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Héctor Beltrán

Héctor Beltrán

Mellon/ACLS Fellow

Mr. Beltrán’s project ethnographically investigates emerging forms of hacking by moving between key physical sites in México and the San Francisco Bay Area. The anthropology of hacking has mostly focused on an undifferentiated community of computer experts precisely because experts themselves claim that language, culture, and nation are irrelevant to improving their technical craft and achieving “software freedom.” What happens, however, when practices of hacking challenge the boundaries of colorblind social commonwealth and intersect with constructions of race, nation, and class?

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Deana Dartt

Deana Dartt

Anne Ray Fellow

Dr. Dartt’s goal for the fellowship period is to revise her dissertation manuscript for publication with the University of Nebraska Press. The manuscript examines museum representations in California and addresses incongruities between the stories museums tell and those that are held within Native communities themselves. The most problematic of these misrepresentations, is the racialization that occurs through exhibition practices and educational tours that underscore oversimplified definitions of Native and settlement communities.

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Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo

Weatherhead Fellow

Dr. Hondagneu-Sotelo plans to complete a book analyzing Latino immigrant integration in the historically African American mega-neighborhood of South Los Angeles. The book will be co-authored from a rich empirical base: 100 in-depth interviews with Latina/o residents of three South L.A. neighborhoods; interviews with 19 civic leaders; Census data from 1970 to the present; and, interviews with African American residents, and with public park and community garden users. Hondagneu-Sotelo challenges assimilation and transnational theories with a new paradigm, immigrant homemaking in multiracial contexts.

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Milena A. Melo

Milena A. Melo

Mellon Fellow

Federal policy classifies undocumented immigrants in the United States as ineligible for the majority of publicly funded healthcare services by virtue of their legal status. As a result, those with chronic, debilitating illness struggle to find adequate treatment for life-threatening conditions. Dr. Melo’s project follows the treatment experiences of one such population that political regimes of power situate at the fringes of the U.S. healthcare system: undocumented Mexican immigrants in South Texas who suffer from end-stage renal disease (ESRD).

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Brian Smithson

Brian Smithson

Weatherhead/Charlotte Newcombe Fellow

Drawing upon two years of fieldwork in Southeastern Benin as a researcher, apprentice filmmaker, and amateur actor, Brian Smithson argues that movie production allows Beninese creators to celebrate indigenous religion and thus speak back from the margins of the two wealthier film industries that surround them: Nigeria’s Nollywood, and the Beninese state’s publicly funded cinema.

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Thomas Michael Swensen

Thomas Michael Swensen

Katrin H. Lamon Fellow

In this project the term “The Great Land” ties indigenous experience to the environment by focusing on compulsory Native belonging to Russia and later the United States amid ecological tragedies and land rights efforts that were paramount in shaping Alaska as a state in the union. Examining this intersection of belonging and the environment, Swensen makes visible how one of the nation’s first noncontiguous colonies embodies a link between US continental expansion and the establishment of overseas possessions that followed the acquisition of the Alaska region.

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