PS2 (The Public Scholarship Practice Space (PS2) housed at The Center for the Humanities honors the past, present, and future of public scholarship at the CUNY Graduate Center. As part of that mission, we are committed to supporting the future of applied, activist, and community-engaged scholarship.
A record 20 doctoral students at the CUNY Graduate Center were awarded ERI/ PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowships this year, with generous funding from the Provost’s Office. This cohort represents a range of programs that have long-championed public scholarship including Anthropology, EES-Geography, History, LAILAC, Music, Psychology, Social Welfare, and Sociology. We are so excited to see them further their research this summer.
Aman Roy
Anthropology
Aman Roy is a PhD Candidate in Cultural Anthropology. His research is set in Central India, where his interests span urban property-making, the commons and technologies of governance. He is particularly interested in how housing rights activists design tools to defend existing claims to land against speculative real-estate regimes.
I look forward to building a library of spatial data and neighborhood histories in collaboration with several housing rights groups in Nagpur, India. These repertoires of movement and strategy will draw on memories of anti-caste struggles that have secured victories for a wide coalition of tenants and workers across Central India.
Brendan O’Connor
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Brendan O’Connor is a PhD candidate in Geography and the author of Blood Red Lines: How Nativism Fuels the Right. His dissertation focuses on how the shifting political economy of world football (soccer) is changing the way the game is played in Ireland and Brazil. A wave of new owners and investors has swept across the beautiful game, each seeking to remake it to their own ends.
This summer, I will study Portuguese at the Middlebury Language School
This intensive language program will help me prepare to conduct fieldwork in both Brazil and Ireland, home to a rapidly growing Brazilian diaspora.
Brittany Brathwaite
Psychology
Brittany Brathwaite is a reproductive justice activist, cultural organizer, and critical sociomedical scientist with a deep-seated commitment to supporting the leadership, organizing, and healing of Black women, girls, and nonbinary folks. She is the co-founder of Kimbritive, the unapologetic digital health platform revolutionizing sexual and reproductive health for Black women by Black women. Currently, she is a PhD Candidate in the Critical Psychology program at the CUNY Graduate Center studying Black health and healing geographies, Black girlhoods, digital health humanities and Black feminist place-making.
I’m excited to embark on a public digital humanities project this summer that maps the long lineage of how Black women create revolutionary healthcare spaces in response to ongoing health inequities and reproductive injustice. This project is needed now more than ever under our current administration, and I am proud to bring Black women’s voices to the center of these conversations.
Cassandra Cronin
Anthropology
Cassandra Cronin is a farmer, artist, and PhD student in the cultural anthropology program. Her work looks at processes of commoning in U.S. agriculture – the ways farmers contest and create alternatives to commodification and privatization in land and seed systems. She is interested in both the legal and social infrastructures that are creatively (re)invented to allow for other-than-capitalist relations to flourish.
I am excited to spend the summer on farms, working with farmers who are cultivating a more livable future in the present. I am eager to build collective research questions and explore creative modes of engagement.
Danielle Bennett
History
Danielle Bennett (she/her) is a PhD student in US History and Public History at the CUNY Graduate Center where she researches queer historic preservation, works for the American Social History Project on their LGBTQ+ Histories of the US Teaching Institute, and is a WAC Fellow. She has also taught at Brooklyn College and the College of Staten Island, and worked on projects at the American LGBTQ+ Museum and the New-York Historical Society. Danielle received her MA in History and Museum Studies from Tufts University in 2019.
I am most excited to get back into the archives this summer! In those files I can peel back the layers of the past like an onion, trying to understand why so many queer men and women from the early 20th century decided to apply themselves to the labor of historic preservation.
Ian Williams
Social Welfare
Ian G. Williams, LMSW is a student in the Ph.D. Program in Social Welfare, where he researches public interest technologies, digital infrastructures, and critical data studies in relation to social work and human services. Ian is actively involved in multiple campus initiatives and governing bodies, and is passionate about organizational structures and forms that facilitate democratic governance and community self-management.
