Graduate Student Fellows

Sahin Acikgoz

Joel Batterman

Stonington hopes to use ethnographic material to build a model of ethics that can account for nonbounded personhood.

graduate students

SAHIN ACIKGOZ 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. 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.

MEGAN BEHREND SYLVIA ‘DUFFY’ ENGLE GRADUATE FELLOW, ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE “The Latinity of Middle English Literature: Form, Translation, and Vernacularization”

This dissertation offers a new, ethical-aesthetic paradigm to account for Latin-English bilingualism in late medieval British literature. It challenges the dominant template for literarylinguistic history in the medieval period, which posits monolingualism as the telos of English literature. To accomplish this, Behrend reconsiders the bilingualism of texts traditionally viewed as central to the early “English” literary canon, arguing that each of these works is constituted by negotiations between the English and Latin languages. Her reading of these texts as fundamentally bilingual, rather than vernacular, depends on the category of translation as an analytic lens. While existing models of Latinvernacular translation in the medieval period formulate the relationship between these languages as rivalrous and hierarchical, the project explores how translation mobilizes a range of other sociolinguistic and formal relationships between Latin and vernacular. These complex bilingualisms then have ethical implications for today’s literary critics ranging from what historical narratives we tell to how we organize our canons and even our academic disciplines.

NICHOLAS CAVERLY DAVID AND MARY HUNTING GRADUATE FELLOW, ANTHROPOLOGY “Restructured City: Demolition and Racial Accumulation in Detroit”

This dissertation examines vacant building demolitions in Detroit to understand the production, embodiment, and transformation of structural racisms in the United States. It brings together ethnographic and archival accounts drawn from living rooms, excavator cabs, regulatory proceedings, municipal offices, and other locations to investigate how transformations of the built environment simultaneously restructure the conditions of inequality, while at the same time maintaining anti-blackness and white supremacy as spatial, political economic, and environmental realities. Based on twenty-four months of field research, it charts how building removals transform the sociomaterial products of racist disinvestment into differently racialized accumulations of protection and distress. In particular, Caverly attends to demolition as a redistributive project that reorganizes land, economic opportunity, and contamination. Physical buildings are transformed into landfillable waste. Incarcerated people are trained to be demolition labor. Resources are channeled into wealthier neighborhoods. Asbestos-containing building materials become toxin-laced air. As building removals shape racialized bodies, territories, and bank accounts, they reveal how the recurrence of structural racisms subjects the already marginalized to harm, while absolving the already privileged from responsibility.

KYLE FRISINA DAVID AND MARY HUNTING GRADUATE FELLOW, AMERICAN CULTURE AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE “Thinking Theatrically: Contemporary Aesthetics for Ethical Citizenship”

This project begins from the observation that in an era when many Americans question government’s ability to act as a guarantor of democracy, an acclaimed subset of 21st-century women writers of color and queer women writers have turned to the subject of relational ethics: to the local, moral question of how to perform in relation to others. Frisina interrogates the efficacy of their interest in relational performance by identifying and taking seriously an often

Megan Behrend

Nicholas Caverly

Kyle Frisina