Author: SPAwordpress

Securitized Suffering: Violence, law and political widowhood in Bangladesh

As a Rob Lemelson Foundation Fellow 2023, I have conducted a total of three months of preliminary fieldwork in Dhaka while living in the city from mid-June to mid-September in 2023. My fieldwork during this time was divided between two primary sites: the Odhiker office in Dhaka district, where I conducted research with rights defenders and Mayer Daak2 activists, and court houses, where I conducted research with lawyers, political widows and the family members of the victims of police violence. Occasionally, I visited the houses of the victims’ families and the protest events in three Districts of Bangladesh: Dhaka, Brahmanbaria, and Noakhali.

Through participant observation and ethnographic interviews at these locations, I learned about different ways through which the suffering of political widows, terrorism defendants, and their families are securitized and managed. Using network sampling, I followed these leads and engaged with a wider variety of interlocutors and locations. To date, I have conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with political widows (8), terrorism defendants and their family members (6), human rights defenders (3), and lawyers (3). I have also conducted participant observation at a number of relevant sites, including the house of the organizer of Mayer Daak, two protest events, and a press conference event organized by Mayer Daak. While in Bangladesh, I also held an institutional affiliation with Brac University from 2019 to 2021, the top-ranked private university in Bangladesh. This allowed me to meet with scholars in anthropology, political science, history, and law, who provided crucial feedback on this research project.

In addition to preliminary fieldwork in Dhaka, I regularly participate in online group meetings and private discussions organized by Odhiker and Mayer Daak. I also continue to closely monitor developments in terror trials and legal battles through newspaper articles, blogs, and social media sites. At Odhiker, I worked as an unpaid human rights defender, participated in daily activities in documenting and categorizing human rights violations, and collaborating with political widows, victim families, and international agencies. I volunteered and attended workshops and training sessions they organized to train Mayer Daak activists. I observed the day-to-day activities of the rights activists of Odhiker to understand how they count the dead and rewrite human rights violation narratives, countering the government narratives. Working as a volunteer in the Odhiker office allowed me to observe the collaboration with victim families. I joined three sessions where they discussed the strategies to counter the government narratives on violence and to navigate everyday suffering. They also facilitated counseling sessions and collaborated with psychiatrists to manage pain and suffering.

At Courtroom, I worked as an assistant to a criminal lawyer. As an assistant, I participated in daily activities, including ongoing case management of terrorism, torture and disappearance, bail hearings, and trial sessions. I recorded how court officials not only authorize harassment of political widows, secret detention, and physical torture in judicial custody but also keep secret the official records of torture and dismiss the testimonies of political widows and the victims of police violence as inconsistent and exaggerated by framing them as ‘hyper,’ ‘brainwashed,’ and ‘mentally disordered.’

Based on this early research, I have developed four initial observations about the securitization of the suffering of political widows, terrorism defendants, and their families in Bangladesh: (1) legal practices and human rights activism, rather than curing suffering and ensuring justice, have become ways of living with suffering and trauma; (2) despite the state’s designation of the political activists as a “terrorist,” the latter received widespread support from all walks of life except the authoritarian regime; (3) The state violently utilize the law to silence political widows and the victim of police violence, leaving virtually no recognition of victimhood and emphasizing their status as criminalized. (4) the employment of large-scale security technologies, at once imbues the lives of political widows and terror suspects with the fear of persecution and also constitutes the material conditions of possibility for the same people to articulate a collective memory, political community, and moral codes to live through this suffering and fear.

Expecting Transgender Futures: Uncertain Lives with Gender Transgressing in Guangzhou, China

This summer I completed a short-term, pre-dissertation fieldwork project with several transgender-centered nongovernmental organizations in Guangzhou, China. My research seeks to understand how transgender youths in Guangzhou, who are excluded from mainstream normalized life trajectories, make sense of their unexpected futures. I am using the term “unexpected” to capture the multiple ways that transgender folks are rendered culturally unintelligible in contemporary urban China. Like other young people, trans youths face overwhelming pressures from Chinese nationalism and familism to forge a cis-heteronormative life, which makes a nonnormative trans life hardly imaginable. At the same time, local medical technologies, grassroots nongovernmental advocacy, and global gender affirming discourses promote possible ways of achieving transness, which primarily set up transgender as a problem to solve rather than a life to live. These ways of achieving “healthy” transness through medical treatments and/or upward mobilities offer ways for trans youths to expect a feasible future, but this expectable future is unevenly accessible to different bodies. Thus my project examines how these vastly different expectations—previously worked-out life trajectories promoted by the non- queer, cis-queer, and trans-centered networks—shape mainland Chinese trans individuals’ sense of their own futures.

