We are pleased to announce that the 2012 Student Travel/Research Grant Recipients have been chosen! Please see below for details. Congratulations to all who were selected, and thank you to everyone who applied.
Alison Schuettingger is pursuing a Masters or Arts in psychology at NSSR. Alison is interested in community based holistic education and will do research on this approach through Indian research centers that teach and practice ecological sustainability. Drawing on the research of Escobar, she will explore the role that religion and traditional knowledge play in environmental sustainability and ask if sustainability is akin to native representations of nature.
Benedetta Valabrega is an undergraduate student in Design Management at Parsons. Benedetta is interested in how India intends to deal with the incredible growth it is experiencing and how it will involve the demographic capital that has made this growth possible. In particular, she wants to focus on how India is designing and performing what has been called “the biggest social project on the planet,” an identification scheme that plans to construct a national biometric database. Based on her research on the experiment of this project, she will make connections and draw conclusions about I.D. systems as weapons to use control over society or to empower people and guarantee each single individual the rights he should have.
Chang-Chen Shen is a first year PhD candidate in Anthropology at the New School for Social Research. His proposed ICI project is to study the life worlds of Chinese immigrants, both in New York City and in Fuzhou (the fist are international migrants, the latter, internal migrants, but both sets are illegal). Shen plans to look at how these immigrants live in spaces not only considered illegal, but outside any semblance of civil society. He will view first-hand how their experiences negotiating such illegal spaces in Fuzhou translate into migrants’ abilities to endure and live in New York City. Chang-Chen will also investigate his hypothesis that the Chinese concept of min-jian can allow us to think differently about these spaces of “civil (il)legality”.
Miranda Ten Broeke is an undergraduate at Eugene Lang College. A passionate dancer, Miranda started her dancing career at The Vanaver Caravan World Dance & Music Company (TVC) at the age of four. TVC will partner with a women-run Indian NGO to build the Shakti Academy, a dance and healing-arts center for India’s gifted youth. The ICi fellowship will allow Miranda to participate and contribute to the Academy which will provide a creative outlet for children and teens who cannot thrive in traditional school settings and have been discriminated against because of caste, sex, or means. In addition, Miranda will teach in local schools, and learn authentic Indian and gypsy dance styles in an ongoing cultural exchange. Miranda expects herself to draw on the connections she will make in India and b a resource for future students wishing to do the sort of work out in the world.
Nicholas Krebs is pursuing a Master degree in Urban Policy at Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy. He has been leading service projects with two chapters of Habitat for Humanity for the last four years in South Dakota and Washington D.C. As a student fellow he would like to do a comparative study of the sustainability efforts in Habitat Housing in China and the US by participating in a Global Village Habitat build in Quangzhou City. From this he hopes to be able to define universal sustainability standards that could be used in Habitat housing developments internationally.
Sofya Omelchenko is an undergraduate student in Global Studies at Eugene Lang College. A native of Russia, Sofya is fascinated by authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China and how they manage to keep power while at the time adapting to the new conditions of international world order. In particular, she is interested in the civil society relationships with the state in both countries. She will focus her research on the environmental sector of civil society, as environmentalism is fairly apolitical in its nature, yet offers a great insight on the functioning of the civil society.