African Urbanism Humanities Lab
Lab Members
Amber Colby
anc2ax@virginia.edu
I am a fourth year undergraduate student double majoring in Anthropology and Global Public Health. I spent six weeks this past summer in Kampala, Uganda as a Center for Global Health scholar doing ethnographic fieldwork at an alcohol and drug rehabilitation center. This work was part of a broader project being done by Professor China Scherz and her research partner George Mpanga surrounding questions of drinking practices and recovery in Uganda. Through this experience, I began exploring concepts of knowledge, temporality, and transformation of social identities within rehabilitation institutions which I will combine into my anthropology senior thesis. My ultimate goal is continue studying the intersections between anthropology and addiction within broader global contexts.
Anna Eisenstein
are9ca@virginia.edu
I am a PhD student in anthropology. My dissertation project is an ethnography of pregnancy in the fast-growing city of Mbarara, Uganda. Like many sites of postcolonial urbanization, Mbarara hosts a heterogeneous mix of herbalists, diviners, biomedical doctors, and Christian faith healers. As pregnant women navigate this landscape of care options, they are asking: Whose advice should I trust? Of whom should I be skeptical? Echoing their concerns, my research asks how pregnant women encounter the diversity of care alternatives in the city. With this work, I aim to advance perspectives on urban networks of trust and care, and analyze how these become factors in therapeutic choice. I am especially interested in thinking about how specific interactions (between pregnant women and their friends, family members, and/or care providers) shape women's decisions about pregnancy care; in this way, my interests include developing an interactional approach both to medical anthropology and to urban ethnography.
Erin Jordan
e.jordan312@gmail.com
I am an incoming graduate student in the Anthropology Department with past experience in Southern Tanzania. In 2009 and 2010, as an undergraduate, I lived briefly in Peramiho-Songea and wrote a thesis on grief/mourning support networks. I revisited this research in my MA program, rethinking my experiences in terms of storytelling ritual following the deaths of male heads of families.
Following my BA (May 2011), I worked in a southern Tanzanian secondary school (Namihoro School, Peramiho-Songea) as an English teacher. In collaboration with a fellow teacher and a local journalist, I helped to organize a photovoice/photo-journalism seminar for twenty students. This seminar culminated in a Swahili-language newspaper, Sauti ya Vijana (Voice of Youth), about topics the students identified as important to them (education, deforestation, and lack of consistent healthcare were a few of the topics included). In the time since I left TZ, many of my students are now on Facebook and posting photographs taken on cell phones (much more accessible to them than the digital cameras we used in 2012). I'm extremely interested in the connections between their online identities and daily lives/interests/concerns. Though my experience is in a rural area, I'm interested in the urban as well.
Fatmah Behbehani
fatmah.behbehani@gmail.com
I am a PhD candidate in the School of Architecture’s PhD in the Constructed Environment Program at the University of Virginia. My dissertation focuses on the planning and social implications of new town developments in Morocco. Many times these large-scale urban developments are planned in the absence of a community—they are preplanned by governments for a non-existent population. So my research asks: who occupies them? And what happens when they are occupied? Do the objectives and aspirations of government officials and planners coincide with those of the primary stakeholders: i.e. the residents? What are the lived experiences, aspirations, and perceptions of new town residents? Why do people choose to live in a new town? More generally, what effects do planning policies have on social life and conversely, what effects do the lived experiences of local residents have on planning policy?
Over the past three summers I have been visiting Morocco’s new towns and collect initial data. I plan to spend the Summer and Fall of 2018 living in two selected new towns and gathering ethnographic field data including participant observation, interviews and cultural mapping. My key objective in collaborating with the African Urbanism Lab is to expand the focus to North Africa, especially in a time when the pan-Africanism movement and conversations have come back in an attempt to unite the Arab North and sub-Saharan African regions economically, socially and politically.
Grace East
gmp4xi@virginia.edu
I am a first-year graduate student in the anthropology department at the University of Virginia pursuing my PhD in linguistic anthropology. My focus in the past has centered around ideologies of language shift as well as kinship, cognition, and language among Hausa speakers of northern Nigeria. Currently, I am very interested in language and West Africa, especially topics in spatial cognition and gesture as well as language shift and endangerment in the region. During my BA at Michigan State University, I studied in Accra, Ghana during the summer of 2012 and worked as a teaching assistant at an after school program in Chorkor. I also studied Hausa for five semesters and completed an African studies specialization. During my MA at Wayne State University, I focused on spatial cognition, temporal metaphor, and gesture in the Hausa language and also worked on Hausa kinship and its linguistic relationship to Optimality Theory. Currently, I am interested in continuing work with Hausa speakers in both Nigeria and Ghana and further pursuing questions of spatial cognition using co-speech gesture as a methodological tool. Additionally, my interests in language shift and ideology in this region continue to be a point of importance in my research. As such, my key interests for collaboration in the African Urbanism Lab are linguistically focused, including language shift and urbanism, language and urban subcultures, pidgins and creoles of West African cities, language ideologies about urban linguistic diversity, Afro-Futurism (hip-hop), and the informal sector.
Anne Nelson
annenelson14@gmail.com
I am a fourth year undergraduate student double majoring in Global Development Studies and Middle Eastern Studies and the University of Virginia. I have a wide variety of interests within and beyond those two majors, one of which is anthropology and I have tried to incorporate as many anthropology classes into both of my majors. This past summer I was fortunate enough to spend six weeks in Kampala, Uganda on a Center for Global Health grant working with Anthropology Professor China Scherz and her research partner George Mpanga. They are conducting research on drinking in Uganda and the ways in which Ugandans are working to stop drinking. I worked in primarily in a Pentecostal Church in the suburbs of Kampala getting to know how the church handles addiction and interviewing those who have stopped drinking through the church. While in Kampala I became more interested in questions around religious pluralism and interreligious dialogue and hope to go back to conduct my own research on this topic. For the future, I hope to continue my education in Anthropology around questions of development.