With the support of the fellowship, I was able to travel to Guangzhou, China and conducted fieldwork there. During the summer of 2023, I connected with and interviewed two trans- and queer-friendly therapists, one doctor specialized in gender dysphoria, and eight NGO workers to get to know about the current cultural, political, and medical milieu that transgender folks live in. I also started volunteering for two support networks for local transgender youths, the Trans Well-Being Team and Yuele Health. The Trans Well-Being Team is specifically founded to make accessible trans-friendly psychological care for trans individuals and to promote transgender visibility for a better collective trans future; Yuele Health is an NGO founded to promote accessible sexual health care for transgender folks. Working with these two groups offered me the opportunities to connect with and interview trans-friendly therapists, doctors, NGO volunteers, and transgender individuals to complete my preliminary research. While diverging in how they offer help, these two NGOs both aim to better transgender lives. These two connections are crucial to my future long-term dissertation research where I can further explore their difference in promoting better futures for local transgender youths.

Navigating the shifting landscape of “good” motherhoods: Exploring the everyday experiences of women experiencing postpartum depression in urban China

Thanks to the valuable SPA / Robert Lemelson Foundation Student Fellowship, I finished my preliminary fieldwork at one of the best Obstetrics-Gynecology hospitals in Shanghai, China, from June 13^th to July 20^th, 2023. I obtained women’s narratives about their experience with early pregnancy and perceptions of prenatal depression and mental illness in general via three interviews and 90 surveys; their families’ knowledge and attitude toward prenatal depression; and the obstetric and psychiatric practitioners’ perception and treatment of prenatal depression. I also observed the doctor-patient interactions and medical practices related to pregnancy in the clinical context from Monday to Saturday, dedicating five hours each day for six weeks.

The results of this fieldwork provided me with a deeper understanding of motherhood and prenatal depression in urban China, which allows me to further identify significant research questions. It also helps me construct a good relationship with obstetric practitioners to help me with my future dissertation fieldwork. My paper, drawing on the results of this fieldwork, titled “‘I do not have these problems’: An ethnographic study on early pregnant women’s perceptions of perinatal depression in urban China”, has been accepted by the 2024 SfAA/SMA 84th Annual Meeting. The specific fieldwork and results are as below.

Before the formal fieldwork started, I met with my collaborator Dr. Liang, a public health professor in Fudan University whose project also focuses on prenatal depression, several times to plan my project, which was nested within her own. We had a project launching meeting with the obstetric doctors and nurses at this hospital on June 2^nd.

In the formal fieldwork, every day from 7:30 am to 12:30 pm, I worked with Dr. Liang’s graduate students as interns in the initial prenatal record room to conduct surveys about prenatal experiences, ideas about mental health during pregnancy, and knowledge on mental illness with women who were in their early pregnancy and so initiating prenatal care at this hospital. The survey includes geographical information and several scales to evaluate these women’s mental health such as Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS), Modified Social Support Survey (MSSS), General Anxiety Scale-7 (GAS-7) and Self-rating Anxiety Scale (SAS). I will have access to these data as part of Dr. Liang’s team and will be an author on papers resulting from this research.

In addition, I engaged in observation of these women’s interactions with doctors, nurses, their families, and with each other in the initial prenatal record room. I also observed the obstetric outpatient clinic for five days during which these women conducted regular pregnancy care, screening, tests and examinations, including while the doctor explained the results to them and arranged their examinations for next time. I observed the mental health outpatient clinic once, during which the doctor conducted counseling with three women, one in early pregnancy with career issue, one in postpartum period with suicide thoughts, and one in postpartum period with a physical issue-high blood pressure. In addition, I observed a multiple-department treatment of a woman experiencing postpartum depression as the obstetricians and a psychiatrist from the Shanghai Mental Health Center worked together to treat this patient.

Beyond the survey and participant observation, I also conducted semi-structured interviews with three women in their early pregnancy to learn about their pregnancy experience and clinic interactions and knowledge on prenatal depression. I also had an informal interview with the psychological nurse at this hospital and short conversations with pregnant women’s families–mainly husbands– and two mothers.

