PhD Alumni Listing

• Job Placement: Assistant Professor in African American Studies at Georgetown University
• Webpage: https://africanamericanstudies.georgetown.edu/people
• Committee: Alexander-Floyd, Nikol G (chair); BROOKS, ETHEL (internal member); Busia, Abena (internal member); Murch, Donna (outside member); Dinzey-Flores, Zaire (outside member)
• Dissertation: "Where shall the monsters live?"

Bio

An interdisciplinary scholar who studies how housing policies are shaped by race, gender, political economy, and ideology, her untitled manuscript-in-progress historically and ethnographically traces how low-income black women have been affected by post-1970s changes in public and affordable housing policies and advocacy. Her research project also examines the contemporary landscape of affordable housing policy and politics to better understand why low-income black women remain vulnerable to eviction, displacement, and housing insecurity in cities like the District of Columbia. Additionally, her work presents the organizing challenges low-income black women tenant activists in D.C. face as they organize to combat the city's reduction and privitization of affordable housing.

Abstract

My dissertation historically and ethnographically traces how low-income black women have been affected by recent changes in public and affordable housing policies and advocacy. This dissertation examines the contemporary landscape of affordable housing policy and politics to better understand why low-income black women remain vulnerable to eviction, displacement, and housing insecurity in cities like the District of Columbia. Feminist scholars have documented how low-income black mothers won tenant rights and greater access to public housing during the civil rights movement. Yet very little research has examined the post-1970s changes to affordable housing policy and black women’s tenant activism. In order to capture the empirical and theoretical complexity of low-income black women’s experiences in affordable housing policy and politics, this study employs a new epistemological approach called black feminist materialism. Black feminist materialism combines black feminist theories including intersectionality, critical theory, and feminist theories on the welfare state. Black feminist materialism provides the theoretical perspective needed to conduct critical ethnography, critical discourse analysis, and historical materialism. Armed with my feminist-minded theoretical perspective and after conducting archival and primary source research, I discovered federal and local housing bureaucrats used negative stereotypes about low-income black mothers to advocate post-1970s market reforms of public and affordable housing. Borrowing a term originally coined by critical urbanist Ananya Roy, I call these stereotypes poverty truths because these negative narratives facilitated policy interventions that had disciplinary and carceral effects. Housing officials used poverty truths to reduce funding, conduct mass evictions, and advocate for character rehabilitation services (e.g., job readiness/parenting classes) in exchange for housing assistance. In order to understand tenant activists’ response to these policy reforms, I analyzed the District of Columbia’s affordable housing advocacy community. To examine this community, I conducted participant observation as a community organizer for 18 months, starting in late 2013 and ending in early 2015. Moreover, I conducted thirty non-profit staffers and ten low-income black women living in public and affordable housing. Post-1970s market reforms to affordable housing led to D.C. non-profit developers and service providers leading affordable housing production and advocacy. No longer leading tenant campaigns, low-income black women are recruited into non-profit developers and service providers’ advocacy models. These non-profits’ advocacy efforts are limited to regulatory reform (i.e., small improvements to existing laws), often ignoring or reducing black women tenant activists’ demands for structural reforms, which included calls for massive state investment in living-wage work, public and affordable housing, and childcare supports. This dissertation concludes with reflections on how non-profit organizing groups and low-income black women tenant activists can help develop tenant solidarity and a political analysis to counter the negative consequences of market and disciplinary housing reforms.

• Job Placement: Assistant Professor, School of Law, University of Warwick
• Committee: Decena, Carlos (chair); Goldstein, Daniel (co-chair); Martinez-San Miguel, Yolanda (internal member); Maldonado-Torres, Nelson (internal member); Fuentes, Marisa (internal member); Rodriguez, Robyn (outside member);
• Dissertation: "Ningún ser humano es ilegal"

Bio

Born and raised in Bogotá, Carolina Alonso Bejarano is a community organizer, writer, editor, translator and DJ. She is an Assistant Professor of Law at Warwick University, and she holds a Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her research interests lie at the intersection of decolonial feminism and migration studies, particularly as it relates to interethnic immigrants’ rights activism in the United States. She is the author of Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science (Duke University Press, 2019), a collaboratively written book that explores the immigrants’ rights movement in New Jersey and the possibilities of using ethnography as a tool for decolonization. She is a collective member of Sangría Editora, a publishing house based in New York City and Santiago de Chile, and in her spare time she mixes music and practices poi in hopes of one day becoming an awesome fire spinner

