2025 ERI/PS2 Fellows on Distributaries

We are honored to present the work of Ángeles Donoso Macaya, faculty lead of Archives in Common, and four of her students, Anahí Benítez Hidalgo, Richard Cuevas, Bertha Martinez, and Nancy Zapata, from her Literature and Civilization of Latin America course at Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC). Read more about the inspiration for the…

My project builds on the everyday understanding of property by examining how actors interpret it through the language of land rights as they sought to convert tax documents into formal land titles. These processes were driven by activists and residents living on untenured land who invest significant time and political energy engaging with a techno-savvy…

This past summer, with generous funding from the 2025 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship through housed at The Center for the Humanities, I embarked on three transformative research experiences that fundamentally reshaped not just my research trajectory, but my understanding of what scholarship can and should do in the world. Between exploring and leveraging the…

There are (at least) two words in Portuguese for the verb “to play,” jogar and brincar. Both have several different meanings, usages, and connotations, which, for beginners, might be boiled down to something like this: jogaris the more structured play of organized sports, while brincar is the informal play of children.  This summer, studying at…

The summer PS2 fellowship supported my preliminary fieldwork connecting with agricultural commoning projects across our local N.Y. food system. I’ve been interested in “commoning” – diverse and creative approaches to reclaiming and collectively stewarding the “commons” – since I myself was a farmer for years before embarking on my PhD journey. Struggling with the everyday…

Something had shifted between June and October.  That’s all I knew, as I paged through the folder of calm, administrative memos in the Columbia University Archives reading room. Harry’s job was safe in June, and by October, he was fired. But I couldn’t see what had changed. Time to go to Cambridge.  I’m a US…

My scholarship examines how emerging technologies’ shape social welfare systems. Focusing on the politics of data science, digital infrastructures, and ‘tech for good’, I incorporate perspectives informed by the digital humanities and critical data studies. I am particularly interested in understanding digital literacies as resistance to algorithmic technocracy, and I aim to support projects that…

This summer, I applied for the ERI/PS2 summer fellowship to initiate and build out the Riis Beach Bloc Association, in collaboration with other members of the People’s Riisearch Group, as part of an ongoing practice of organizing-as-research-method. Like a block association, we aimed to build bottom-up power, work toward common goals, and build inroads to…

The ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship allowed me to continue working on a digital archive called Solidarity TK that aims to tell the story of the last decade of labor organizing within New York City-based news publications. This is a project that originated in the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (ITP) program and continued through a…

My dissertation explores how recent efforts are reshaping justice in the United States by expanding community-held restorative justice diversion (RJD). I examine how nine counties across the country are testing new approaches that move oversight and power away from courts and prosecutors and toward local BIPOC-led, justice-oriented community groups. These efforts grow out of broader…

The ERI/PS2 fellowship enabled me to initiate the production of my web series Singing While Trans, an open education resource for transgender musicians and performing artists. Within the last decade, voice teachers and music educators have become increasingly interested in training trans singers, as evidenced by the numerous workshops at national conventions and circulation of…

This summer, I continued developing my dissertation research, a qualitative study exploring parents’ experiences breastfeeding in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). As a social practice, breastfeeding is laden with meaning. It evokes essentialist ideas about gender and women’s bodies, discourses of intensive mothering and maternal sacrifice, and the history of the medicalization of pregnancy and…

From June to August 2025, the ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship allowed me to wrap up ethnographic fieldwork, catch up with key informants, and give back to my research community in the form of a mapping project. In 2024, I worked with young West African migrants recently arrived in the Paris region who had been…

Stirring a big pot of lentil stew, Fernanda told us how many feminists like her left unions and progressive parties after realizing their ideas and experiences of gender violence went unheard by the compañeros (men-comrades). Others nodded in agreement as they drifted closer, drawn by the smell of the stew. Luisa added that something shifted when…

This summer as an ERI/PS2 Fellow, I worked with the Beyond Acceptance Research Collective (BARC) to explore the creative practices queer, trans, and gender-expansive people are using, and seeking to learn, to resist in this time of rising anti-trans and anti-queer violence, and how these practices can be documented and shared. I helped to found…

If you’re reading this, you’re most likely connected to the internet. And that connection is brought to you by an intricate tapestry of fiber-optic cables that run underground. This layer of interconnected wiring is considered a type of digital infrastructure, and in New York City, this infrastructure does not serve everyone. According to a 2024…

The n’dee, n’nee, or ndé people, more broadly known by the exonym Apaches, used to inhabit and move freely on the land now occupied by the US-Mexico border. In the 1800s, they faced genocidal persecution from both countries. In Mexico, the attempt at extermination led to the silencing of their cultural identity. The Nación N’dee/N’nee/Ndé…

We stood in darkness, as we waited for the third member to arrive at the jetty. We were going to collect the crab nets close to the Penang Strait. One last cigarette before the crab-fisher heads out to ready the boat. It was 6am, and while most Penang-ites are still asleep or just about to…