Congratulations to graduate student grantees of the “Conflict, Crisis, and Im/mobility” Grant. The grant funded by the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme will support graduate students in research and creative work on the topic of the project. The projects will explore the question of what happens to people living through armed conflict or crises.

Sam Wrigglesworth (Department of Art) will create two interconnected projects that work to honor Palestinians through memorial, digital archiving, and radically accessible education. Their sculpture piece, October and November, memorializes every Palestinian life lost in Gaza in October and November 2023. They will also build The People’s Library for Palestine which will bring a library into unexpected public spaces to encourage learning and engagement.

Jorge Alberto Vega Rivera (Department of Design) will design an AR immersive experience about the challenges and efforts of the farmers from former coca crop regions in Colombia. Vega Rivera’s project Ultrallanos: Stay and resist highlights the experiences of farmers in the eastern region of Colombia Farmers who have resisted with their farm project, going through the rise and drop in coca prices, economic crisis, displacement and migrations, the peace and demobilization process of FARC guerilla, eradication and substitution of the coca crops from the state, and finally the sense of abandoned lands.

Mehr Mumtaz (Department of Sociology) will focus on the forced displacement of the Afghans in the aftermath of the post-2001 U.S. military interventions in the country. Specifically, her study unpacks the ways in which the history of conflict and violence in the region has influenced (im)mobility among residents in Afghanistan.

Lejla Veskovic (The Department of Slavic and Eastern European Languages and Cultures) will research the cultural and political activities associated with the Festival SlovoNovo, held in the popular tourist destination of Budva. The SlovoNovo event has become a hub for oppositional discussions on how to reconceptualize Russian culture and identity in the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine. The aim of her project Russian Mind in the Montenegrin World is to estimate the cultural scripts that underlie the group’s collective identity.

Jack Fernandes (Department of Political Science) will conduct fieldwork in Malawi to understand the social and political dynamics following cyclones Freddy (2023), Gombe (2022), and Idai (2019). Through interviews, he aims to understand the expectations of the public after a disaster, the pressures felt by the government during and after, and the role of international assistance in the form of NGOs.

Katherine Weiss (Department of History) will use the grant to support her dissertations Mothering in War: Wartime pregnancies, childbirths, and raising children during World War I in France and Australia, which undertakes a gendered study of the experience of war in France and Australia during World War I. Bringing together women’s history, social and cultural history, national security studies, the history of medicine, and military history, her project complicates cultural understandings of motherhood during World War I, developing a social history of mothers raising children during the war and in turn untangling public conceptions of motherhood and war from private experience.

Emily Hardick (Department of History) will examine the role of defection, flight, and movement play, for both performers and governments, in Congolese cultural production and identity. Her dissertation explores the ways in which touring performances are related to what scholar Thomas Nail (2015) describes as the “kinopolitics”—the “regimes of motion” that dictate how subjects move—of Congolese life.

Ra’phael Davis (Department of Political Science) will explore the role of local actors in encouraging or resolving conflicts worldwide. His dissertation, Peacebuilding and the Structure of Inter-Organizational Cooperation, will synthesize existing theories of organizational management and group behavior not commonly paired in the political science study of conflict and argues that the size and structure of inter-organizational cooperation affect local peace outcomes by building inclusive conversations about ethnicity, belonging, and conflict sensitivity.

Awardees will present their work at events organized by the Armed Conflicts and Im/mobility project during 2024-2025 academic year.