Abstract

“Ningún Ser Humano es Ilegal: Decolonial Feminisms & Immigrants’ Rights Grassroots Organizing in New Jersey” is a feminist decolonial study of the immigrants’ rights movement in Freehold Borough, NJ. As an interdisciplinary project, the dissertation draws on multiple methods –primarily archival research, oral history and four years of ethnographic fieldwork– and argues for the use of dehumanization rather than illegality as a framework for understanding the debate around undocumented immigration in the United States.

• Job Placement: Lecturer, WGSS, UMass Amherst
• Committee: Ethel Brooks, Jasbir Puar, Nancy Hewitt, Temma Kaplan, Karen Tongson
• Dissertation: "In the crevices of global capitalism"

Bio

Stina’s research and teaching interests include queer theory, environmental justice and ecofeminism, and critical perspectives on the prison system. More specifically, she has researched access to land among queer communities in the rural US South, and is currently asking how histories of land tenure, sexuality, and religion have been intertwined in the expansion of the US nation-state. As a teacher, Stina is particularly interested in feminist pedagogy and student involvement both in and outside of the classroom. She has taught Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers and Mount Holyoke, and at Rikers Island through the Prison Education Initiative.

Abstract

“In the Crevices of Global Capitalism: Rural Queer Community Formation” is an interdisciplinary study of a cluster of intentional communities in Tennessee, referred to by residents as the “Gayborhood.” It asks what factors influence rural community-building, and how queer rurality is linked to larger historical, economic, and political patterns. As an interdisciplinary project, the dissertation draws on multiple methods, primarily ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, oral history, and media analysis. The project studies the Gayborhood not just from an LGBT history view, but more crucially from the perspective of the history of the land on which it is located. It argues that the creation of a queer community in rural Tennessee is predicated on several waves of displacement of other groups from the land, through an ongoing process of settler colonialism and capitalist exploitation. The dissertation makes four main interventions in the field of Queer Studies: First, it provides a reading of the concept of “labor of belonging.” The Gayborhood is created through constant labor, which is for the most part unremunerated, and not always acknowledged. This labor creates a multifaceted belonging: people belonging to a community, land belonging to people, and people belonging to the land. Second, the dissertation presents a theory of materiality and excess. The Gayborhood is in several ways built on waste: the utilizing of literal trash in building, discarded food in cooking, and also being located in a metaphorical post-industrial wasteland. Third, the project places rural queer intentional communities within the landscape of settler colonialism. The dissertation shows how the claiming of land by queer groups is predicated on the naturalization of white US citizenship, and the erasure of histories and presents of Native presence on the land. Fourth, the dissertation uses the concept of fermentation as metaphor and method. It poses that the process of fermentation, whereby microorganisms interact with feedstock materials in a process that combines decomposition and creation, can be used to explain how locations such as the Gayborhood become possible, and how they change.

• Job Placement: Instructor III and Graduate Studies Coordinator at at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus, Trinidad
• Webpage: https://sta.uwi.edu/crgs/july2011/JeanneRoach-Baptiste.asp
• Committee: Abena Busia, Ethel Brooks, Aisha Khan
• Dissertation: "Gender practices and relations at the Jamaat Al Muslimeen in Trinidad"

Bio

Jeanne has taught at Rutgers; Devry Collge of Technology; Essex County College, Newark, NJ, and Bloomfield College, Bloomfield, NJ. Her research interests include Caribbean feminisms, Black feminist criticism; borders and boundaries; Islam; African women’s spirituality; resistance and revolution in the African diaspora; African Caribbean History and philosophy; and feminist pedagogy.

