CSRC RESEARCH GRANTS, 2024-25

 

Cabildos Urbanos, The legal terrain of Indigenous Rights to the City in Colombia

 

Ramirez Valencia’s central inquiry of his dissertation revolves around how Indigenous struggles in the city reconfigure ethnic minorities’ relationship to the state. He is particularly interested in how Indigenous groups defy state practices of illegalization and reconfigure sociopolitical categories in the city.

He states the IAC research grant will be used to spend the summer months locating historical documentation from the 1990 lawsuit, along with corresponding literature. I will also interview key figures from this process, including Antonia Agreda, who supported this process as a young activist. I hope to identify at least a couple more participants with first-hand experience for interviews through snowball sampling. I will also interview the three lawyers that prepared the 2024 lawsuit on behalf of AIB, who I am already in correspondence with and who may also provide me with additional legal documentation. I also intend to interview legal scholar Juan Camilo Herrera, who has written about the legal claims of Indigenous people in Colombia (Herrera 2021). In the latter part of 2024, I plan to review the data from my archival research and the interviews. This analysis will help me understand the legal claims of each lawsuit, as well as important changes that have occurred in the last 30 years.

 

 

Moges research examines the consequences of climate change are consistently most harshly experienced along differentiated lines of race, class and geopolitical position. As growth-fueled climate change renders parts of the planet inhospitable to habitation, cities and states are increasingly inhospitable to the (often Black and Brown) people who need to move. As a result, poor, Black, Indigenous, migrant and otherwise racialized and disenfranchised communities are increasingly taking remediation into their own hands. Across North America, organizations for Black self-reliance are increasingly building networks of interdependence with Indigenous tribal communities, with food sovereignty organizers, movements to demolish borders, defund the police and prison abolitionists. Taken together, these networks of seemingly disparate movements have the power to reconceptualize from ‘below’ (as neoliberal globalization is said to do from ‘above’) modern notions of governance, nationhood and that axiom of rights and representation.

            She states the IAC research grants for travel from June of 2024 to May of 2025 will help support her spending eight months at the Cooperation Jackson headquarters in West Jackson and four months at their satellite in Vermont. Her dissertation research asks: What new practices of community building is CJ developing? Do their practices provide escape from, or reparation for, the damage caused by environmental racism and capitalist development? How might we assess their effectiveness? What does Black self-determination mean to CJ and what does it look like when pursued in partnership with other movements of marginalized peoples? What impact has CJ’s partnership with local and state government had on their pursuit for self-determination? What roles do climate and migration play in in their pursuits to radically reimagine community?

 

In Nguy's dissertation research she situates at the confluence of political science and ethnic studies, directly aligning with the Institute of American Culture's commitment to foregrounding the experiences and perspectives of people of color within the increasingly diverse tapestry of American society. It delves into the intricate dynamics of racial rhetoric in political campaigns, particularly focusing on how candidates of color navigate the complex landscape of racial discourse in an era marked by heightened awareness of racial issues and shifting norms regarding discussions on race. Historically, minority candidates have often been counseled to minimize discussions of race — a strategy known as "deracialization" — to avoid alienating racially resentful segments of the white electorate. However, the growing recognition of the imperative to confront and discuss racial realities openly as a precondition for addressing systemic inequalities challenges this conventional wisdom. In addition, newer research on race in campaigns finds that voters are more open to explicit racial rhetoric than previously thought, and that voters of color might even prefer racialized candidates. This project seeks to unravel several critical questions at the heart of these discussions: How do minority candidates talk about race in their campaigns? What is the threshold for engaging in racial discourse without provoking backlash? Which strategies of racial rhetoric are most effective in galvanizing support among and between diverse racial groups?

 

Park examines neoliberal standards of good citizenship reproduce harmful logics of cultural racism, and within an institutionalized context that devalues restaurant labor as unskilled labor, the lack of linguistic capital circulates as another marker of social distinction that serves to reify the linguistic and racial segregation that exists within Koreatown kitchens. Reflecting this political economic positioning, the Spanish language is devalued in the United States by mapping racist stereotypes onto language users. Meanwhile, English is considered an “unspeakable tongue” by Koreans given the significant difference between the grammar of English and Korean. Given the developmental limitations of language acquisition, near native fluency in English requires a significant amount of economic capital and long-term language learning. In this way, the inability to speak English reifies stereotypes of Korean immigrants being unassimilable or lacking economic or cultural capital. By examining communicative interactions between restaurant workers in Koreatown and creating more opportunities for friendly socialization between them, I seek to reframe deficit views of linguistic competency and linguistic capital to shift the focus onto multimodal awareness as a site for building class solidarity.

