We are delighted to announce our third cohort of CAE Early Career Presidential Fellows. This year the committee selected six fellows from a large pool of outstanding emerging scholars. We look forward to working closely with this group at the November meetings, along with our previous cohorts and encourage you to meet them.
Amy Brown
Earning a Ph.D. in social anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin in 2011, Amy Brown’s work looks at large and persistent questions around education equity asking how increasing privatization of public education affects teaching and learning practices. In particular, she has examined how the reliance on private sector funding has shaped constructions of gender, class and race as well as distribution of power and resources. She writes: “Through exploring more creative ways to collaborate with the communities we study, as well as more creative and interdisciplinary ways to gather and present data, school ethnographers can create a broader audience for research and social critique and can trouble the barrier between researcher and subject.”
Juliette de Wolfe
A doctoral student in anthropology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, Juliette de Wolfe has focused her research on the daily experiences of parents with children who have been diagnosed with autism. After finishing her dissertation, Juliette intends to initiate public discussion about ability and disability, with an exploration of the multiple meanings of these words and labels that illuminate how people are treated in communities and by the media. As she explains, “I have found anthropology immeasurably helpful for engaging with such issues and have recently made a commitment to see that conversations about these issues have a place in the CAE.”
Reva Jaffe-Walter
Earning her doctorate in Urban Education at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, Reva Jaffe-Walter recently conducted ethnographic research in Denmark and the United States that is focused on the national discourses and policies of immigrant youth in each country. In Denmark she documented the experiences of first and second generation Muslim youth, illuminating the conflicting discourses in the schools and society. Her work exposes how educators’ discourses and practices that are intended to promote integration and mobility for Muslim immigrants can encourage them to withdraw further from society. She concludes: “My work points to the importance of teacher education initiatives and teacher learning structures within schools that provide teachers with the skills and professional supports to support the academic and emotional needs of immigrant youth and emergent bilinguals. It also reveals how, in the absence of this knowledge, teachers default to blaming students and immigrant families and perpetuating deficit discourses.”
Ariana Mangual Figueroa
Earning her doctorate in education at the University of California, Berkeley, Ariana Mangual Figueroa is currently an assistant professor at Rutgers University. Her work focuses on mixed-status Mexican families, including parents and older children who are undocumented migrants along with younger children who are U.S.-born citizens. Through a close examination of talk and daily practices, she illustrates the differential opportunities available to these groups based on migratory status. In addition, she is interested to explore and write about the difficulties associated with conducting research in vulnerable populations. Among other goals, she is “interested in deepening
[her] analysis of the intersections between the state immigration and education policy and the everyday interactions that take place between parents, teachers, and students.”
Silvia Nogueron-Liu
After graduating from Arizona State University, Silvia Nogueron-Liu became an assistant professor at the University of Georgia. In her work, she documents how recent technology users from immigrant communities understand digital communication and social media, including how they use these tools in their daily lives. Among other topics, she has also explored the ways that language ideologies and family language policies shape how immigrant mothers and children make choices about their technology use. As she explains, “Our positionality as researchers and ethnographers shifts as we become co-instructors practitioners and guides in digital media projects with minority students. Our reflections in fieldwork require new ways of thinking about ethics, representation, publishing, and authoring.”
Dolma Roder
A recent graduate from Arizona State University, Dolma Roder locates her work in Bhutan where she examines gender relations in state-sponsored schools. She was curious to understand why Bhutan, a country known for its gender equity, has so few women in politics and public life. While the dominant narrative was that women were choosing not to participate in these contexts, she uncovered the ways in which discourses of women’s “limitations” shaped their decisions as did the constant teasing and harassment they experienced. In sum, her work “challenges powerful assumption within international developmental policy and practice that uncritically see education as both unequivocally beneficial and empowering, particular for women in the developing world.”