Part of the 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship Cohort This summer, I watched school workers teach each other how to fight. At an annual gathering of dozens of rank-and-file educator-organizers, one group met to discuss lessons from teacher strikes. After being asked about the consequences of going on an illegal strike in Massachusetts—a fine…

Part of the 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship Cohort My research examines Iraq under British occupation and the subsequent Mandate, spanning the First World War and its aftermath. Given this focus, most of the archival material I require is understandably held in the United Kingdom and in Iraq itself. I became interested, however, in…

Part of the 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship Cohort Since my undergraduate days, I have been fascinated by the depiction of gender non-confirming bodies in pre-modern South Asian art, and to develop methodologies for reading them. This broadly forms the core of my doctoral dissertation project, and the support provided by the ERI/PS2 fellowship…

Part of the 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship Cohort This summer marked a year since the beginning of the mass ICE raids in Los Angeles. While they continue in new forms across the outskirts of the city, the poorest and densest neighborhoods—where I organized and conducted research alongside the LA Tenants Union (LATU)—have seen…

Part of the 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship Cohort An Ultra-Rare Pediatric Cancer and the Intersectionality of Clinical Neglect Many of us have had some interaction with the healthcare system in the U.S., and therefore it’s probably safe to assume we have all in one way or another seen the dangerous gaps and disparities…

NDARN (Negotiating Darkness: Artists Research Network) In 1993, the satellite Znamya attempted to reflect sunlight onto Arctic cities during the polar night, aiming to extend working hours and “conquer” darkness. The Negotiating Darkness Artistic Research Network critically challenges a long legacy of treating darkness as unproductive, dangerous, or negative. In the Nordic region, seasonal extremes…

Part of the 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship Cohort Democratic Resistance Has a Thousand Faces “Here, authoritarianism has a thousand faces,” a young Guatemalan politician told me during my first interview this summer. The phrase stayed with me as I traveled through Guatemala City and Bogotá with the support of the ERI/PS2 Summer Public…

Part of the 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship Cohort NYC Trash Through a One Health Lens: Waste, Rats, and Disease If I asked you to close your eyes and imagine an ecosystem, what would you picture? A coral reef, the African savanna, maybe a lush jungle? Probably not New York City. But cities are…

Part of the 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship Cohort Agrarian Social Movements in Punjab, India The rise of farmers’ and landless agricultural workers’ movements since the mid-2010s have rekindled popular interest in agrarian questions. What is more, they seem to have done so on a broader and more inclusive basis than before: on the…

Part of the 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship Cohort The Past and the Future Are Now The past, present, and future collided in the summer of 2026 as I used the ERI/PS2 to travel internationally to Australia and Aotearoa (New Zealand) as well as to Minneapolis, Minnesota to learn more about the utilization of…

Part of the 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship Cohort Contested Sites Within Cyprus If settlements were the only traces of human presence typically indicated on maps, one might assume that getting to Pyla from Nicosia would be relatively straightforward. Yet maps also mark some of the routes through which people move, and obstacles that…

Part of the 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship Cohort Carceral development and organized violence I’m sitting in a padded chair, in a ballroom, in a swanky hotel, in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. I’m listening to a British gold mining executive present to a conference of industrial and extractive companies. “Unfortunately,” the executive said,…

Part of the 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship Cohort Learning the Know-hows of Getting Goods into Palestine Among Palestinians, there’s a popular saying: “everything in Palestine is made in China.” From souvenirs to household appliances, counterfeit brand clothes, and restaurant equipment, Chinese goods have flooded shops and warehouses across Palestine. While often complained of…

Part of the 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship Cohort Will a Program That Worked There Work Here? Researchers and policymakers often use evidence from one population to make decisions about another. But an effect estimated in one setting does not necessarily predict the effect in another, a problem known as external validity. My coauthor…

Part of the 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship Cohort Teaching Machines to See the Road When we drive, recognizing a lane feels almost automatic. We see painted lines, curves, intersections, and changes in the road without consciously thinking about the geometry beneath them. For an autonomous vehicle, however, understanding the same scene is a…

Part of the 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship Cohort Stand Up for Your Rights: Language, Resistance and Community Building Learning a new language is a deeply personal and unique experience. While some people embrace the journey with excitement, pride, and a sense of discovery, others may experience it as a source of anxiety, uncertainty,…

Part of the 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship Cohort time before the disaster In summer 2026,  I returned to Dar Jacir—an arts and research centre located in Bethlehem, Palestine—to complete a residency I began in the previous year. In 2025, I began trawling through the newspaper and magazine archives at Dar Jacir. Focusing on…

Part of the 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship Cohort Nuestra Historia Amsterdam When Nidsa Vázquez arrived in Amsterdam, upstate New York, in November 2017, just weeks after Hurricane María devastated Puerto Rico, she did not intend to stay. She brought two of her grandsons with her after months of food and water shortages and…

Part of the 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship Cohort Experiencing Femtech On and Offline: What happens when an Egyptian women’s health app brings users together? Beneath the unforgiving midday sun at an open-air mall in the satellite city of New Cairo, I joined a group of young women who were eagerly awaiting not just…

Part of the 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship Cohort Designer Babies or Parental Choice? Exploring Ethical Perspectives on Polygenic Embryo Screening On the quiet Wednesday afternoon before Thanksgiving in 2025, I found myself on the platform of Broadway–Lafayette station as commuters rushed by. I had come to see the ad campaign put up by…

Part of the 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship Cohort Men and the Deportation Regime Are boys and men who are subject to forced gang recruitment victims of gender-based violence? This is the question I asked multiple scholars this summer. From immigration lawyers to gender scholars to community organizers and sociologists, the answer I got…

Part of the 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship Cohort Tfaddalu, Mis Amores: A Muslim Jewish World I was supposed to go to Wadi Abu Jamil, in Beirut, this summer, but I couldn’t. I start from this longing, being away-outside. A longing of decades turned local: to Mexico City, to my body. A longing, collective,…

This series of letters emerged from Ju Ly Ban’s work as a Fellow for Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative from the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, grounded in archival engagement with the work and life of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Attuned to the fragments of her presence in…

We are honored to present CUNY Adjunct Incubator work. Please read about Natalie Willens’ (LaGuardia Community College) public scholarship and its impact below. In Fall 2023, supported by the CUNY LGBTQIA+ Consortium and LaGuardia & Wagner Archives, I began forming a collective of LaGuardia students and faculty to build a map and archive of underrepresented/underfunded…