2023-2024 Fellows

Kirsten Carlson, Professor, Law and Adjunct Professor of Political Science

Title: Indigenizing Outcomes: Improving Impact Measurement for Indian Legal Services

Date of Presentation: February 12, 2024 3-4:30pm, McGregor Room E

Description: Project Description: Dr. Carlson is investigating the gaps in existing measures of outcomes and impacts for legal services delivery in Native communities in the United States. Her work integrates sociolegal theories with Indigenous worldviews to develop an innovative relational theory of legal effectiveness that reflects the values and experiences of Native communities served by legal services programs. She is collaborating with Michigan Indian Legal Services, which provides legal services to Native Americans throughout the state of Michigan, to develop, pilot, and evaluate the use of measures of impacts and outcomes informed by a relational theory of legal effectiveness. The goal is to improve access to justice by providing legal services programs with ways to measure social, institutional, relational, and generational impacts and outcomes.

Lauren Duquette-Rury, Associate Professor, Sociology

Title: Naturalizing Under Threat in the Age of Immigration Enforcement

Date of Presentation: March 27, 2024 3-4:30pm, McGregor Room E

Description: As public debates about border security, national membership, and belonging rage on, more eligible immigrants are becoming American citizens to secure and protect their right to remain. A closer look, however, uncovers a set of perverse incentives driving naturalization in the United States. Even though few noncitizens believe membership in the national political community is synonymous with belonging or inclusion, acquiring citizenship protects oneself and one's family against the threat of deportation. Citizenship has come to mean protection for nonwhite immigrants who remain the primary targets of color-blind immigration policy. For others, citizenship is a critical insurance policy against the risk of harsher immigration reforms to come. While existing scholarship helps us understand what enables people to naturalize (i.e., resources, socioeconomic status, language ability), a comprehensive study of what factors motivate citizenship remains incomplete. Using rich archival texts, quantitative analysis of national and state naturalization rates from 1907 to 2018, and in-depth interviews with immigrants and community-based organizations across the U.S., Naturalizing Under Threat accounts for how citizenship becomes more resonant and valuable to immigrants in the contemporary age of interior surveillance and removal.

Andrew Newman, Associate Professor, Cultural Anthropology

Title: Empire's Garden: Anthropology and the Racialization of Vision in Fin-de-Siecle Paris

Date of Presentation: April 12, 2024 3-4:30pm, Student Center Hilberry D RSVP

Description:  His project for the Marilyn Williamson Fellowship is "Empire's Garden: Anthropology and the Racialization of Vision in fin-de-Siecle Paris." In this book project, Newman sheds light on a series of exhibitions held in Paris between 1877 and 1908 in which indigenous people from around the world were displayed for the public in "ethnographic shows". His study highlights the stories and experiences of the people who were featured in these exploitive exhibits while showing the ways that the displays influenced the emergence of anthropology as a discipline. Newman also examines the legacy of these exhibits for the present day by linking them with France's fraught politics of cultural diversity and anthropology's association with cultural exoticism.