Senior Fellow Abstracts

Sarah Del Carmen Camacho:

Centroamérica y Zhongguo: A Story of Converging and Conflicting Perspective

In Chinese-Central American Relations

International partnerships take many forms, yet their success always hinges on the mutual satisfaction of each party’s objectives. A critical obstacle to a mutually beneficial international partnership is power differentials between participants. This project understands these power dynamics in Chinese-Central American relations through the lens of discourse around Chinese-funded infrastructure projects in Central America. Government releases and media articles from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Costa Rica, and Nicaragua are coded for themes that reveal discursive messages about each party’s attitude toward these infrastructure projects. Findings reveal there are inconsistencies in the narratives that each country produces when they are compared across regions and internally. The PRC presents a mostly unified narrative across government and media sources that presents the Chinese-Central American relationship as mutually-beneficial to the two regions. The PRC characterizes Costa Rica and Nicaragua as fellow developing nations, while Central American people are discussed as obstacles to the progress of Chinese-funded projects. In contrast, the Central American narrative must be broken down at the government and media levels. Central American governments tend to echo sentiments from PRC government documents by using similar verbiage. Central American media, however, draws attention to the failures of Chinese-funded projects and the doubts that Central American people have about them. By bringing both of these themes to light, the media accepts that working with the PRC can be a way for Central America to continue developing, but questions Central American governments’ management of these relationships and whether they hold the interest of Central American people.

Savannah Henderson:

“I’m Fat As F**k:” Fat Black Women’s SelfPerception and Modes of Resistance

While many past scholars have positioned Black women as not having significant body image anxieties, Black women’s experiences with racism, sexism, and fatphobia are deeply rooted in historical narratives of the “acceptable body.” As a result, body image anxieties are prominent among Black women of size. My project investigates the historical and contemporary positioning of self-defined fat Black women and thoroughly interrogates the assumption that they do not have significant body image anxieties. Through the employment of 14 interviews, my project explores how fat Black women perceive their bodies and navigate the world. Additionally, using Lizzo’s media presence as a case study on fat Black women celebrities, I analyze interviews, social media posts, and song lyrics to give insight into the role of status and visibility in shaping fat Black women’s perception of their bodies. The overarching goal of this project is to locate the ways in which fat Black women resist racialized and gendered fatphobia and claim agency within different environments

Olivia Kerr:

Rethinking the “Unusual Type”: Black Queer Women and the Spatial Politics of Belonging in Twentieth Century America

Historical examinations of queer people in American history have often overlooked and disregarded Black queer women. However, archival evidence gestures towards the existence of such women who led complex lives within a white supremacist heteronormative dominant society predicated on the Othering of Black queer bodies—rendering them abject. My research explores the contours of Black women’s queerness through a historical lens. I analyze primary source materials through an archival analysis surrounding the lives of Black queer women in the twentieth century United States, prior to the Stonewall riots. Heteronormative and connotatively “queer” spaces were often hostile towards Black queer women as they deemed Black queer women as not having space in society —resulting in what I call “uninhabitable space.” I examine the "uninhabitable" spaces they occupied, and this project will make space for the interiority of these Black queer women’s lives. Black women’s geographies illustrate how their queerness manifested spatiotemporally. Through this exploration, I have let the archives guide my research as I investigate how Black women’s queerness was perceived by a broader, heteronormative Black public sphere while, most importantly, investigating how Black women’s queerness contributes to a greater, more conceptual idea of Black Queer Space as liberatory and transgressive. I intend for this research to encourage an increase in the recovery of Black queer women’s stories from the past.

Marc Ridgell:

Resistance/Refusal of Violence in the Neoliberal City: Black LGBTQ+ Communities in Chicago and New York

Since the 1980s, Black queer communities across U.S. cities have experienced racist and classist exclusion from gay neighborhoods, police and interpersonal violence in neighborhoods more generally, and medical racism in the HIV/AIDS crisis. Despite these forms of anti-Black and antiqueer oppression, Black queer and trans people have performed acts of resistance and refusal to build community and experience better worlds. This research project examines how Black LGBTQ+ communities have responded to systems of racism, classism, queerphobia, and misogyny by claiming their “right to the city.” Specifically, this project explores how Black LGBTQ+ people in both Chicago and New York City have expressed resistance and refusal since 1989. This project is interdisciplinary and utilizes mixed methods, including archival-based research, visual and media analyses, urban sociology, performance studies, and critical geography.

Ale Uriostegui: Opening the Avenues

of Political Participation: The 1968 Mexican Student Movement in Gonzalo Martré’s Los símbolos transparentes

My project analyzes the 1968 Mexican Student Movement and how the movement mobilized hope for social changes in society. The Mexican military violently repressed the Movement’s peaceful protest on October 2, 1968, killing over 400 people. The 5,000 students, educators, and parents protested against the unconstitutional military occupation of universities, demanded the release of political prisoners, and the repeal of Articles of Penal Code which punished political dissent. I analyze the movement through the political novel Los símbolos transparentes (1978) by Gonzalo Martré. Using the novel, I explore how the author uses different forms of documentation to create a narrative of collective hope for social changes amidst a politically repressive regime. Using Ana Dinerstein’s concepts of political autonomy in Latin America, I ask how the student characters in the novel 1) “negate” the available acts of political participation, 2) “create” new avenues for political participation 3) navigate “contradiction” with their demands and actions, and 4) exemplify “excess”? My project has implications for citizenship education and political literary studies.