2017

• Job Placement: Assistant Professor, Global Studies and Gender, Race, and Sexuality Studies, Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
• Webpage: https://ntanjeem.org/
• Committee: Hawkesworth, Mary (chair), Decena, Carlos; Rodgers, Yana; Brooks, Ethel; Siddiqi, Dina (outside member).
• Dissertation: “Can Workers of the World Unite?” A multi-sited ethnography of transnational labor organizing across the apparel commodity network.

Bio

Nafisa Tanjeem is an Assistant Professor of Global Studies and Gender, Race, and Sexuality Studies at Lesley University. She served as a Visiting Scholar at the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program of Northeastern University in the academic year 2020-21.

Nafisa’s research and teaching interests include transnational, postcolonial, and decolonial feminisms; critical race theory; globalization and feminist politics; critical community engagement; nonprofit industrial complex; critical university studies; and transnational social justice movements with a specific focus on the United States and South Asia.

Nafisa’s current book project examines transnational labor activism and activist discourses developed in relation to the deadliest garment industrial disaster in the human history – the 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza, a factory building housing five garment factories in Savar, Bangladesh. Drawing on two-year-long physical and digital ethnographic observations, her project reveals how creative transnational feminist praxis in virtual and physical organizing spaces can uncover histories and struggles of women workers and grassroots labor organizers, thereby transcending benevolent regimes of neoliberal transnational labor organizing.

Before joining Lesley, Nafisa taught at Rutgers University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Dhaka. She has been actively involved in community organizing and social justice activism. As Community Organizer of Council of Agencies Serving South Asians (CASSA), she designed and implemented local campaigns aimed at promoting poverty reduction, gender equity, and youth engagement among South Asian immigrant communities in Toronto, Canada. She was also an organizer of United Students Against Sweatshops in the USA and “Meye” (Women) network in Bangladesh.

Nafisa holds a Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University in the USA, an M.A. in Women and Gender Studies from the University of Toronto in Canada, and a B.S.S in Women and Gender Studies from the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh.

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes transnational labor activism and activist discourses developed in relation to the deadliest garment industrial disaster in the human history - the 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza, a factory building housing five garment factories in Savar, Bangladesh. The project takes an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach, involving two-year-long physical and digital ethnographic observation and interviews with Bangladeshi women garment workers, labor rights activists, researchers, and policymakers in Bangladesh and the United States. The research asks what it means for grassroots labor organizers in the Global South, who are often restricted by national borders and neoliberal socio-economic-political forces, to engage in transnational solidarity building. It specifically examines why some grassroots organizing initiatives in the Global South can engage in solidarity building with transnational allies while others do not gain such access. Drawing on the case study of the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh - a transnational governance structure that aspired to ensure safety and security for Bangladeshi garment workers after the Rana Plaza collapse, the dissertation argues that the post-Rana Plaza transnational collaboration between workers and labor organizers in the Global North and the South reproduces a neoliberal attention economy where gendered and racialized Southern workers receive attention from their Northern allies only if they speak the preferred language, subscribe for a preferred politics, and mobilize donor funds in a preferred way. The ethnographic fieldwork documents how attention from the Northern allies often comes at the cost of losing attention from Southern workers and activists. Therefore, the neoliberal attention economy offers the impossible choice between engaging in transnational collaboration while losing material impact on the ground and focusing on grounded struggles while losing transnational allies.

• NU Academic Track Fellow (NUAcT)
• Department: The School of Geography, Politics and Sociology
• Job Placement: Academic Track Fellow in the School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology, Newcastle University
• Webpage: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/gps/staff/profile/stephenseely.html#background
• Committee: Cornell, Drucilla (chair); Grosz, Elizabeth (co-chair); Cohen, Ed (internal member); Fermon, Nicole (outside member)
• Dissertation: "A world of difference"