The results of this preliminary fieldwork show that nearly 20% of 500 women who created the initial prenatal record in June screened either positive in depression or anxiety scales, or had a mental illness history. These women paid much attention to their physical conditions but spoke sparingly of their mental and emotional experience. When I introduced the project to them, they said, “I do not have these problems” and even when the doctors told them they screened positive for depression or anxiety, these women and their families only cared whether it would influence the fetus. The doctor or nurse suggested these women visit the mental health clinic, but only a few (according to staff) would likely follow the referral. In addition, the psychological nurse told me that the notion of “postpartum depression” is to some extent misleading, since it makes pregnant women think only after giving birth, one could get depression.

Exploring therapeutic and environmental processes with Andean-Amazonian healers in Bolivia

This project, conducted with Andean-Amazonian healers in Bolivia, explores how environmental change mediates therapeutic processes, particularly amidst environmental crises caused by extractivist policies. My research questions include: what are the psychic, sensorial and agential relations that are disrupted by capitalist extractivist logics? How are indigenous identities (re)produced through the recuperation of ancestral therapeutic practices? Do they differ from hegemonic indigenous subjectivities envisioned by extractive modes of development under the Bolivian indigenous state (Postero 2017)? How do these reframe notions of ecological and human health? This project focuses on traditional healers’ embodied attunements with more-than-human environmental relations, in alignment with Indigenous Andean-Amazonian philosophies and kinworlds. Given our current planetary milieu of environmental crises, probing the impacts of environmental change through expanding broader frameworks of ecologies of mind (Bateson 2000) and notions of health and healing  to include larger environmental and psychosocial relations is a timely intervention.

Report:

I carried out preliminary fieldwork in Bolivia from May to August 2023, consisting of interviews with traditional healers in the Andean-Amazonian traditions and participant observation of their therapeutic practices. My goal was to explore how environmental change mediates therapeutic processes. My other research questions included: what are the psychic, sensorial and agential relations that are disrupted by capitalist extractivist logics? How are indigenous identities (re)produced through the recuperation of ancestral therapeutic practices? Do they differ from hegemonic indigenous subjectivities envisioned by extractive modes of development under the Bolivian indigenous state (Postero 2017)? How do these reframe notions of ecological and human health?

In the Andean capital of La Paz, I made trips to the sacred mountain sites of Guaqui and Pajchiri together with traditional Aymara healers for the purpose of conducting sacred rituals and offerings. These healers, locally known as yatiris or amautas (in Aymara and Quechua, respectively), traverse richly interconnected psychic, social, and ecological worlds where the permission and ability to heal is sourced from ancestors, earth beings, healing plants and their spirits cultivated through lifelong, reciprocal relationalities. In my findings, the importance of environmental processes to these healers was very clear – various environmental disruptions ranging from natural events such as eclipses to anthropogenic wildfires were interpreted as having negative impacts on human health and well-being. I also realized that it could be important to study the role of social media in influencing environmental knowledge and awareness. When I asked the healers where they got their information from, most said through social media. Many have also started sharing popular posts about environmental destruction in Bolivia through Whatsapp or Facebook stories, where they can reach many of their clients and followers. For my subjects, especially the younger ones in their mid-20s who identified as Indigenous, recuperating traditional spiritual practices was an important part of their identity, and they did not feel particularly aligned or connected to the state.

In Riberalta, a city in the Northeastern Bolivian Amazon, I conducted participant observation and interviews with an elderly Tacana shaman. He took me into the forest garden that is his backyard, and although it looked no different from a wild forest trail to my untrained eye, it is a carefully cultivated apothecary of medicinal trees and plants. I was reminded of a saying that I have heard from healers many times, “cada planta tiene su medicina” (every plant can be used as medicine). The healer and his community, who identify as non-indigenous campesino (peasant), rely on traditional knowledge of local plants for their health, livelihoods, and well-being. He also described to me how he came to learn the uses for plants while he was apprenticing under a senior healer. He described how plant spirits wearing white lab coats took him to a space he called a hospital, with gleaming walls and bright lights, where they showed him how various plants could be used to cure different illnesses. This seems consistent with mestizo shamanistic practices in the Amazonian region (Beyer 2009). It reinforced the close and reciprocal relationships that healers share with earth beings, and their vulnerability to ecological damage from extractivism. 

