Stonington hopes to use ethnographic material to build a model of ethics that can account for nonbounded personhood.
graduate students SAHIN ACIKGOZ Sahin Acikgoz
Joel Batterman
MARY FAIR CROUSHORE GRADUATE FELLOW, COMPARATIVE LITERATURE “Transgender in Translation: A Transnational Category of Socio-Cultural Analysis in the Turkish Nation-State” In this dissertation project, Acikgoz analyzes the transnational circulation of the category “transgender” in the contemporary world. Acikgoz argues that a critical analysis of the deployment of the category “transgender” in the Middle East and the Global South can reveal the ideological convergence between modernization and epistemological colonization. Acikgoz draws on medico-legal literature, religious texts, military archives, oral histories, autobiographies, testimonies, films, ethnographies, and ethnographic documentaries from Turkey, Iran, Brazil, Mexico, and the USA to examine how “transgender” as an umbrella term erases the religious, class-based, ethnic, sexual, and racial particularities of the non-Western transgender communities. Acikgoz suggests a new approach in reading the translation of transgender into these diverse geographic spaces through a post-secular feminist lens, arguing that this reading praxis allows us to accomplish three outcomes. First, it exposes the epistemic erasures of the secular Eurocentric knowledge production. Secondly, it challenges the archival politics of the transgender biomedical modernity. Thirdly, it provincializes the Eurocentric political and cultural capital by problematizing the asymmetries that globalized knowledge circulation maintains. 16
JOEL BATTERMAN
MARY FAIR CROUSHORE GRADUATE FELLOW, URBAN AND REGIONAL PLANNING “A Metropolitan Dilemma: Race, Power and Regional Planning in Detroit” Unbeknownst to many, there was once a time when Detroit was at the forefront of metropolitan planning and regional governance initiatives. The region’s highway planners laid out a framework for metropolitan growth in the 1920s. In the years after World War Two, as the region’s economy boomed and development surged into the suburbs, regional elites established a series of metropolitan institutions intended to facilitate regional planning and governance. Assisted by the Ford Foundation, they viewed Detroit as a pacesetter for the nation in planning a “metropolitan future.” What regional planners and advocates for regional cooperation failed to address was the problem of racial segregation and inequality. In 1967, months after the establishment of the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG) formalized a new metropolitan political arrangement, Detroit’s Twelfth Street ghetto exploded as black residents protested police violence. In the wake of the rebellion, SEMCOG tried to steer clear of controversy, but it quickly attracted intense suspicion from white suburbanites who feared it could be used to implement desegregation plans and redress metropolitan inequality. Meanwhile, as black elected officials gained power in Detroit, they saw little benefit in cooperating with SEMCOG, which they regarded as a white-dominated institution unwilling to advocate for black interests. This “metropolitan dilemma” is still with us today, and by understanding its history, we can better understand the roots of our present political predicament, and shape a strategy for a “reparative regionalism” that advances racial and economic equality in Detroit and other metropolitan areas.