Abstract

In an effort to bring into view critically—as actors rather than as spectacle—Muslim men and especially Muslim women in non-Islamic countries and to examine their constitutive individual as well as collective religious and social identities—that is their contextual realities as opposed to just the ideal of Islam—this project seeks via ethnographic research to investigate gender practices and relations among Muslims at the Masjid al Muslimeen and Madressa located in Trinidad and Tobago. This small community’s mundane yet resilient existence amid national, global, historical, geographical, physical, and sociopolitical ambivalences and contradictions begs revisiting how we read, interpret, represent, and deploy extant categories, theories, and methodologies articulating gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, and nation.

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• Job Placement: Associate Dean of Students, Inclusion, and Involvement at Rhodes College
• Webpage: https://www.rhodes.edu/content/student-life
• Committee: Hawkesworth, Mary (chair); Wall, Cheryl; Butterfield, Sherri-Ann; Jeffries, Hasas
• Dissertation: "Everyday men, extraordinary hustles"

Bio

Meredith Davis developed her leadership skills as an undergraduate at St. Mary’s College, where she served on search committees for Dean of Students and Director of Minority Affairs, student representative to the Faculty Senate, and Vice President on the Student Government Association Executive Board. After earning her M.A., Meredith went on to a career in education administration, beginning with the Office of Humanities in the Baltimore Board of Education, directing several programs in multicultural education and enhancing opportunities in institutions of higher education, to her current position as Associate Director, Office of Social Justice Education and LGBT Communities at Rutgers University. She has served as instructor or teaching assistant for courses on African American literature, Black political thought, and the Caribbean. Meredith is also a feminist poet who has performed her work in numerous venues.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the complex lives of African American men in Memphis, Tennessee (1925 – 2006), whose vocations and acts of courage afford alternative perspectives on Black masculinity. Comparing the Jim Crow, post-apartheid, and “postracial” eras. The project documents institutional and socially-sanctioned racism over the course of a century in the U.S. south. Crafting an interdisciplinary methodology that encompasses archival investigations, critical race and gender theories, and analysis of visual culture, I conduct case studies of the heroism of dockhand Tom Lee, the Sanitation Workers Strike of 1968, and the depiction of twenty-first century urban life in Hustle and Flow to disrupt pernicious and pervasive stereotypes of Black men. I demonstrate how a culture of emasculation generated practices of subjugation and systemic oppression, which operated over time and through changing modes of employment and economic dispossession to produce Black men as racialized and gendered subjects. I also illuminate Black men’s creative resistance to these modes of subjugation, identifying diverse means devised by Black men who struggled against great odds to build lives of dignity and win public respect.

• Job Placement: Harvard Law School 2020-2022; Assistant Professor (non-tenure track), WGS, Rutgers University; 2015-2017 GRID Postdoctoral Fellow, Gender Research Institute, Darthmouth College
• Dissertation: "Revolutionary Humanism and Geographies of Survival in Afro-Caribbean and Feminist Thought"

Bio

Max Hantel's research intertwines feminist and Afro-Caribbean philosophy to explore alternative political and ecological imaginaries of humanism. His dissertation, "Revolutionary Humanism and Geographies of Survival in Afro-Caribbean and Feminist Thought,” traces a distinct materialist tradition borne of the Caribbean's history as a site of both intense violence and creolization, often mobilized around the distinction between different kinds of humanity and between humans and nonhumans. He looks especially to sites where who counts symbolically is a matter of life and death and the environment impinges on the supposed sovereignty of the human: "natural disaster" zones like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or the Mississippi flood of 1927. Finally, he addresses the increasing importance of the discourse of the "Anthropocene," the idea that humanity is not longer just a biological agent but a geological agent. Broadening out from the Caribbean, he argues that thinkers from the Global South have continually developed survival tactics in the face of these dangerous interpenetrations of colonial power, economic exploitation and environmental destruction (conditions faced throughout the world since at least the fifteenth-century) and generated new ways of making livable worlds.

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• Job Placement: Deputy Editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society at Northeastern University
• Committee: E. Cohen, J. Puar, J. Livingston, A. Aizura
• Dissertation: Bodies of Value: Transnational Discourses and Practices of Plastic Surgery

Bio

Andrew Mazzaschi received a B.A. in Women’s Studies and Literary and Cultural Studies from the College of William and Mary in 2003. After completing his PhD in 2014, he continued in his role of Deputy Editor at Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society as the journal makes the transition from Rutgers to Northeastern University in Boston.

