Marie-Fatima is a PhD student in the Social and Behavioral Sciences program and a student in the Graduate Certificate Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She takes a justice-oriented approach to public health, and is interested in melding frameworks of critical race theory and Black feminist theory with her public health research. Marie-Fatima will conduct a series of focus groups and in-depth interviews with people engaged in the sex trades, working towards understanding police violence against this community. This project builds on exploratory research done from 2021-2022 by the Global Health Justice Partnership and the Sex Worker Project at the Urban Justice Center in the form of literature reviews and in-depth interviews which elucidated a variety of potential responses to police violence. In this current phase of the project, she will be conducting focus groups and interviews where she shares the results of the exploratory study with people engaged in the sex trades to understand whether the findings resonate and to gage the utility and feasibility of a participatory action research project around this issue. Marie-Fatima will be partnering with the Connecticut-based Sex Workers and Allies Network (SWAN), as well as partners based in New York City.As part of these focus groups, she will be recruiting interested participants to form a participatory action research team. This series of focus groups builds toward the next phase of the project, where the team comprised of people engaged in the sex trades and researchers based in academia will conceive of and conduct a participatory action research project based on the focus group findings and the original exploratory research.
Maurice is a PhD student in the joint African-American studies and Sociocultural Anthropology program. He is currently exploring issues of education inequality, masculinity studies, and citizenship across the African Diaspora, with focuses in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States. Maurice will be doing participant observation research at Franklin Field in Philadelphia, USA to explore the relationship between sports governing bodies and organization culture within high school and collegiate track and field. Specifically, he will do semi-structured interviews with coaches and administrators who participated in the 127th running of the Penn Relays Carnival, with supplemental interviews with organizers of other prominent relays (Mt. SAC, Drake and Texas Relays). He wonders how organizers work with corporate sponsors, university interests and navigate local and national legal boundaries in order to facilitate these meets. He has been thinking about these annual spectacular events as a type of pilgrimage, with a call for attention to not just what is happening on the track/field, but more broadly to the phenomenon of spectatorship and witnessing. He is also interested in thinking with how tradition is invented and sustained. He hopes to have both breadth and depth of how a meet comes together, and think through the implications of these decisions on student-athletes and their families.
Chloe is a dual-degree Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Most broadly conceived, Chloe’s research interests focus on the cultural, social, and historical processes through which bodies, nations, and their borders take shape in the U.S. Their research agenda spans the subtopics of domesticity, reproduction, family, and genetics as they contribute to the maintenance of a racialized settler-colonial ideal in the U.S. Chloe will conduct an ethnographic study of state control and narratives of transgender reproduction through individual interviews with lawyers, policymakers, and advocates and through observation of the legal processes that impact trans families in New York family courts and institutions that support LGBTQIA+ legal rights. This ethnographic approach is crucial to understanding the institutionalization of social practices that govern transgender people and will chart the ways emergent state categories (like “gender identity”) are being managed by those directly impacted. This summer research will provide the empirical basis for the formal legal portion of Chloe’s dissertation work and will set the groundwork for their broader project of analyzing rhetorical and institutionalizing practices of the state as well as the way such practices are received by those who encounter them.