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Opening Windows and Imagining Other Possible Worlds
opening windows and imagining other possible worlds
2019-20 DAVID AND MARY HUNTING GRADUATE FELLOW
NICHOLAS CAVERLY
The time I have spent in residence at the Institute for the Humanities is the most enriching experience I have had as a graduate student at the University of Michigan. I do not say this lightly—the university has offered me ample opportunities for intellectual engagement. And yet, across my seven years on campus, those opportunities pale in comparison to the models for creative and generous scholarship that I have encountered in the institute. My colleagues this year included literary scholars, artists, historians, gender theorists, performers, linguists, and cultural critics. Some wear more than one of these hats. They are people who inspire me as they angle purposefully across disciplinary fault lines. In their hands, interdisciplinarity is not an empty buzzword; it is a practice that demands ongoing theoretical and methodological innovation.
Our weekly seminars and biweekly FellowSpeak lectures were a comforting regularity, especially in a year that is concluding with most of us sheltering at home. It has been my privilege to engage with works-in-progress from colleagues who are pushing at the cutting edges of their fields. To name only a few, their drafts have examined ancient cognitive processes, transhistorical educational institutions, sonic communities of carillon performance, embodied stakes of postcolonial resistance, and new definitions for language itself. Commenting on my colleagues’ work has challenged me to expand my own modes of analysis and scholarly commitments as an ethnographer of racist (and antiracist) environments. In particular, it has done so by opening windows on the diverse ways that humanistic scholars can make conditions of oppression legible while never foreclosing possibilities for liberatory politics.
During my fellowship year I have written and revised an article for publication, completed two chapters of my dissertation, and successfully navigated the academic job market. None of this seemed possible in September. Yet it became so with the support of my colleagues in the institute, all of whom read and commented on an early draft of that article. Outside of our regular seminars, a few graduate student colleagues and I also workshopped chapter drafts, cover letters, and job talks. Their feedback helped me craft work that speaks to a breadth of scholarship rather than a narrow field. I was also buoyed by the care that faculty fellows extended toward graduate students. Without exception, they were reservoirs of encouragement on early career transitions and commiseration about the increasingly precarious state of the academy. Their advice has been invaluable to me, especially on job interview rituals and the need to cultivate life outside of work.
From former fellows, I knew that my fellowship at the Institute for the Humanities would help me better orient my scholarship toward matters of interdisciplinary concern. I was, nonetheless, unprepared to find a community of people who go to such lengths to sustain me both intellectually and personally. As individuals and as a collective, they have indelibly shaped the ways that I think, work, and imagine other possible worlds.
–Nicholas Caverly, 2019-20 David and Mary Hunting Graduate Fellow, anthropology
coincident investment in theatrical performance. Examining how literary works including Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic take up themes of theatrical performance, how they perform on the page, and how their evocations of marginalized bodies are “performed” by and for the books’ wide audiences, she argues that encoded in these texts is a “theatrical” reorientation toward democratic life at once more modest and more radical than we might expect. It is more modest in that subjects—and audiences—are figured as perpetually unable to understand one another. It is more radical in that they are urged to attend to one another anyway. Each chapter combines black, queer, and feminist theater and performance approaches to identity and embodiment with close reading methods from literary studies to elaborate different relational elements of thinking theatrically. Together, the chapters advance a practice of collaboratively developed, collectively sustained attention: a theatrical ethics of relation.
ZEHRA HASHMI A. BARTLETT GIAMATTI GRADUATE FELLOW, ANTHROPOLOGY AND HISTORY “Biometric Belonging: Datafied Kinship and Databased Governance in Urban Pakistan”
This dissertation investigates the manner and means by which Pakistan’s biometric identity card system, the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA), moves from a security-oriented identification system into a broader regime shaping domain of social life outside the realm of security. The NADRA card, built from individual biometric information and databases that consolidate records on citizens’ kin ties and other social data, is a central preoccupation for Pashtun migrants in urban locations. Through multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Pashtun neighbourhoods and NADRA’s institutional sites, this research addresses three broad questions: 1) How do NADRA’s biometric identification technologies transform Pashtun experiences, notions and practices of kinship? 2) How does incorporation into and exclusion from NADRA’s databases shape daily practices affecting mobility and access to housing, education and government services? 3) How are NADRA’s day-to-day operations shaped by Pashtun encounters with NADRA, and what does this reveal about Pakistan’s governance and security practices? Additionally, this project historicises biometric technologies by examining early post-colonial and late-colonial fingerprinting and tribal identification practices. Hashmi hopes to develop an understanding of historically constituted connections between kinship, biometrics, security practices, and the status of ethnic minorities as they crystallise into a networked, state-organised infrastructure.
SHIRA SCHWARTZ RICHARD & LILLIAN IVES GRADUATE FELLOW, COMPARATIVE LITERATURE “Yeshiva Quirls: A Textual Ethnography of Jewish Gender, Sex and Reproduction”
This dissertation explores the shifting roles of American Orthodox Jewish women through the changing gendered educational norms of the yeshiva. Since the rabbinic period, the yeshiva has operated as a center of male reproduction, generating lineages of learned men through rabbinic discipleship. Schwartz’s research traces the contemporary re-gendering of the yeshiva from a men’s to a women’s educational institution with the recent advent of women’s yeshivas. Framing Jewish education as a form of gendered reproduction, the project highlights this institutional shift as a reproductive shift, demonstrating how women’s yeshivas restructure Orthodox gender, sex and reproduction. Centering students’ biomaterial learning bodies, Schwartz registers secondary sex trait
Zehra Hashmi
