Prestigious Organizations Give Grants to Support NSSR’s Scholars
It is an exciting time for critical inquiry at The New School for Social Research (NSSR). Scholars there are exploring a multitude of topics to produce creative answers to societal issues from the past, present, and future. Recently, several doctoral candidates received prestigious grants and fellowships to help further their investigations.
Two prestigious foundations awarded six NSSR doctoral students with grants to help further their research. The Wenner-Gren Foundation, which supports significant and innovative anthropological research and provides leadership at the forefronts of the discipline, awarded three NSSR anthropology students grants to help develop their dissertations. The National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds fewer than 30% of the approximate 40,000 proposals it receives each year, also chose to fund three NSSR students who are advancing discourse in the areas of anthropology, sociology, and economics.
Scott Brown and Charles A. McDonald received Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grants, while Marisa Solomon earned a Fieldwork Dissertation Fellowship from the organization. Brown examines emergent practices of social design, inquiring how practitioners render issues of social and political complexity into problems of design. McDonald investigates political projects led by Jewish converts, immigrants, and the state that seek the inclusion of Jewish people and history in contemporary Spain. Solomon questions how trash – a symbolic and material agent – becomes a generative force shaping spatial transformations and logics of race and class.
The NSF grant recipients’ work covers a rich terrain of topics. With the Dissertation Grant in Cultural Anthropology, Randi Irwin will explore strategies for property utilization in the Western Sahara, and consider how property and citizenship are configured in order to legitimize the transfer of land plots and make political claims to sovereignty. Read more on the NSF website.
Sociologist Tim Rosenkranz won a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant. His work analyzes destination marketing efforts in the United States and India, and addresses how national tourist offices manage image production in local travel media and industry. Visit the NSF profile for details.
Economics scholar Lauren Schmitz also received a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant. Her investigations will contribute to a better understanding of how an occupation affects a worker’s health in the years leading up to retirement. For this examination, Schmitz also earned a place in the Dissertation Fellowship Program in Retirement Research, administered by the Center for Retirement Research (CRR). Learn more about her work on the NSF or CRR websites.
A version of this story originally appeared on NSSR GradFacts.