ETHNOGRAPHY CAUCUS: Opportunities for Funding Ethnographic Research

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Professional Development Format

Abstract

This roundtable discussion will include scholars sharing and discussing opportunities and strategies for funding ethnographic research. Learn from colleagues who have successfully funded research in this roundtable. Faculty will share their experience and advice. Possible topics include proposal development, collaboration, identifying funding, etc. Ample time will be reserved for audience members to ask questions. Time will also be reserved for audience members to present short pitches and receive feedback from roundtable members.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Jennifer Huynh, University of Notre Dame

Panelists

• Nitasha Sharma, Northwestern University

• Jason M Ruiz, University of Notre Dame

• Erin L. Durban, University of Minnesota

• Ben Chappell, University of Kansas

• Kevin Escudero, Brown University

Biographical Information

Nitasha Tamar Sharma is a Professor of Black Studies and Asian American Studies, Director of the Asian American Studies Program, and Co-Director of the Council for Race and Ethnic Studies at Northwestern University. Sharma is a comparative race studies scholar who offers an interdisciplinary, comparative, and ethnographic approach to the study of difference, inequality, and racism. Her teaching, research, and writing contests inter-minority racisms by ethnographically detailing existing models of cross-racial solidarities among nonWhite groups. Highlighting historical crossovers, comparative or relational racialization, and expansive political orientations, Sharma’s work imagines liberated futures for all people. Nitasha Sharma is the author of two books and co-editor of two volumes. Her ethnography of the lives and perspectives of Hawai‘i’s Black residents, Hawai‘i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific, was published by Duke University Press in 2021. Two questions frame this ten-year project: What does the Pacific offer people of African descent? And how does the racial lens of African Americans illuminate inequalities, including antiBlack racism, in the islands? Bringing into conversation Black Studies, Native Studies, Pacific Islands Studies, and Critical Mixed Race Studies, it charts how Hawai‘i’s Black residents, including Black hapas, negotiate race, indigeneity, and culture. Dr. Sharma served on the Executive Committee and National Council of the American Studies Association and the Executive Board of the Association for Asian American Studies. She is on the editorial board of American Quarterly, for which she served as Associate Editor.

Jason Ruiz is Professor and Chair of American Studies Department at the University of Notre Dame, where he is affiliated faculty with the Program in Gender Studies and the Institute for Latino Studies. He teaches courses in Latinx studies, race and representation, queer studies, and popular culture. He is the author of Americans in the Treasure House: Travel to Porfirian Mexico and the Cultural Politics of Empire and Narcomedia: Latinidad, Popular Culture, and America’s War on Drugs (both from the University of Texas Press, 2014 and 2023, respectively). He is also the principal investigator of Latinx Murals of Pilsen, a digital research project devoted to public art in Chicago supported by the Whiting Foundation. Ruiz is a 2016 recipient of the Edmund P. Joyce Award and 2019 Charles B. Sheedy Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at Notre Dame. Ruiz is the Editor-In-Chief of American Quarterly

Erin L. Durban (they/them) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Critical Disability Studies at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. They have a PhD in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of Arizona and have continued to contribute to feminist, queer, and trans studies. Durban’s first book, The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti (University of Illinois Press 2022), was awarded the National Women’s Studies Association–UIP First Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT+ Studies. It focuses on the gender and sexual politics of French colonialism and American imperialism in Haiti. Durban edited a special issue of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory titled “Nou Mach Ansanm (We Walk Together): Queer Haitian Performance and Affiliation” with Dasha A. Chapman and Mario LaMothe and, more recently, the “Trans* Ecologies” issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly with Megan Moore. Durban is currently working on their second book manuscript, “Enabling Ethnography: Crafting Anti-Ableist Fieldwork Methods,” which argues that a greater diversity of researcher bodyminds enhances ethnographic inquiry and analysis for interdisciplinary scholarship.

Ben Chappell is a Professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas. Chappell is an ethnographer and cultural critic working in areas of Mexican American studies, vernacular cultural production and performance, neoliberalism, fascism, and critical university studies. He founded and convenes the Ethnography Caucus of the American Studies Association. Chappell is the author of three books, Mexican American Fastpitch (Stanford University Press 2021), Mexican American Baseball in Kansas City (Arcadia Press, 2018), and Lowrider Space: Aesthetics and Politics of Mexican American Custom Cars (University of Texas Press, 2012).

Kevin Escudero is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies and an affiliated faculty member in the Sociology Department at Brown University. His research centers on Comparative Ethnic Studies, Native Pacific Studies, U.S. imperialism and militarism, immigration, social movements, and law. Escudero’s book, Organizing While Undocumented (New York University Press, 2020) examined Latinx and Asian undocumented immigrant youth's cultivation and use of an intersectional movement identity to facilitate coalition building with members of other underrepresented groups. The book was a finalist for the 2020 C. Wright Mills Award and Honorable Mention for the 2021 American Sociological Association’s Asian American Book Award. His current book manuscript, “Imperial Unsettling” (under advance contract with the University of Hawai‘i Press), focuses on Indigenous CHamoru and Filipinx immigrants’ participation in Guåhan’s ongoing decolonization movement. Escudero is the recipient of a Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Fellowship, Eastern Sociological Society Public Sociology Award for Early Career Scholars, Association for Asian American Studies Early Career Achievement Award, and National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

Jennifer Huynh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Huynh's research and teaching interests include immigration, Asian American Studies, and Critical Refugee Studies. She earned her doctorate in Sociology from Princeton University and her BA from the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book, Suburban Refugees: Class and Resistance in Little Saigon (University of California Press, 2025), studies refugee placemaking and resistance against financialized gentrification. She has published journal articles in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and the Asian American Journal of Psychology. She serves on the managing editorial board for American Quarterly and is the recipient of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation/Russell Sage Foundation Pipeline Grant for early career scholars.