Studies Program. Dr. Vora's current manuscript, titled "Participatory Exclusion: The Emirati State, Forms of Belonging, and Dubai's Indian Middle-Class," investigates the effects of Dubai's aggressive post-oil development strategy, which relies upon foreign investment and labor while denying migrant belonging. As citizens become a diminishing minority, the UAE state is increasingly interested in policing the boundaries of national identity, and state discourses often stress that foreigners are not migrants but temporary "guest workers." Vora, through detailed ethnographic observations and interviews, demonstrates that Indians, despite having no access to formal citizenship, actually experience Dubai as an extension of India. However, middle-class Indians are also integral to the legitimacy of the Emirati state and participate in reifying the division between citizen and foreigner in the UAE. While structural inequality is often thought to be the result of state-sanctioned exploitation of migrant laborers, Vora argues that it is actually maintained through the convergence of expatriate and governmental conceptual vocabularies, which both consider economy, culture, and nation as distinct bounded domains to which only certain populations have access.

Dr. Vora's next research project will focus on the influx of American institutions of higher learning into the Gulf Arab States. She is interested in exploring this topic from a macro and micro perspective. First, she will consider the bureaucratic, economic, and state entanglements and negotiations that go into the implementation of branches of US-accredited universities in the Gulf. What have been the successes and failures to date, and what are the intentions and goals of those involved in the planning process? Second, she will consider the individual experiences of students and faculty at these universities and how American, Gulf, and other cultural logics surrounding gender, national identity, citizenship, Islam, and academic freedom come into contact--and are renegotiated--in these spaces.