Recent Alumni Publications

Originating in the Black Atlantic world as a fusion of dance and martial art, capoeira was a marginalized practice for much of its history. Today it is globally popular. This ethnographic memoir weaves together the history of capoeira, recent transformations in the practice, and personal insights from author Katya Wesolowski’s thirty years of experience as a capoeirista.
 
Capoeira Connections follows Wesolowski’s journey from novice to instructor while drawing on her decades of research as an anthropologist in Brazil, Angola, Europe, and the United States. In a story of local practice and global flow, Wesolowski offers an intimate portrait of the game and what it means in people’s lives. She reveals camaraderie and conviviality in the capoeira ring as well as tensions and ruptures involving race, gender, and competing claims over how this artful play should be practiced. Capoeira brings people together and yet is never free of histories of struggle, and these too play out in the game’s encounters.
 
In her at once clear-sighted and hopeful analysis, Wesolowski ultimately argues that capoeira offers opportunities for connection, dialogue, and collaboration in a world that is increasingly fractured. In doing so, capoeira can transform lives, create social spheres, and shape mobile futures.

Gay men in Kunming, China use collusive infrapolitics to foster and sustain LGBT communities under the premise of HIV/AIDS prevention. Collusive infrapolitics is the building of collaborative relationships between non-state actors and governing agencies to tacitly agree on publicly acceptable political projects, while leaving vague other deviating activities. Men who have Sex with Men HIV Community Based Organizations cooperate with the state around HIV/AIDS prevention and can then build collusive relationships with low level government cadres, who then ignore gay social activities and help to insulate LGBT organizations from political pressure. As the Chinese political environment becomes more restrictive of LGBT organizing, collusive infrapolitics provides an important theoretical explanation for how non-state actors can engage politically around sensitive topics.

Marketization of education in South Africa accelerated at the crossroads of the postapartheid democratic transition and global neoliberal turn, reflecting both educational policy impacts of the country’s protracted negotiated settlement and transnational trends. A controversial 2018 provincial amendment further entrenched marketization in the Western Cape by introducing “collaboration schools,” public-private partnerships modeled on charter schools from the United States and academy schools from the United Kingdom. This article employs critical policy ethnography to argue that racial capitalism shapes transnational policy borrowing and to illustrate that a perceived portability of marketized reforms rests on racialized notions of the function of schooling for marginalized youth across contexts. I draw on Cedric Robinson’s analysis of capitalism as a ubiquitously racialized, interconnected global order and Neville Alexander’s insistence that antiracism must be anticapitalist, particularly in education, a site and strategy of struggle with dual potential to perpetuate or undermine racial capitalism.

This innovative volume presents twenty comparative case studies of important global questions, such as 'Where should our food come from?' 'What should we do about climate change?' and 'Where should innovation come from?' A variety of solutions are proposed and compared, including market-based, economic, and neoliberal approaches, as well as those determined by humane values and ethical and socially responsible perspectives. Drawing on original research, its chapters show that more responsible solutions are very often both more effective and better aligned with human values. Providing an important counterpoint to the standard capitalist thinking propounded in business school education, People Before Markets reveals the problematic assumptions of incumbent frameworks for solving global problems and inspires the next generation of business and social science students to pursue more effective and human-centered solutions.

The United Nations (U.N.) advocates for the inclusion of refugees into public schools. This ethnographic, pilot research explores foreign students’ experience of inclusion and belonging in a Nairobi public school. The research found that these students most resented being placed in lower grades and that their lowered grade placement may have benefited the teachers and schools, to the detriment of foreign students. Lowered grade placement was justified as a way to mitigate students’ negative impact on school performance [mean grades] - however, foreign, over-aged students soon became the schools’ overachievers: given leadership opportunities and getting the highest grades, with some younger Kenyans classmates feeling unable to compete. According to this research, a focus on performance may turn foreign students into a school’s ‘joker’ card: slotted into lower grades when they would harm class performance and left as overaged students when they increase performance, a phenomenon which not only harms all students but further divides host communities and foreign students.

This article examines the historical, structural, and embodied aspects of the 2016–2018 crisis at the Université d’État d'Haïti (State University of Haiti, UEH) to contextualize and disrupt a conventional notion of “Haitian perpetual crisis.” The article first discusses various approaches to the ongoing crises in Haiti. It specifically highlights Beckett's conceptualization of kriz (embodied crisis) and uses articulation and embodied spaces to forward a place-based understanding of kriz. It next examines transnational processes, which articulate UEH as a “crisis factory” by constituting it as a state-nonstate entity located in a yellow zone (meaning, a site of insecurity). The embodied space thus creates affective uncertainty for individuals. In the final section, the article uses a composite narrative to retell the story of the UEH crisis from 2016 to 2018. It also draws on fieldwork at three UEH faculties (schools) to trace kriz through the affective experiences and embodied practices of UEH students, professors, and administrators. This article argues that the UEH crisis was a manifestation of the so-called crisis factory articulation that geographically situated bodies incorporated and reified through a habitus of improvisation. It concludes that this improvisation may also provide a way out of future crises—to the extent that improvisers can coalesce around a shared vision of the future that can drive systemic change.