I also found that it is comparatively more difficult to find traditional healers in the Amazon region. Speaking generally across Bolivia, the Aymara and Quechua communities in the Andean region have generally preserved cultural practices better. Officially, there are over thirty recognized indigenous peoples in the lowland Amazon region, but the majority are small and fractured communities due to regional histories of rupture and displacement, and it is more challenging to find communities that still have traditional healers actively working and practicing medicine. The role of regional histories of displacement should be foregrounded in this research to explain any potential gaps or absences in this regard.

One unforeseen obstacle to my fieldwork was scheduling difficulties with my subjects. While this might seem like a very basic fieldwork issue, it was arguably the biggest challenge to my fieldwork plans that I faced. The traditional healers are, by nature of their skill and work, very busy and in demand by clients, in addition to the demands of both regular family life and spiritual life. They don’t really operate on set schedules. Even if I have made an agreed-upon appointment in advance for an interview, our plans often would get shelved multiple times (e.g. due to a client emergency, or if they suddenly got called spiritually to travel to a faraway sacred site), which then made it difficult to schedule interviews with other subjects, too. Furthermore, in Bolivia, August is considered a sacred month when Pachamama (Mother Earth) is open to receiving ritual offerings, which meant that healers were constantly busy with clients. As a result, I managed to interview only ten traditional healers and their associates, which is at the low end of my goal. This illustrated the shortcomings of being limited to a short few months for summer fieldwork. This would not be as much of an issue with longer-term research of a year, for example, and I was forced to come up with alternative strategies, such as making up for a relative lack of interviews by spending more time doing participant observation during rituals, or renting a room in the house of a different healer, who was able to spend more time conversing with me during mealtimes or evenings. Although I had only planned to carry out fieldwork for two months, I ended up extending it to three months to make up for these scheduling difficulties.

Outside in the City: Youth Subjectivity and Trajectories in Urban Adventure Therapy

My project looks at the practices of an urban, Chicago-based adventure therapy organization, with an eye towards how diagnosis and labelling shape their practice and youth experience. As is typical for urban outdoor education organizations, this one—Directions—offers a broad range of developmental outdoor programming. Typically, this involves structured challenge in an adventure sport, like kayaking, rock climbing or cycling, alongside intensive reflection work. Directions describes their work as therapeutic and they operate with a clinical framework. Directions mostly serves young people who are in some way marked as needing (therapeutic) rehabilitation. Some of these are programs for gang-involved youth, youth with behavioral challenges or exposure to community violence. Some are programs with more of an enhancement focus—leadership programs, or community development organizations. On one hand, most youth coming to Directions (whether through “leadership” or “rehabilitation” programs), share demographics—many are Black or Latine, and most are low-income and from poor parts of Chicago. On the other hand, these groups of young people arrive occupying very differently labelled social positions (“problematic” or “leader”). Nevertheless, Directions has a decidedly anti-labelling ethos. Within the scope of this summer project, I set out to examine the role that such characterizations play in both the forms of development youth are offered, and the ways they take them up. This prompts the following research questions: does the AT modality operate differently in rehabilitative and leadership-oriented programs? Is one therapeutic and the other not? Are Directions staff acting on distinct “problems” when they approach these groups? Ultimately, how does social location shape youths’ experience there and sense of possibility for the future?

Report

The SPA-RLF Fellowship enabled me to complete a successful summer of fieldwork: I collected a significant amount of data, have been able to draw some initial conclusions and, most importantly, have begun to develop a contextually informed dissertation research question. RLF funds largely supported my transportation to and from Directions programming (sometimes giving staff/participants rides or toting outdoor equipment) during the 3-month period of fieldwork. Acting as a “volunteer”/researcher, and working alongside Directions staff, I participated in over 350 hours of formal Directions programming this summer, and I continue to be involved in the Directions community throughout this school year. RLF funds allowed me to attend a week-long, out-of-state “expedition” which served as a sort of capstone experience for some participants who participate regularly in Directions weekly programming. Finally, and most recently—RLF funds enabled me to attend the annual meetings of the Therapeutic Adventure Professional Group, where I was able to observe sessions on the future of AT, meet key figures in the field, and develop connections that will help me set up sites for my dissertation project.

