Three Graduating Seniors Awarded

Three very recent Gallatin alumni have won the School’s Dean’s Award for Graduating Seniors.  This annual competition provides funding for students who wish to pursue research projects following graduation, particularly studies that extend their work on their concentrations and colloquia.

The following three members of the Class of 2007 have received grants for their research:

Larnies Bowen
Following up on her concentration in Identity in the Spanish-Speaking Caribbean, Larnies Bowen will travel to Panama to conduct independent research on “Reggae en Español” “as a vehicle for understanding West Indian-Panamanian (Afro-Antillano) identity, culture, and collective experience.”  Other ethnomusicologists have documented the role music plays in the construction of Afro-Caribbean identity, but none has focused on Panama and its particular musical genre. Bowen will interview individuals involved in this Spanish form of Reggae, work in local archives, and analyze the music itself.

Sinat Giwa
Sinat Giwa’s concentration was African and African-American History and Post-Colonial Theory, along with performative writing.  Giwa is “interested in the ways in which many colonial means of regulation, such as educational systems, language, architecture/technology, and even food, are consequently integrated, hybridized, and re-inscribed by the colonial societies they serve to regulate, not simply consumed and embraced wholly.”  She plans to conduct research on the way citizens of Ghana have engaged “these systems of multicultural and ethnic distinction” since the nation’s independence.  She will visit Ghana for at least two months to do ethnographic and archival research on this issue.

Maya Politis
Extending her concentration on the Anthropology of Globalization and Social Justice, Maya Politis will travel to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to do research and work on a documentary about “recuperated factories” that were created after the financial crisis of 2001.  When their factories went bankrupt, workers cooperated with neighborhood groups to keep them open and producing—but changed the organization and power dynamics of the companies radically, using a principle Gallatin instructor Marina Sitrin calls “horizontalidad,” or egalitarianism.  Politis plans to study this movement as an example of “how people build from the bottom up—a beginning to a counter-hegemonic globalization.”

Gallatin Interim Dean Ali Mirsepassi states, “The Dean’s Award for Graduating Seniors is a wonderful opportunity for our most recent alumni to continue their academic exploration and research. Congratulations are in order for Larnies, Sinat, and Maya. I look forward to hearing about the results of their studies.”

The 2007 awardees are required to provide a written report on their activities by the end of next year. Applications for the 2008 Dean’s Award for Graduating Seniors are available at http://www.nyu.edu/gallatin/current/ba/forms.html.