I am excited to attend The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference (TICTeC) in Mechelen, Belgium in June, where I aim to connect with other civic tech practitioners and academics who are at the front lines of adapting and retooling practices around pro-democracy technologies in a time of declining democratic norms and institutions. I am also looking forward to spending time this summer applying the digital pedagogy skills I’ve learned at The Graduate Center to develop working prototypes adaptations of existing NYC focused open data literacy workshop materials.
Jaclyn Reyes
Social Welfare
Jaclyn Reyes is an interdisciplinary artist and PhD student in Social Welfare at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her work explores diaspora, community care, and environmental justice through participatory and arts-based methods.
I’m eager to work with communities to create visual stories that reflect their hopes and ideas for the environment. This project is a chance to highlight local knowledge and strengths, showing how people come together to face environmental challenges.
jah elyse sayers
Earth and Environmental Sciences
jah elyse sayers (they/them) is currently a PhD candidate in Earth & Environmental Sciences at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Their dissertation focuses on embodied, enacted, and relational placemaking in tension with public-space planning, research, and policy, focusing on the rapidly changing landscape of People’s Beach at Jacob Riis Park.
I hope to see people forge and/or strengthen their relationships with each other and the ways they work to care for the beach and its communities. I most look forward to seeing what participants do with the connections and knowledge built, long after the space of the workshop..
Jessica Bal
Art History
Jessica (Jess) Bal (she/her) is a researcher, educator, and photographer pursuing a PhD in Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research focuses on documentary ethics, histories of photographic illusion, and emerging imaging technologies. A former journalist, Jess is also currently working on a community memory project and digital archive about labor organizing in U.S. newsrooms.
At a time when U.S. journalism faces enormous challenges, news media labor organizers are fighting for sustainability in their own careers and for the future of the industry. With the support of this fellowship, I’m excited to spend the summer documenting these stories and building a collaborative archive of meaningful objects related to journalism union campaigns.
Joshua Adler
Psychology
Joshua Adler‘s work explores the deep impacts of the criminal legal system, tensions in justice reform efforts, and how community groups advance alternative approaches to care and safety. He has worked on numerous campaigns between reform and abolition, bridging activism and research. He strives for research to be an accessible, useful, and collaborative practice.
It’s been rare to focus solely on my own research during my PhD, but the Summer Public Research Fellowship gives me the incredible opportunity to do exactly that. I’m excited to fully immerse myself in my dissertation, while also learning from my peers and the amazing work they are doing.
Kristofer Eckelhoff
Music
Kristofer Eckelhoff (they/he) is a transgender singer, musicologist, and activist. They have performed in the U.S. and Europe and have received national and international scholarships to support their work on transgender performance history. Eckelhoff has a wait list for their private, sliding-scale voice studio, which consists only of trans singers, and is developing a transgender-focused vocal method to better serve trans singers.
With the support of this fellowship, I look forward to creating an open education resource to reach a broader audience of transgender musicians and those who work with us. I have been planning this project for a couple of years, and I am thrilled to finally have the support to launch it.
Laura Hooberman
Psychology
Laura Hooberman (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Critical Psychology at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Broadly, her research interests center on the interweaving of reproductive injustices, biomedicalization, structural violence, and resistance. Her dissertation focuses on breastfeeding experiences in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs), exploring how intimacy emerges within, and is disrupted by, the highly medicalized environment of the NICU.
This summer, I am excited to further develop my dissertation research and create space for conversations, shaped by the voices and experiences of birthing people themselves, around birth trauma, care, and healing.
Lea Coffineau
Anthropology
Léa Coffineau is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at the Graduate Center. Her dissertation project focuses on the notion of “colonial debt” – a debt owed by the colonizer to the colonized – and on its manifestation in the political discourse of young West African migrants who claim the status of unaccompanied minors in France.
After completing the main part of my fieldwork in 2024, I will return to France this summer to ask new questions that have emerged during the first stages of writing. This field trip will be the opportunity for me to travel to different cities and bear witness to and assist the development of a national coordination of unaccompanied minors’ collectives.