Next Steps

Fieldwork this summer has set the stage for the development of my dissertation proposal, and Directions will be a site that I continue to engage with and include in my dissertation project. The broader field of adventure therapy (AT) represents a multiplicity of youth practices—including the general development of mindsets, skills, and dispositions for success in school and social life, as well as targeted treatment for substance abuse, behavioral and mental health issues. The broader AT professional community is in a moment of transition, eager to professionalize, build an evidence base and move towards more targeted (diagnosis-based), and explicitly clinical work. This thrust is at odds with Directions’s anti-labelling ethos, though it is one that the broader field sees as a way to root out bias and potential abuse from the practice. I hope to track this tension in my dissertation project, through ethnographic engagement in 3 different AT sites—which all take different approaches to diagnosis and labelling of youth “problems” while using the same modality and otherwise similar set of clinical activities, strategies and ideas. Further, I plan to use my remaining RLF fellowship funds to attend the next in-person SPA meetings, as well as begin conducting interviews with key figures in the AT field.

Dynamic Frame Building and Communitas in Autistic Workplaces: A search for field sites

In 2018, series of newspaper articles and United Nations memos from the Committee on the Rights of the Child reported that autistic children in France were frequently denied education, often only had access to inadequate psychoanalytic treatments or were sequestered in psychiatric day hospitals and were sometimes even removed from their homes (Chrisafis 2018). Ultimately, these accounts frame autism as a highly stigmatized and misunderstood condition, by both the French psychological community and the country at large, rooted in a fundamental difference in its clinical interpretation as compared to the rest of Western Europe. However, these critiques fail to demonstrate how autistic people successfully participate, exist, and thrive in the French social milieu. My project seeks to address this question through an ethnographic study of an employment training program at a special education facility (IME) in Paris, France which takes the form of an adaptive café. This program seeks to imbue autistic youth between the ages of 16 and 22 with the skills necessary to seek external employment in food service once they age out of the IME. The ultimate objective of the café project is to increase these youths’ autonomy, diversify their options for the future, and increase their social inclusion. However, it is necessary to interrogate what this objective means (both for educators and autistic youth), how it is enacted, and, ultimately, its attainability. I therefore guide my research by asking: “What does labor do for autistic individuals in France?”

With the funds awarded through the Robert Lemelson Fellowship, I was able to return to the field in the summer of 2023 to expand upon my previous research. Dynamics at the café have shifted significantly (and unexpectedly) since the summer of 2022. Three of my principal interlocutors departed the IME for other opportunities and the program has expanded to include a greater number of both youth and educators from the IME in an effort to distribute the labor demanded by the café more equally. At the same time, the café has experienced a significant increase in popularity and a decrease in efficacy, as a result of an influx of new educators who are not fully trained to work food service. These changes have produced an interesting dynamic in which the café’s institutional commitment to adaptation and inclusion is tested in the face of demanding clients who often are unaware of the social purpose of the café. I documented these shifting priorities carefully during my field visit. This analysis has served to challenge my previous conceptions of what, exactly, is going on at the café, as well as providing a valuable lesson in the precarious temporality of the field. This experience has been invaluable to building out a nuanced and layered exploration of my principal research question.

In addition to revisiting the café and its dynamics as a whole, I was also able to pay particular attention to labor training exercises through the collection of audio-visual data. I attended and recorded training sessions run by the IME’s speech therapist for several youth who were preparing to begin participation in the café program. I not only observed these sessions, but also participated in them. This allowed me to both observe the skills deemed necessary for the youth to gain in order to become productive participants at the café and also become aware of the challenges educators face in negotiating methods for adapting the café to the needs of autistic youth who require different and/more supports.

I additionally participated in several political/social outreach events the café hosted and/or participated in during my field visit. This included an inclusive event at the mansion of the mayor of the 3^rd arrondissement, where the café is located, which featured representatives from various local organizations for individuals with disabilities. I also had various conversations with educators and administrators about the expansion program they are preparing to launch, which will place autistic youth in externships in the kitchens of the Louvre and French National Assembly.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, I presented my work to-date directly to my interlocutors. This allowed me to gain renewed consent, strengthened my relationship with actors at the IME, and hear the perspectives of my interlocutors. This would not have been possible with the generous funding I received from the Lemelson Fellowship. I will continue this important work next year as I embark on my dissertation research.