Bio

Stephen graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago with degrees in English and Gender and Women's Studies. His dissertation project explores the relationship between sex/uality and technicity in philosophy, psychoanalysis, the biological and techno-sciences, and science fiction. In general, Stephen's work seeks to think through the reconfigurations of life, sex, and spirit/psyche wrought by contemporary forms of information and biocapitalism, technoscience, and neoliberal governmentality. In addition to his dissertation, there are currently two main ongoing projects through which this work takes shape. The first is a collaboration with Drucilla Cornell rethinking the relationship between revolution, spirituality, and sexual ethics as they have been configured in queer and feminist theory and in various revolutionary movements (especially Iran and South Africa). Their article "There’s Nothing Revolutionary About a Blowjob" is forthcoming in Social Text, and they are currently working on a book. The second project develops the concept of psychecologies which couples the framework of ecosophy” (ecological philosophy, philosophical ecology) in Félix Guattari’s writings with a more capacious understanding of psyche as mind-spirit-life-ghost in order to widen the individualistic frame of contemporary psychology by centralizing the concern for both the collective and environmental dimensions of life. The notion of psychecology then shifts psychology from the study of the (individual) mind to a consideration of a series of inter-linked ecosystems (mental, collective, environmental), as well as thinks critically about what care practices are necessary to maintain a balance among these systems at varying scales, from the individual to the global. Additionally, he has published work on queer becoming, affect theory, race and psychoanalysis, sexual difference, and biophilosophy.

Abstract

This dissertation is an exploration of the co-imbrications of Being, life, and sex: of the sexuate dimensions of Being (or, perhaps better put: of living) and of the ontological (or, perhaps better put: vital) dimensions of sex. It asks: What is the relationship between Being and living? Does Being, or life, have (a) sex? What is the, often implicit, ontology of life and sex that prevails in feminist and queer theory and politics? And what questions and practices might another thinking of Being, life, and sex enable? Its goal is to outline a feminist and queer theory of sexuation as a mode of individuation and relation that moves beyond the ontology of the individual that dominates Euro-American philosophy (and therefore most feminist and queer theory): rather than taking the individual as a starting point and analyzing sexuality as a form of identity, subjectivity, or interaction between individuals, it thinks sexuation as a vital ontological process of individuation and relation at work at a number of “levels” from the physico-chemical to the ecological, technological, artistic, and political. Its central argument is that, as a mode of individuation, sexuation consists simultaneously of differentiation and relation and that this is a process given by Being, or life, “itself.” As such, it thinks Being, or life, as always already more-than-one. This theory of sexuation, then, is a theory of life’s Being, or becoming, that insists on sexual difference as an ineradicable and ontological force while also insisting on its open-endedness. We do not know what forms of sexuation life may bring, or what modes of life sexuation may bring, but the becomings of life and sex take place in and through one another. Understanding sexuation this way, it suggests, cuts across many ongoing debates in feminist, queer, and trans theory and highlights unexplored areas of transdisciplinary research and feminist inquiry. If there is no dimension of Being, or life, at which the isolated individual exists and if there is no dimension of Being, or life, at which sexuation is not at play, then there is no dimension that does not call for feminist and queer analysis.

• Job Placement: Assistant Professor in African American Studies at Georgetown University
• Webpage: https://africanamericanstudies.georgetown.edu/people
• Committee: Alexander-Floyd, Nikol G (chair); BROOKS, ETHEL (internal member); Busia, Abena (internal member); Murch, Donna (outside member); Dinzey-Flores, Zaire (outside member)
• Dissertation: "Where shall the monsters live?"

Bio

An interdisciplinary scholar who studies how housing policies are shaped by race, gender, political economy, and ideology, her untitled manuscript-in-progress historically and ethnographically traces how low-income black women have been affected by post-1970s changes in public and affordable housing policies and advocacy. Her research project also examines the contemporary landscape of affordable housing policy and politics to better understand why low-income black women remain vulnerable to eviction, displacement, and housing insecurity in cities like the District of Columbia. Additionally, her work presents the organizing challenges low-income black women tenant activists in D.C. face as they organize to combat the city's reduction and privitization of affordable housing.

