Ten graduate students were selected to receive travel funds for the winter/spring 2017-18 award cycle. The Holtz Center reviews proposals from graduate students each spring and fall. Students are eligible for up to $1,000 for their work on research related to the field of science and technology studies. Funds may be used for travel to research sites or for presenting papers at professional conferences. Research covers science, technology or medicine.
Danya Al-Saleh
Danya Al-Saleh’s project, “Between Knowledge and Hydrocarbons: An Institutional Ethnography of Texas A&M’s Branch Campus in Qatar” will involve participant observation at Texas A&M in Qatar. Texas A&M established an engineering branch campus in Qatar in 2003. Al-Saleh (Geography) will look at the significant role that the United States educational institutions of higher education plays in managing and developing the region’s hydrocarbon deposits through knowledge production and expertise, particularly in the fields of petroleum and chemical engineering. Al-Saleh will conduct fifteen months of multi-sited fieldwork in Doha, Qatar and the main campus in College Station, Texas during 2018-19.
Amanda Friz
Amanda Friz, Communication Arts, will travel to the 103rd Convention of the National Communication Association in Dallas, Texas in November. She will present “Sex as Assemblage: Using ANT to (Re)Entangle Female Sexual Health” during a panel discussion. The project turns to medical images, diagrams, 3D models, and street artwork to visually represent female sexual health. She investigates the ways a visual epistemology has come to govern notions of the body such that visually depicting and organ serves as proof not only of its existence, but also its corresponding value.
Nick Lally
Geography’s Nick Lally will travel internationally to Ireland and London in February of 2018 to continue studying climate resilience software. Through “Coding Politics: Software, Space and Climate Resilience”, Lally will work with computer programmers, scientists, and government actors who build software interfaces to translate the complexities of climate science into simplified representations that can be used to develop city resilience plans.
Robert Lundberg
Robert Lundberg, of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Law School, will return to New Mexico this winter to continue his research on acequias – unique pieces of physical, as well as legal and culture, infrastructure. Through “The Shifting Fluidity of the Acequia”, he is composing a hybrid academic/artistic work. Lundberg’s research utilizes photography, informal interviews with local expert acequia operators, and review of historical, legal, and photographic documents.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu
In May of 2018, Amanda McMillan Lequieu (Community and Environmental Sociology) will travel to MaxPo Paris as a visiting scholar. The “Max Planck Sciences-Po Center on Coping with Instability in market Societies” is an interdisciplinary hub for social scientific researchers to discuss and cultivate collaborative research on the theme, “Neoliberal futures, insecurity, and precarious employment”.
Ben Power
Ben Power, Political Sciences, will travel to New York City to study “blockchain” technologies and humanitarian organizations. Power will use the growing reach of blockchain technologies to explore whether certain communication technologies systematically empower some actors over others.
Jason Rocha
Communication Arts’ Jason Rocha will travel to Minneapolis, Minnesota to present “Bringing into Being: Text, Image, and Rhetorical Coaction in Walter Pope’s Scientific Illustration of the Washing of the Mercury” at the 2018 RSA Conference. The presentation takes the position that the concept of “bringing into being” is located within the realm of communication; it is discursive in nature and wholly social.
Heather Rosenfeld
Heather Rosenfeld, Geography, will present her research at the American Association of Geographers annual meeting in April 2018. She will be presenting a paper in New Orleans, Louisiana, titled “Capitalism and Anthropocentrism: Beyond the Trap of Intrinsic/Extrinsic Value?”. Rosenfeld will also be showing an illustrated version of Margaret Atwood’s poem “Cell”, during a panel discussion, discussing the challenges sanctuaries face in treating hens with health problems associated with their being bred for reproduction.
Stephanie Velednitsky
Geography’s Stephanie Velednitsky will also be traveling to New Orleans, Louisiana during April, to present her research at the American Association of Geographers annual meeting. Velednitsky’s project examines the ways in which water came to flow through Fab 28 – a fabrication facility that produces microprocessors in Kiryat Gat, Israel. Her work examines the role that mundane spaces of digital manufacturing labor play in producing the socio-ecological relations of industry and landscape that constitute the nationalization of territory.
Yidong Wang
Yidong Wang, Journalism and Mass Communication, will be completing fieldwork regarding the relationship between technology and social changes over a two week visit to Hong Kong. Wang’s project analyzes how a digital media niche containing alternative, political voices emerges around the Hong Kong localist movement – a socialist movement from 2014 to present.
Please join us in congratulating each of these travel grant recipients. We look forward to hearing more regarding your research, travel and professional presentations related to science and technology studies over the upcoming months. Summer and fall travel grants will be awarded again in April 2018.