 

 

Hernandez examines how In 2023, a new record was set for unauthorized migration into the United States which resulted in the mass hiring of U.S. Border Patrol (BP) agents. In this historically male-dominated field, the number of Latina BP agents has increased, making them vulnerable to forms of gendered violence stemming from institutional racism and sexism. More specifically, Latina agents work in environments whereby they experience violence in the workplace, witness it against migrants (often female), and may themselves perpetuate it. As such, her work seeks to understand the day-to-day lives of Latina BP agents and how they conceptualize, witness, and experience various forms of gendered violence in their workplace. Coupled with the fact that more Latina women are migrating and experiencing different forms of gendered violence at the U.S.-Mexico border, examining this phenomenon from the perspective of Latina BP agents provides new and important insights into the practice of boundary enforcement with implications for understanding the rise of violence against female migrants. This summer I will conduct ethnographic research in the El Centro, California Border Patrol sector that will include conducting interviews, participating in ride-alongs, and observing the day-to-day lives of Latina agents at work. Using a gendered-racial lens to understand the experiences of Latina BP agents has the potential to illuminate both how law enforcement practices are carried out and the many gendered implications of the work.

 

 

Uribe’s dissertation project follows the minoritarian figure of the racialized migrant disabled woman across hostile infrastructure to ask: Given the enduring effects of racial and injurious capitalism in the Bronx, how does hostile infrastructure create disability, injury, and inaccessibility in the lives of Black and Brown disabled migrant women? How are disability, injury, and inaccessibility racialized and gendered? This project has both (1) representational aims in the larger fight of changing enduring negative symbols of a group of people from a specific place and (2) deeply explores where injury takes place – at what point do we recognize harm has been committed? I interweave innovative methods (1) ethnography (2) 15 in-depth interviews (3) collected notebooks kept by interviewees and (4) archival research to answer these questions. This proposed research is a Black feminist extended case historical community study localized in the South Bronx with strong interdisciplinary roots grounded in ethnic studies. The Bronx is an especially important research site to engage questions of infrastructure, disability, and inaccessibility because of its history as an epicenter of historical economic and racial crises. This historical accumulation of documented neglect lives in the national public imaginary, across media outlets, and in people’s memories. A less discussed side of this history is how racialized migrant populations carve out space and survive the underside of modern migration in the rapid decline of public infrastructures. The COVID-19 pandemic clearly illustrated how infrastructural violences have impactful material traces that assemble people’s lives for premature death. People’s deaths opened up the grounds to interrogate these deaths. This project enters into this policy window to draw out meaningful conversations around survival, disability, and infrastructural ethics in a world where our able-bodiedness is not guaranteed.

 

 

Duarte’s study delves into the intricacies of queer speech, exploring its acoustic characteristics in both English and Spanish. It seeks to discern whether these phonetic features are language-specific or shared across languages, with a consideration of theoretical frameworks that conceptualize queer speech as either a reflection of identity or a product of societal influences. By examining various phonetic features that have been found to mark queer speech such as pitch, vowel production, sibilant production, segment duration, and pitch range, this research aims to understand the complex interplay between language, gender, and sexuality in shaping speech patterns.  Data collection for this project involves twelve distinct groups, including monolingual Spanish speakers, monolingual English speakers, and bilingual Spanish-English speakers, categorized by self-identified sexual orientation and gender. Participants will engage in semi-spontaneous speech tasks, such as cooperative description tasks and sociophonetic interviews, designed to elicit natural speech samples. By collecting data from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, this study aims to capture the complexity of queer speech across different contexts. The analysis framework is structured around independent variables of gender, sexuality, and language, with dependent variables encompassing various phonetic properties. Acoustic properties related to pitch, voice quality, vowels, sibilants, and stops will be examined to identify differences and similarities across groups. This analysis enables a better understanding of how gender, sexuality, and language intersect to shape speech patterns, shedding light on the intricate dynamics of queer speech.