Recent Alumni Publications

Keenan's analysis of the 2011 St. Patrick's Day parade in Belfast suggests that, in Belfast, the parade is reinvented as a carnival, less about Irishness and more about re-imagining a troubled city. The event becomes a space for testing and affirming what the city and its citizens want Belfast to become.

In his book "The Para-State," Aldo Civico draws on interviews with paramilitary death squads and drug lords to provide a cultural interpretation of the country’s history of violence and state control. Between 2003 and 2008, Civico gained unprecedented access to some of Colombia’s most notorious leaders of the death squads. He also conducted interviews with the victims of paramilitary, with drug kingpins, and with vocal public supporters of the paramilitary groups. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, this riveting work demonstrates how the paramilitaries have in essence become a war machine deployed by the Colombian state to control and maintain its territory and political legitimacy.

Tawasil’s ethnographic fieldwork in Iran reveals how some religious conservative howzevi (seminarian) women understand marriage and motherhood as constitutive of idealized womanhood. Tawasil argues that the howzevi’s observances of certain constraints facilitate educational, social and political mobility.

Koyama's OpEd piece in the Huffington Post calls for providing refugees with English training as a prerequisite to enjoying economic mobility.