No Place Like Home: Care, Community, and Criminalization of Homelessness in Kansas

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic the city of Topeka, Kansas has seen a significant increase in the number of unhoused people, many of whom live in improvised housing along the Kansas river that runs through the city. In response, the local Community Mental Health Center (CMHC) and the Topeka Rescue Mission, a Christian charity and Topeka’s sole shelter operator, expanded homeless outreach services using federal COVID-19 funding.This led to the establishment of dedicated outreach teams and the Mobile Access Partnership (MAP), a biweekly event meant to address unhoused Topekans’ basic needs and connect them to social services. Simultaneously, Topeka city government has taken steps to criminalize homelessness, passing a targeted anti-camping ordinance in 2019 and dramatically expanding its scope starting November 17, 2023. While homelessness and struggles for housing justice in America’s major cities have received much attention in contemporary academic and public discourse, smaller cities like Topeka where housing has historically been more affordable have been understudied.

This project works to bring ethnographic attention to the lives of contemporary unhoused people living in an academically overlooked and undertheorized community in the heart of the Midwest, foregrounding the precarity of everyday life and the relationships, communities, and lives built despite it. I examine strategies unhoused Topekans use to ensure social and material subsistence and the collective structural processes that make survival and sociality more difficult. My work looks at how unhoused people relate to one another, to their housed neighbors, to our broader communities, and to the environment. I work to ground conversations on worsening social inequality in the United States, and to challenge the alarming growth of punitive public policy, technologies, and profitable markets for policing extreme poverty and homelessness.

Finally, by centering the experiences of unhoused people in “flyover country,” I question the arbitrariness of red state/blue state regionalization to identify future opportunities for collective mobilization for housing justice regardless of state and city border.

Over the past several months, I have been spending time intermittently with unhoused Topekans and service providers, volunteering on street outreach teams and at the Mobile Access Partnership (MAP). This has permitted me to establish rapport with key interlocutors necessary for the implementation of more intensive methods. On my original grant application, I discussed the implementation of three focus groups with unhoused Topekans to create spaces to theorize present material and social conditions, imagine future possibility, and make asks of the greater Topeka community. I intend to use the fellowship funds for this purpose, offsetting air travel costs to return to my fieldsite from Los Angeles and use remaining funds to compensate focus group participants. Upon receiving the fellowship, I notified local partners with whom I have been working and have scheduled a two-hour meeting on November 13, 2023 to discuss these plans and receive approval for using MAP events to recruit participants. Once this approval is obtained, I will submit for IRB approval from my home institution, aiming to begin participant recruitment and focus group in late January and/or February 2024.

Between Two Breaths: Investigating Selfhood and Resilience through Sama Freediving Practices in Southeast Asia

In my PhD in Psychocultural and Medical Anthropology at UCLA, I aim to investigate the freediving, or breath-hold diving, of Sama communities in Southeast Asia. I am specifically interested in how freediving affects their experiences of selfhood and resilience. I will explore how diving practices are changing in current political, economic, and environmental contexts; and how Sama communities use freediving practices as forms of resistance and refusal against harmful boundaries, logics, and processes of othering that fragment their ecologies and communities, and perpetuate their lives – and breaths – as marginal. I explore these questions through ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation, in-depth interviewing, and photoethnography.

I am grateful for the SPA/RLF Fellowship because it enabled me to conduct important exploratory fieldwork in Southeast Asia in order to connect with, and begin getting to know, several different Sama communities and their current contexts. I spent one month in the Philippines with three Sama communities in Panglao, Davao City, and Samal Island respectively. I then spent one month in Indonesia, with two Sama communities in Sulawesi. This fieldwork allowed me to contextualize each community’s freediving practices, gain a more nuanced understanding of the forms the practice is currently taking, and how socio-political, economic, and environmental conditions are influencing freediving livelihoods and experiences. I was able to start building important relationships, became a freediving and spearfishing apprentice in each community, and started collaborating with community members to ensure that the community’s ideas, interests, and circumstances guide my future research. Excitingly, I was able to choose one site out of the five I visited this summer – a community in southeastern Sulawesi, Indonesia – that will become the main fieldsite for my PhD research, and arguably, for my career.

This SPA/RLF funded fieldwork has allowed me to begin the important work of honing and tailoring my PhD training around my newly chosen fieldsite and its contexts. I have begun taking language courses in Bahasa Indonesia at UCLA, and have ample linguistic material that I collected over the summer to continue self-studying Bahasa Sama. I plan to take an independent study this winter on the history, geography, ecology, and politics of Sulawesi. I have presented preliminary findings and reflections based upon this fieldwork at the 4S 2023 Honolulu Conference this November, where I gave a paper titled “Submerged Stories: Centering Indigenous Freediving Practices in Oceanic Governance and Knowledge Production.” Thank you for such an enriching and empowering fieldwork experience!