Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

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Mary Elizabeth Ibarrola (Anthropology), Rothman Doctoral Fellow: “Placemaking in the Borderland: An Archaeology of African-Descendent People in Colonial Florida”

During the colonial era, Florida was a region of constant geopolitical turmoil. Mary Elizabeth Ibarrola examines how people of African descent responded to and transformed this turbulent landscape. She considers the various tactics and strategies employed by people of African descent to adapt within the changing political landscape of colonial and territorial Florida through the everyday creation of place. Her research examines six archaeological sites which range from the Second Spanish Period through the Territorial Period and were occupied by individuals of varying legal and social status but overlapping ethnic and racial categorization. She highlights particular insights gained from examining site distribution and site arrangement. Through this close spatial analysis, she creates a picture of spatial relationships among sites and their positioning within a physical landscape and demonstrates how that physical landscape might be manipulated to limit or encourage certain kinds of interaction.  Ultimately, her research promises insight into how internal and external pressures influence the structure of diasporic places.

Alexandria Wilson (Political Science), Rothman Doctoral Fellow: “Framing Violence: The Women’s Movement and Gender-based Violence in Central Eastern Europe”

In recent years, throughout Central Eastern Europe conservatives have pushed back against the gains made by women’s rights activists. This backlash has been felt the hardest by those activists working to fight gender-based violence, as conservatives have rallied around their rejection of the Council of Europe’s Convention on Preventing Violence against Women and Domestic Violence, otherwise known as the Istanbul Convention. To understand how a movement adapts to these pressures, Alexandria Wilson examines the cases of Slovakia, Czechia, and Poland in which she conducted in-depth interviews with activists and analyzed government documents to shed light on the question of how women’s rights activists frame the issue of gender-based violence in a hostile environment.