Maria Sosa
Anthropology
María Mónica Sosa Vásquez is a PhD student in Cultural Anthropology at the Graduate Center and an Adjunct lecturer at Lehman College. Her current research focuses on how sovereign debt and financial indebtedness have become sites of struggle for transfeminist movements in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
I am excited to co-create oral histories on financial indebtedness of/with women and LGBTIQ+ individuals who belong to political organizations against sovereign debt and financial indebtedness, for it will contribute to keeping developing bridges among transfeminist in the Global South and Global North, and simultaneously, it will foreground collaborative methods to expand further in my long-term fieldwork.
Mica Baum-Tuccillo
Psychology
Mica Baum-Tuccillo is a PhD candidate in Critical Social Psychology whose work explores social science as a tool for political transformation and justice. As a co-founder and Principal Investigator on several critical participatory action research studies, Mica brings together coalitions of youth, organizers, researchers, and advocates using a variety of creative and community-based methods. Mica’s dissertation examines the value of epistemic, relational, and methodological “knots” that emerge in participatory research grounded in collective struggle.
What excites me most about this summer’s research is the chance to be in a joyful, intergenerational community, creating spaces with queer and trans people to share the creative strategies we use to resist violence and erasure, and to build lives of care and connection. In collaboration with the Beyond Acceptance Research Collective and a growing network of artists, organizers, and researchers, we’ll document these practices in real time through zines, storytelling, and gatherings that feel tangible, tender, and fiercely alive.
Nikhil Ramachandran
Anthropology
Nikhil Ramachandran is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research and teaching interests lie broadly in the problematics of political imagination and the use of interdisciplinary methods.
This summer I am excited to deepen my participation in the work of community organizations involved in the making of an alternative economic ecosystem, especially their efforts to collaborate with the larger public – residents, activists, small and medium sized businesses, policy makers, and politicians. I am also looking forward to building connections with artists and storytellers to explore how they might engage in the making of an alternative economic ecosystem.
Seon Britton
Sociology
Seon Britton is a student in the PhD sociology program where he studies community organizations. He is currently working on his dissertation which focuses on community technology centers and how they utilize technology for community development.
I will be conducting observations over this summer at Silicon Harlem which serves as a case study for my dissertation. What I am most interested in exploring is how Silicon Harlem interacts with other city agencies in order to support technological innovation in upper Manhattan.
Sumeja Tulić
Anthropology
Sumeja Tulić is a Libyan-born Bosnian cultural anthropologist and writer whose work explores the intersections of visuality, history, conflict, and everything in between.
I look forward to exploring how commemorative rituals shape Bosniak identity, particularly through direct engagement with Srebrenica genocide survivors to ensure their voices are central to understanding these practices in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Denisse Gómez-Retana
LAILAC
Denisse Gómez-Retana is a third-year Ph.D. student in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures. Their ethnographic research examines the linguistic practices within cultural reclamation community projects, focusing on their transnational ties, postcolonial naming processes, and entanglements between language and land.
The first immersive N’dee Biyáti language camp in Mexico excites me, as it marks a transformative shift where participants evolve from learners to co-creators, designing their own materials and projects for linguistic revitalization. This horizontal model is noteworthy for its potential to empower linguistic agency and facilitate indigenous reclamation through collective praxis.
Tenn Joe Lim
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Tenn Joe Lim is a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Geography program. He researches ocean geographies, land reclamation, and community infrastructures in Malaysia, specifically, how encroaching real estate and industrial pressures to terraform the sea are reshaping the lives of coastal communities.
With the fellowship, I am excited to continue my dissertation research of land reclamation in Malaysia and to produce collaborative work that supports the recovery of artisanal fishers’ social worlds. Meanwhile, I am also part of a research team that seeks to study basement flooding here in New York City during the semester. By studying urban development globally, I hope my research will communicate and contribute to our understanding of the diverse climate-based loss people experience in our cities today.