Kent Blansett
Katrin H. Lamon Resident Scholar
A Journey to Freedom: The Life of Richard Oakes 1942-1972 is the story of indigenous leader and activist Richard Oakes. It focuses on the climax of the national movement toward Native self-determination and freedom. A Journey to Freedom investigates the intersections of place, space, identity, and socio/political coalitions within the Red Power movement. Oakes’s leadership was influential in the Alcatraz (California, 1969) and Fort Lawton takeovers (Washington state, 1970), as well as Pit River’s resistance to PG&E Corporation’s illegal land use (California, 1970).
Jason De León
Weatherhead Resident Scholar
During his residency at SAR, Jason De León plans to complete the manuscript for his first book, which is titled Undocumented: Violence, Suffering, and the Materiality of Clandestine Border Crossings. This book draws on extensive field work carried out between 2009 and 2012 as part of the Undocumented Migration Project, a long-term ethnographic and archaeological study of border crossings between Northern Mexico and Southern Arizona, which De León currently directs. The book explores the many stages of clandestine crossings, highlights the different forms of violence and suffering that characterize the process, and demonstrates how the material traces of migration can be recovered archaeologically and interrogated ethnographically.
Laurie Kain Hart
National Endowment for the Humanities Resident Scholar
Laurie Kain Hart’s book project explores the protracted impact of ethnopolitical conflict and displacement among returned political refugees at the northwest boundary of Greece. Focusing not only on the zone’s inhabitants but also on boundary territory itself, the book sets the evidence of material culture (buildings, landscape, photographic archives) alongside that of everyday social practice and the psychoaffective experience of individuals displaced by war.
He Li
Anne Ray Resident Scholar
Li will use his time at SAR to complete his book-in-progress titled Intellectual Discourse and China’s Reform. The project pursues the following objectives: 1) to trace the development of the major schools of political thought in China, 2) to place China’s intellectual discourse on the reforms in comparative and theoretical perspectives, and 3) to enhance our understanding of the roles of ideas in the economic reform and political change in post-Mao China.
Islah Jad
Campbell Resident Scholar
Classic literature perceives local governments as an important path for decentralizing the often centralized state power, thus involving people at the grassroots level to share power. In this context, women are perceived as better served and more empowered. However, the context of persistent insecurity and conflict that overshadow Palestinian women’s lives means women are unable to wield any real political power and implement improvements within their communities, which they hoped entering politics would allow them to do. This research will attempt to explore the degree to which local governments in general, and those controlled by Islamists in particular, can constitute a constituency for women’s empowerment in a conflict situation.
Amy Lonetree
Anne Ray Resident Scholar
Amy Lonetree’s manuscript explores the intersections of photographic images, family history, tourism, and Ho-Chunk survivance through an examination of two extraordinary photographic collections housed at the Wisconsin Historical Society. In 2008, Lonetree resumed research on the Charles Van Schaick collection, which includes close to 1,000 photographs of Ho-Chunk people taken between 1879 and 1936. She is also studying the H. H. Bennett Collection, which is comprised of hundreds of images of tribal members taken between 1865 and 1960 along with film reels of the Stand Rock Indian Ceremonial from the 1920s through the 1960s. Both collections comprise an amazing visual legacy for Ho-Chunk people and are rich historical resources documenting a long-neglected period in Native American history.