We welcome 6 early-career scholars as panelists for our symposium entitled “Migration Matters: Ethnicity, Race, Labor, and Politics across Borders” that is part of our Emerging Scholars Initiatives. Browse their biographies and the titles of their papers to be given at this symposium.
Natasha Raheja
Paper title: Pakistani Hindu Minority Citizenship and the Bureaucratic Everyday in Western India
Natasha Raheja is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University working in the areas of migration, citizenship, and religious nationalism. She recently co-edited a short essay series on India’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) for Political and Legal Anthropology Review. Her book manuscript, From Minority to Majority: Pakistani Hindu Claims to Citizenship, is an ethnographic account of the flexible religious minority form across state borders in South Asia. She is directing a companion film, Kitne Passports? (How many Passports?), a documentary exploration of the lives and migration trajectories of four Pakistani Hindu families from different caste backgrounds pursuing Indian citizenship. Natasha is also completing an experimental short film series on the movement of non-human animals and everyday objects across the India-Pakistan border. Films in the series include: A Gregarious Species, Kaagaz ke chakkar, and Enemy Property.
Ampson Hagan
Paper title: Humanitarianism and the Limits of Black Rescue
Ampson Hagan is a Black anthropologist using interdisciplinary theoretical approaches and ethnographic methods situated in African studies, Black studies, and Anthropology. Ampson’s research on humanitarianism in West Africa shows how humanitarianism itself contributes to the racialized conditions of emergency Black peoples face. By focusing on how aid organizations are aligned with the anti-migration military and police of the Nigerien state, Ampson’s work demonstrates how humanitarianism authorizes the neoliberal principles of policing, border security, and free market ideology in the name of rescuing Black African migrants. Ampson is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Helena Zeweri
Paper title: Migrant Anti-Carceral Politics: Emerging Knowledge Practices in the Global Refugee Rights Movement
Helena Zeweri is Assistant Professor of Global Studies (Security and Justice track) at the University of Virginia. Rooted in Cultural Anthropology, Helena’s research focuses on global migration, Muslim diasporas, humanitarianism, and social welfare in liberal democratic states. Helena’s book project is an ethnographic study of how migrant-targeted social services in Australia become assimilationist projects through their entanglement with the criminal justice and immigration systems. She is currently developing a research project on practices of resistance, knowledge-building, and transnational collaboration in the global refugee rights movement, specifically in carceral spaces of detention and their aftermath.
Helena’s research on Muslim Australian women’s anti-Islamophobia politics has recently been published in Feminist Formations (2020), and has forthcoming pieces in Ethnic and Racial Studies (2021) and the Australian Journal of Social Issues (2021). Helena’s previous research, which was published in the International Feminist Journal of Politics in 2017, has examined the relationship between gender, war, and imperialism through NGO representations of Afghan women.
Helena’s work has been supported by several research grants from organizations such as the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. She holds a PhD in Anthropology (Rice University), and MAs in Near Eastern Studies (New York University) and Anthropology (The New School). She completed her BA in Middle East Studies and International Relations (Columbia University). Prior to her PhD, Helena worked in various non-profits around US-Middle East relations and helping low-income communities with foreign language instruction, as well as with Afghan refugee youth. She is a founding member of the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association, a diasporic collective that amplifies and elevates Afghan voices in the arts, academia, and activism.
Helena has taught courses on “Refugee Mobilities and Border Zones,” “Refugee Resettlement,” “Global Humanitarianism,” and one of her Spring 2021 classes will focus on Migrant Women’s Political Activism.
Grazia Ting Deng
Paper title: Performing Sociability: Everyday Conviviality between Chinese Baristas and the Local Populations in Bologna, Italy
Grazia Ting Deng is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University’s Population Studies and Training Center. She received her Ph.D. degree in December 2018 from the Department of Anthropology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has also held visiting positions at Harvard University and the University of Bologna during her Ph.D. studies. Her research primarily focuses on the Chinese diaspora and especially ethnic encounters and intercultural dynamics between Chinese migrants and European local societies. Grazia’s current book project is about Chinese managed coffee bars in Northern and Central Italy since the economic downturn of 2008 with the working title Chinese Espresso: Contested Race and Convivial Space in Contemporary Italy. This is a revised version of her Ph.D. dissertation, which was sponsored by the U.K.’s Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies and The Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Global Scholarship Program for Research Excellence as well as its Research Postgraduate Student Grants for Overseas Academic Activities. This research project has led to several further academic publications. Among them, one article about Chinese immigrants’ alternative racial formation is now under review by American Ethnologist. Another article currently under review by the journal Ethnography reflets upon her positionality in terms of gendered racial and ethnic identity during her fieldwork. Her other academic articles are published by the journal International Migration, the journal Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion, and Firenze University Press. She has also produced other online op-eds about global anti-Chinese racism and Chinese in Italy for Global Dialogue, Plan A-Magazine, and Agenda for International Development.
Hrag Papazian
Paper title: Circumventing the border, erecting new boundaries: Two-way migration of Armenians between Armenia and Turkey
Hrag Papazian holds a doctoral degree in social anthropology from the University of Oxford (2020). His dissertation about Armenians in contemporary Turkey was awarded the David Parkin Prize for “the best use of detailed ethnographic materials to advance anthropological arguments” by the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford in early 2021. In addition to teaching at the American University of Armenia, Papazian currently conducts an EU-funded multi-sited research between Istanbul and Yerevan, which examines processes of mobility and issues of dual citizenship and belonging among Armenians of Turkey looking toward and/or moving to Armenia. Papazian’s research interests include social boundaries and their making, ethnicity and nationalism, religion and race, politics and activism, migration and diasporas.
Celina de Sá
Paper title: “Relearning the Culture”: Making Sense of Heritage and Migration in Postcolonial West Africa
Dr. Celina de Sá is a Kenneth P. Dietrich School Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, and will be joining the Anthropology department of University of Texas at Austin as an assistant professor this fall, with an appointment in African and African Diaspora Studies. She earned her PhD with distinction at the University of Pennsylvania in a joint program with Anthropology and Africana Studies. Her research focuses on the legacies of racial formation, colonialism and the slave trade in urban francophone West Africa and beyond. She is specifically interested in the ways in which contemporary African contexts and agents recast, critique, and engage with the black Atlantic. She is currently working on her first book manuscript, Diaspora Without Displacement: Race, Performance, and Belonging in West Africa, that looks at a network of the region’s first capoeira groups. Dr. de Sá has published creative meditations on the political possibilities of “the otherwise” and life after Covid for Cultural Anthropology and American Ethnologist respectively. She has an article under review titled “Playing with Origins” that investigates how Togolese martial artists respond to economic precarity and political instability through performances of racial self-making. She is currently developing a chapter in an edited volume on The Anthropology of White Supremacy. Dr. de Sá also trains capoeira and dances samba.