The American Ethnological Society is pleased to announce the winners of the 2021 AES Graduate Student Research Grant.The AES small grants competition, now in its fourth year, received many excellent proposals, and the committee was challenged to select 20 grant recipients from a pool of worthy projects. The award of $2500 is to fund dissertation research. Grantees will be encouraged to write a short reflective essay on their project findings for the AES website, and an additional $500 will be available to grantees who present their work at the 2022 AES spring meeting, co-hosted by the Association of Political and Legal Anthropology (APLA), place and date TBA.

AES plans to run the competition again in 2022.

The committee awarded grants to the following twenty graduate students:

Tariq Adely

George Washington University, tariq_adely@gwu.edu
“Digital Space, Literature, and Locality on ‘Jordanian’ Facebook.”

Tariq Adely

Adely’s research examines how Jordan-based authors draw on various communicative practices and technological affordances to cultivate local readerships in online spaces such as Facebook groups. Through digital ethnographic methods, his project aims to understand how social media users, digital technologies, and scale-making practices intersect to produce notions of place in virtual space.

Karina Beras

Cornell University, kb283@cornell.edu
“Belonging and Place-Making Outside of the Nation-State”

Karina Beras

Karina’s dissertation project examines the phenomenon of statelessness, investigating how denaturalization prompts fugitive practices that circumvent state mandates and law enforcement. She explores how Dominicans of Haitian descent practice place-making and enact belonging irrespective of a perceived boundedness to nowhere.

Haley Bryant

University of Toronto, haley.bryant@mail.utoronto.ca
“Cultural Recuperation in Cyberspace: Collaborative Digital Heritage Initiatives Beyond the Museum”

Haley Bryant

Museums are increasingly exploring digital solutions to expand access to collections and other resources beyond their walls as part of broader ‘decolonizing’ efforts. As museums successfully leverage digital tools to connect audiences with their exhibitions and educational programming, virtually recreating the experience of being present and engaging with ancestral belongings for the purpose recuperating and sharing traditional knowledge is proving more challenging and complex. Haley’s doctoral research explores how digital technologies shape, and are shaped by, collaborative cultural recuperation initiatives between museums, Indigenous communities, and third-party participants like tech companies, how these communities of practice form and operate, and how the narratives they co-produce about technologies, heritage, and knowledge inform institutional policies and protocols.

Randall Burson

University of Pennsylvania, Randall.Burson@pennmedicine.upenn.edu
“Practicing Plurinationality: Mapuche Participation in Chile’s Changing Political Landscape”

Randall Burson
My research attends to how Mapuche people become intentionally entangled in state politics—specifically this historic moment of constitutional reform in Chile—in order to challenge the sovereignty of the Chilean nation-state through claims to plurinationality and indigenous self-determination.

SJ Dillon

(they/them) Emory University, sjdillo@emory.edu
“Reverberations of Anti-Black Settler Colonization on Trans Dysphoria in the Southeast (United States)”