Abstract

Proceeding through case studies of actors involved in transnational instantiations of plastic surgery practice or discourse, this dissertation demonstrates that a transnational lens illuminates new dimensions of plastic surgery’s history and its contemporary manifestations. Examining plastic surgeons’ development efforts after WWII, the transnational charity Operation Smile, and cosmetic surgery tourism to Johannesburg, South Africa, the dissertation examine how surgeons’ and patients’ involvement in transnational work affects their understandings race, gender, and health. I argue that, in all three cases, the demarcation between reconstructive and cosmetic surgery is racialized: On the one hand, cosmetic patients understood as paradigmatically white and from the “developed world,” enacting forms of self-investment through medical markets. On the other hand, recipients of reconstructive surgery, associated with particular geographical areas and racialized as nonwhite, are understood as objects of external investment. I show that the concept of race operative in transnational surgical contexts is not, first and foremost, an anatomical one; rather surgeons produce a nonbiological but still embodied conception of race that is linked to cultural and economic difference. Finally, I show that plastic surgery’s expansive conception of health—incorporating bodily, psychic, and social dimensions—is precisely what allows it to engage in the forms of racialization I describe and what enables the specialty to incorporate itself into a variety of economic rationalities.

• Job Placement: Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship, European Commission (2015-2017)
• Committee: J. Regulska, H. Davidson, M. Hawkesworth, E. Grosz
• Dissertation: Women’s Labor in the Global City: Representations of Transnational Subjects and Spaces in Contemporary Visual Geographies

Bio

Laura Lovin received a B.A. in Special Education in 1997 and a B.A. in Sociology in 2000 from the University of Bucharest, Romania. She also received an M.A. degree in Cultural Studies from University of Bucharest in 2000 and an M.A. in Gender Studies from Central European University in Budapest, Hungary in 2003.

After completing her PhD in 2014, she received a two-year Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship from the European Commission. Her research project is "The Race, Class and Gender of Transnational Urban Labour: Romanian Workers in the Cities of London and NYC,” and her collaborating institution is the Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research at London South Bank University.

Abstract

This dissertation explores depictions of working women in three transnational urban spaces, Sibiu (Romania), Berlin (Germany) and Newark (New Jersey, USA). In the aftermath of the cold war and in the midst of globalization, these cities represent marked sites in the geopolitical axes of "west"/"east." Each city has grappled with labor restructuring, the upward redistribution of wealth, urban dilapidation, and segregation. Each city has also deployed a commodified version of multiculturalism to foster tourism, corporate development, and diverse strategies for reinvestment and revitalization. Within these contexts, I looked for contemporary art projects that render topical phenomena such transnational work migration, changing labor practices, new modes of livelihood, and new gendered, racialized and classed identities. This dissertation relies on data and representational materials collected through extensive multi-location field research in Sibiu, Berlin and Newark. The case study on Sibiu foregrounds working women of three different ethnicities, Romanian, Romani and Saxon, and traces their articulation in relation to practices of transnational work migration. The case study on Berlin continues the engagement with transnational migrant workers. The theme of sexuality constitutes its core analytical dimension, as representations of voluntary and coerced sex work take the center stage of the visual arts projects encountered in Berlin. Finally, in the case of Newark, an U.S. city where work disappeared with the transnationalization of industrial production, the theme of racial neoliberal subject formation informs the analysis of the documentary representation of a young woman's work as a community activist. Interrogating concepts of urbanity, representation, and affect, this research also identifies limitations of recent accounts of affective theories, methodologies and politics, arguing that while taking the affective turn in humanities and social science, researchers should continue to supplement their readings, viewing, and theorizations with contextualized examinations of informed by political economy and inquiries into the meaning making practices of situated subjects.