Abstract

My dissertation historically and ethnographically traces how low-income black women have been affected by recent changes in public and affordable housing policies and advocacy. This dissertation examines the contemporary landscape of affordable housing policy and politics to better understand why low-income black women remain vulnerable to eviction, displacement, and housing insecurity in cities like the District of Columbia. Feminist scholars have documented how low-income black mothers won tenant rights and greater access to public housing during the civil rights movement. Yet very little research has examined the post-1970s changes to affordable housing policy and black women’s tenant activism. In order to capture the empirical and theoretical complexity of low-income black women’s experiences in affordable housing policy and politics, this study employs a new epistemological approach called black feminist materialism. Black feminist materialism combines black feminist theories including intersectionality, critical theory, and feminist theories on the welfare state. Black feminist materialism provides the theoretical perspective needed to conduct critical ethnography, critical discourse analysis, and historical materialism. Armed with my feminist-minded theoretical perspective and after conducting archival and primary source research, I discovered federal and local housing bureaucrats used negative stereotypes about low-income black mothers to advocate post-1970s market reforms of public and affordable housing. Borrowing a term originally coined by critical urbanist Ananya Roy, I call these stereotypes poverty truths because these negative narratives facilitated policy interventions that had disciplinary and carceral effects. Housing officials used poverty truths to reduce funding, conduct mass evictions, and advocate for character rehabilitation services (e.g., job readiness/parenting classes) in exchange for housing assistance. In order to understand tenant activists’ response to these policy reforms, I analyzed the District of Columbia’s affordable housing advocacy community. To examine this community, I conducted participant observation as a community organizer for 18 months, starting in late 2013 and ending in early 2015. Moreover, I conducted thirty non-profit staffers and ten low-income black women living in public and affordable housing. Post-1970s market reforms to affordable housing led to D.C. non-profit developers and service providers leading affordable housing production and advocacy. No longer leading tenant campaigns, low-income black women are recruited into non-profit developers and service providers’ advocacy models. These non-profits’ advocacy efforts are limited to regulatory reform (i.e., small improvements to existing laws), often ignoring or reducing black women tenant activists’ demands for structural reforms, which included calls for massive state investment in living-wage work, public and affordable housing, and childcare supports. This dissertation concludes with reflections on how non-profit organizing groups and low-income black women tenant activists can help develop tenant solidarity and a political analysis to counter the negative consequences of market and disciplinary housing reforms.

• Job Placement: Assistant Professor, School of Law, University of Warwick
• Committee: Decena, Carlos (chair); Goldstein, Daniel (co-chair); Martinez-San Miguel, Yolanda (internal member); Maldonado-Torres, Nelson (internal member); Fuentes, Marisa (internal member); Rodriguez, Robyn (outside member);
• Dissertation: "Ningún ser humano es ilegal"

Bio

Born and raised in Bogotá, Carolina Alonso Bejarano is a community organizer, writer, editor, translator and DJ. She is an Assistant Professor of Law at Warwick University, and she holds a Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her research interests lie at the intersection of decolonial feminism and migration studies, particularly as it relates to interethnic immigrants’ rights activism in the United States. She is the author of Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science (Duke University Press, 2019), a collaboratively written book that explores the immigrants’ rights movement in New Jersey and the possibilities of using ethnography as a tool for decolonization. She is a collective member of Sangría Editora, a publishing house based in New York City and Santiago de Chile, and in her spare time she mixes music and practices poi in hopes of one day becoming an awesome fire spinner

Abstract

“Ningún Ser Humano es Ilegal: Decolonial Feminisms & Immigrants’ Rights Grassroots Organizing in New Jersey” is a feminist decolonial study of the immigrants’ rights movement in Freehold Borough, NJ. As an interdisciplinary project, the dissertation draws on multiple methods –primarily archival research, oral history and four years of ethnographic fieldwork– and argues for the use of dehumanization rather than illegality as a framework for understanding the debate around undocumented immigration in the United States.