Two Cornell anthropology graduate students will conduct their fieldwork overseas with support from the program. Alexandra G. Dalferro and Rebekah M. Cirbassi are among 91 students nationwide who received the prestigious award this year.
Dalferro, from Norwell, Massachusetts, left for Surin, Thailand, in September and plans to remain there until early 2019. She is interested in the tensions between the practices of ethnic Khmer silk weavers and government policies that promote their weavings as 鈥減art of a static Thai national cultural heritage,鈥 she wrote in her proposal.
鈥淔or Khmer weavers, this official interest and demand is welcome, but it also threatens to erase local meanings, histories and knowledge,鈥 she added.
Her proposed dissertation title is 鈥淪himmering Surfaces and Stray Threads: Weaving State Politics into Silk in Contemporary Thailand.鈥
The central research question is 鈥渉ow are official and tourist-market desires for 鈥榮himmering surfaces,鈥 and materials and dispositions that reflect 鈥榞ood culture,鈥 linked to the prioritizing of particular kinds of knowledge and particular ways of being in the world?鈥
Dalferro, whose committee chair is associate professor , will conduct her fieldwork in the Thai and Khmer languages.
Rebekah M. Cirbassi, a native of Chicago, will travel to Tanzania in January 2018 to work on a project titled 鈥淪ickle cell disease amid intersecting ideologies of kinship in Northwest Tanzania.鈥
In January 2017, a new diagnostic technology called 鈥淪ickle-Scan鈥 was introduced in Tanzania, she explained in her proposal. The test does not just determine whether a person is carrying the disease, but also provides information about genetic relatedness.
鈥淚ncreasingly, then, diagnostics are becoming integrated into Tanzanian forms of kinship reckoning 鈥 i.e., the culturally constructed ways of recognizing some ties as relevant for making families,鈥 she wrote.
Cirbassi plans to study how people in Mwanza 鈥渋ntegrate the lexicon of genetic medicine 鈥 and the transnational, racialized discourse on sickle cell research 鈥 into their sense of national belonging.鈥 She expects to remain in Tanzania until next December. Her committee chair is associate professor .
Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad awards support research in modern foreign languages and area studies. The six- to twelve-month awards are sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education.
At Cornell, the program is administered by the . The center assists students in the application process and administers the awards for successful applicants.
Jonathan Miller is associate director for communications at the Einaudi Center.
This article orignally appeared in the
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