• Job Placement: Lecturer, Center for Ethnicity and Race, Columbia University
• Committee: N. Hewitt, E. Brooks, J. Puar, A. Ramos-Zayas
• Dissertation: Expulsions and Exceptions: Palestinian Women Refugees and the Politics of Belonging in the Brazilian Nation State

Bio

Bahia Munem received an M.S. in Communication from New Jersey Institute of Technology and holds an M.A. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers. She was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies for her ethnographic project in 2010.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the resettlement of a group of Palestinian Iraq War refugees in Brazil. In 2007, Latin America's largest democracy and self-proclaimed racial democracy made what it claimed was a humanitarian overture by resettling 108 Palestinian refugees displaced from Baghdad as a result of the Iraq War. The majority of them had escaped from Baghdad in 2003 and had been living for nearly five years in a makeshift refugee camp on the border of Jordan and Iraq. Utilizing a multi-method approach, this work examines how Brazil, with its long history of Arab migration, incorporates this specific re-diasporized group into the folds of its much-touted racial democracy, an important arm of Brazilian exceptionalism. In order to address the particularity of Palestinian refugees, and while considering pluralism discourses and other important socio-political dynamics, I engage and extend Edward Said’s framework of Orientalism by analyzing its machinations in Brazil. To closely assess the particularity of the resettled Palestinian refugees (but also Arabs more generally), I consider how already stereotyped Brazilians construct Palestinians in Brazil through an Orientalist lens. This Orientalism, I argue, is a product of a Neo-Orientalist glaze. This formulation takes into consideration the racialized and exoticized constructions of Brazilians in order to examine how these essentialist ideas are reconfigured and reproduced to “Orientalize” other others. In examining the near and distant history of this group, interrogating labor histories and contemporary labor practices, dissecting their incorporation into Brazilian public policies, and interrogating discourses of cultural misrecognitions and problematic Palestinian cultural constructions, I have made significant theoretical interventions and highlighted distinct ways in which members of a minority community are de-subjectified and re-subjectified in the Brazilian context. Moreover, this analysis provides insight into the Brazilian nation-state and the scope and scale of its neoliberal form of statecraft. Considered together, my dissertation engages and traverses a wide range of literatures, crosses disciplinary boundaries, and contributes to multiple fields of study. At the same time, it illuminates in fine detail the daily lives of a group of refugees whose experiences can help us re-imagine the lives of multiply-displaced persons in other times and places.

• Committee: M. Hawkesworth, L. Schein, H. Davidson, M. Gossy
• Dissertation: Politics of Cultural Proximity: Transnational Marriage and Family Making Among Vietnamese Women and Women and South Korean Men in the 21st Century

Bio

Eunsung Lee received a B.A. in English Literature from Dongguk Univeristy, South Korea, and M.A. degrees in English Literature from University of Northern Iowa and Women’s Studies from San Diego State University.

Abstract

This dissertation examines how the idea of cultural proximity is constructed in commercialized marriage and transnational family making among Vietnamese women and South Korean men. Based on ethnographic work in Vietnam and South Korea, my dissertation theorizes cultural proximity in the context of regionalization among Asia-Pacific countries, ethnic identity formation, and social stratification in South Korea. The dissertation argues that the construction of cultural proximity involves disciplinary politics. I explore how the politics of cultural proximity is embedded in Korea’s multicultural policies that aim to socially and culturally assimilate migrant women and children of transnational families. In addition, I analyze the everyday politics of cultural proximity articulated by Koreans who are involved in brokered marriages, cultural assimilation programs, and transnational family making. This study highlights the new transnational formations of social, ideological, economic, and interpersonal relations in South Korea where Vietnamese wives negotiate patriarchal gender roles, ethnic identity, and social stratification. The study extends the theory of cultural proximity to assess the multifaceted regionalization processes in the Asia-Pacific region. It contributes to the study of race and ethnicity in the region by examining immigration, multicultural policies, and cultural assimilation programs in South Korea that are based on the hierarchy of Korean and non-Korean identities. In addition, the study sheds new light on masculinity studies by arguing for more nuanced understandings of Korean men who are involved in unconventional marriage and family making. My analysis of Vietnamese women’s rural-to-rural migration attests to the on-going gender scholarship that critiques women’s upward mobility via transnational marriage. My study confirms that Vietnamese women struggle to find ways to empower themselves in the host country. Lastly, my study of the role of international matchmaking agencies in Vietnamese women’s settlement processes suggests that both the South Korean and Vietnamese government ought to consider the promulgation and enforcement of laws related to matchmaking services that better protect the Vietnamese women.