As the 2016 application season concludes, we are immensely proud to announce that three Graduate School-New Brunswick doctoral candidates have been awarded the prestigious Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for 2016-2017: Rosemary Ndubuizu (Women’s and Gender Studies), Carolyn Ureña (Comparative Literature), and Dara Walker (History)!
The Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship offers one year of fellowship support for Ph.D. candidates during their final year of dissertation writing, and supports promising scholars whose commitment to diversity is evident in both their research as well as their teaching.
Rosemary’s dissertation, “Where Shall the Monsters Live?: Understanding the Urban Politics of Black Women’s Disposability” is concerned with “the question around how politicians, developers, nonprofits, and even activist/organizers, are forced to have to deal with and confront these stereotypes about black women living in public and Section 8 housing” as well as “how the recent reforms to public and Section 8 housing actually have carceral effects that have justified increased surveillance, dispossession, and even evictions.”
In “Invisible Wounds: Rethinking Recognition in Decolonial Narratives of Illness and Disability,” Carolyn brings the theoretical contributions of “influential theorist, psychiatrist, and physician Frantz Fanon into conversation with U.S. and Caribbean narratives to examine how accounts that foreground the wounds and the embodied forms of knowledge that are the dual legacies of slavery and colonialism offer access to devalued or otherwise overlooked perspectives.”
Dara’s dissertation, “They Dared to Fight: Black High School Student Activism in Detroit during the Black Power Movement, 1966-1972,” examines “how young people of a different era grappled with questions about community control of schools and school desegregation” and she argues that “black adolescents’ intellectual development and experiences with segregated schooling, the carceral state, and the welfare state reveal the failure of the youth-centered racial liberalism that had informed the successes of the Civil Rights movement.”
In addition to our three awardees, twelve graduate students have been designated honorable mentions for the dissertation and predoctoral fellowships. The Ford Foundation press releases detail the awardees and honorable mentions for the 2016 competition.
To have 15 of our graduate students recognized by the Ford Foundation for their scholarly excellence and deep commitments to enhancing diversity is a great honor, and in the coming weeks we will be sharing more on their research and commitments to diversity, so stay tuned!
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