The American Ethnological Society is pleased to announce the winners of the 2025 AES Graduate Student Research Grant.

The AES small grants competition received many excellent proposals, and the committee was challenged to select 9 grant recipients from a large pool of worthy projects. The award of $2000 is to fund dissertation research for first- or second-year PhD students. The committee awarded grants to the following nine graduate students:

Ajung Ryoo, University of California, Berkeley
“Technocratic imaginaries and counter-imaginaries on the womb”

Chunkai Cao, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
“Gateway to nature: An ethnographic study of rural communities at the periphery of a southwest Chinese national park”

Edward Ephithite Lindholm, University of Manchester
“(Re)making common futures: An ethnographic study of water activism in Chile”

Ernestine Whitaker, Syracuse University
“Placemaking without belonging: Migration, labor, and uncertainty in northern Italy”

Frederico Dupont Bernal, Duke University
“Betting on the future: Sports gambling and speculative capitalism in Colombia”

Isabel Goddard, Oxford University
“Designing love: How dating apps design modern intimacy”

Maria Murad, Oxford University
“Oxford and the ‘ethnographic state’: Anthropological training and the colonial administrative services course

Mira Guth, Brown University
“Viral crossings: Managing ‘bird flu’ on California dairy farms”

Omotayo Adenugba, Johns Hopkins University
“The evolution of crude oil (black gold) and ecologies of restoration in Ogoni, Nigeria”