UCLA - University of California - Los Angeles
10/31/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 10/31/2024 10:10
15 UCLA graduate students selected for Fulbright-Hays Fellowship
The Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program has awarded 15 fellowships to UCLA graduate students, the most chosen from any research university nationwide for the fourth year.
Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, the Fulbright-Hays program allows doctoral candidates to study aspects of a society or societies, including their cultures, economy, history and international relations. The fellowship is designed to contribute to developing and improving the study of modern foreign languages and area studies in the U.S.
The 2024 UCLA Fulbright-Hays fellows come from diverse disciplines. They will conduct their research in Colombia, Egypt, Guinea, Italy, Japan, Morocco, Mexico, Peru, Poland, Nigeria, Spain and Taiwan.
The Division of Graduate Education administers the Fulbright-Hays research abroad program at UCLA. More information is available at the UCLA Fulbright Fellowships website.
The 2024 awardees and their destinations are:
Natasha Bluth, sociology, will study in Poland. Through ethnography and interviews, Bluth's research delves into the gendered and familial aspects of Ukrainian wartime migration to and from Poland. She will investigate how refugees, primarily women and children, navigate displacement and return and how families are restructured in the process. She will also assess the impact of refugee mobility on displaced groups as well as on home and host states.
Adam Boggs, architecture, declined an award to Mexico to accept a tenure-track position with the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Boggs' research compares the functionalist architecture of schools designed by Juan O'Gorman in Mexico City in 1933 with Tijuana's Agua Caliente Technical School. Boggs argues that the North American concept of "leisure" was reinterpreted by the postrevolutionary state in the Federal District to connote "health and education" rather than "vice and spectatorship." The difference in architectural styles and reform policies between the regions demonstrates how Baja maintained its autonomy from the capital by adapting to the political economy of the border.
César Bowley Castillo, sociology, will study in Colombia. Bowley Castillo focuses on understanding how the urban poor, who are often seen as risk-averse, fragmented and politically influenced by clientelism and drug trafficking networks, can become a significant political force. He will specifically study working-class neighborhoods in Cali and Medellín, examining their contrasting political trajectories during the first two decades of the 21st century. This period culminated in the country's largest popular uprising in 2021 and the election of its first leftist president in 2022.
Sunny Chen, history, will study in Morocco. Chen's project focuses on the history of phosphate mining, infrastructure and environmental politics in 20th-century Morocco, especially in the context of anti-colonial struggle and labor movements.
Wesleigh Gates, world arts and cultures/dance, will study in Colombia. Gates' project is a transnational study of how trans and gender-variant populations across the Americas use movement practices to claim the right to exist in hostile public spaces. During the grant period, Gates will conduct ethnographic research with Red Comunitaria Trans, an artist/activist group based in Bogotá.
Sara Greenman-Spear, history, will study in Mexico. Greenman-Spear studies Mexican women's radical political activism over the 1960s and 1970s through the lens of the 1968 Mexico City student movement. This project investigates why women took different paths in their activism before and after 1968, as they diverged into feminist movements, leftist organizing and even guerilla groups. To understand this history, Greenman-Spear will conduct archival research and oral history interviews to explore the political networks, organizations and movements created by these women.
AnnaLise Hoopes, comparative education, will study in Italy, Germany and Ecuador. Her project explores how schools in each country foster empathy. Hoopes is particularly interested in the cultivation of empathy across lines of division, including dimensions of race, class, gender, ability, religion and political ideology, as well as empathy toward animals and nature, or ecological empathy. Through her research, she hopes to elucidate effective strategies to promote empathy on a broader scale - in service of a more inclusive, just and sustainable world.
Sara Hussein, history, will study in Egypt and England. Hussein researches social and intellectual histories of pan-Africanism, internationalism and circuits of exchange in the global south. Her project examines Cairo's role in African anticolonialism networks and in shaping the wider Afro-Asian solidarity movement through archival research of key state and non-state institutions, organizations and their participants in the mid-20th century.
Juan Carlos Jauregui, social welfare, will study in the Amazonian region of Loreto, Peru. Jauregui's research will explore intersectional stigma, mental health and HIV treatment engagement among LGBTQ+ young people living with HIV in Loreto. The project will prioritize knowledge that will improve community-based service provisions and interventions that address the mental health and HIV care needs of this vulnerable population.
Rachel Kaufman, history, will study in Spain and Mexico. Kaufman's dissertation explores the transgenerational and transatlantic story of women in Spain and Mexico during the 16th and 17th centuries. It focuses on the preservation and adaptation of ritual, language and tradition by forcibly converted Jewish women, known as conversas, amid religious persecution. The study delves into their homes, revealing scenes of transmission, teaching and intimacy while also paying attention to systems of colonial power and violence. Kaufman's work sheds light on global trade networks, the transatlantic slave trade and cross-community cultural and religious exchange in colonial Mexico City.
Kanako Mabuchi, Asian languages and cultures, will study in Japan. Mabuchi explores the convergences of early broadcast television and postwar art movements in Japan from the late 1950s through 1970. Mabuchi will examine the socio-aesthetic possibilities and limitations of early broadcast TV by studying textual and audiovisual archives in Japan.
Chris Abdul Hakim Martinez, history, will study in Guinea and France. Martinez's research focuses on the interconnected struggles for decolonization, development and economic sovereignty by examining the history and political economy of Guinea's bauxite mining industry from 1945 to 1984. Using archival research, oral histories and methods from international political economy, his work centers on the history of Guinea's unique engagements with and challenges to the global capitalist economy, from local grassroots movements to international arenas.
Leah Nugent, anthropology, will study in Taiwan. Nugent's research investigates why Indigenous groups choose to participate in or withdraw from government-sponsored environmental stewardship projects. She compares how differential experiences of colonialism under Japanese imperialism, Kuomintang authoritarianism, and democracy unevenly transformed Indigenous bodies and landscapes. She asks how contemporary Indigenous peoples respond to these colonial afterlives and the possibilities for enabling just, green futures.
Andres F. Ramirez, urban planning, will conduct fieldwork in Colombia. His research examines how Indigenous struggles for urban citizenship challenge property regimes and reconfigure the relations between state and Indigenous people. He will study land and property as a means through which dispossession and repossession is operationalized. Working alongside Indigenous urban communities in Bogotá, he will identify oppositional urban planning practices between the state and Indigenous groups, as well as forms of Indigenous sovereignty in the city.
Hunter Wimpey, history, will study in Japan. Wimpey's research focuses on the social and spatial relationship between the city of Kyoto and the Gion Festival during the early modern period His project investigates how the festival's mythology and ritual practices contributed to the development of identity among the festival participants amid their diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. Wimpey will also look at the transformation of Kyoto from an urban center into a ritual center during festival time and how this transformation affected community development among the townspeople.