1st Place Winner

Kelsey A. Dalrymple

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Kelsey A. Dalrymple is an Educational Anthropologist and Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After nearly 15 years working in the sectors of education and humanitarian response, Kelsey’s doctoral work has focused on the phenomenon of social emotional learning in refugee and crisis contexts. She completed her dissertation research with Burundian refugees in Tanzania where she explored the converging issues of governmentality, neoliberalism, race, culture, and knowledge co-production. Kelsey uses ethnographic, critical, and visual methodologies and her work has been published in the Journal on Education in Emergencies, Current Issues in Comparative Education, and is forthcoming in the Harvard Educational Review.

 

2nd Place Winner

Leyla Jafarova

Boston University

Leyla Jafarova is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Boston University. Her dissertation project offers a critical exploration of the emergence and development of humanitarian ethics of care for unidentified dead bodies in a post-war setting of Azerbaijan, with a central focus on the complex interplay between morality, politics, and regimes of care. Her work draws attention to the multiplicity of ways that the living adopt to forge relations with their missing and/or departed kin after the acts of mass violence and to construct their truths in the absence of certainty.

 

3rd Place Winner

Miguel Cuj

Vanderbilt University

Miguel Cuj is a Guatemalan with Indigenous roots. He has a Nutrition degree from San Carlos University, which was supported by the Maya Educational Foundation scholarship program in Guatemala. Also, Miguel has a Master of Arts in Latin American Studies & Anthropology and a certificate in Global Health at Vanderbilt University. Currently, Miguel is a doctoral candidate in the Anthropology Department at Vanderbilt University.

Over the last five years, Miguel has fostered meaningful collaborations with women’s groups in a Maya ixoq’ib’ (women) community in the highlands of  Iximulew (Guatemala). Through immersive ethnographic fieldwork, Miguel has come to recognize the intricate ways of community organization beyond food aspects to innovative ways of organizing their selves. His dissertation, “More Food, Less Nutrition: K’iche’ Maya Women’s Collectifs of Food in Iximulew (Guatemala),” looks at how nutrition emerges from the interaction of human and non-human actors, biological mandates, environmental constraints, and the creative resilience of women provisioning their families. Thus, Miguel shows how Indigenous Maya foodways emerge  as a kind of food realities from the relationships of coexistence and interaction among K’iche’ women, agricultural production, and social contexts

His research has been supported by Wenner-Gren Foundation, HASTAC program, James Lawson Institute, and the Center for Digital Humanities at Vanderbilt University. Since 2021, he has been at the helm of GuateLab, a student-led initiative. GuateLab is supported by the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies (CLACX), and The Curb Center for Art, Enterprise & Public Policy at Vanderbilt University. Together with his Guatemalan peers, they have cultivated GuateLab into a hub for engaging in dialogues about the humanities from a unique student perspective.