2000 — 2001 |
Morris, Rosalind |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Dissertation Research: Transatlantic Governance: Urban Women and Legal History in Havana, Cuba, 1837-1889
Transatlantic Governance: Urban Women and Law in Havana, Cuba, 1837-1889
This dissertation project is a study of transatlantic legal administration. It examines the period 1837-1889, during which Spanish colonial Cuba was governed by what were called "special laws." The project examines the impact of these laws on women. The relevant data are the colonial statutes and municipal ordinances that regulated the daily life of Havana's population. Occupational, criminal, and family regulations are considered. The hypothesis critically examined is the prevailing interpretation that law limited the participation of women in economic and social life. These data provide the strongest data on women's involvement in commercial and juridical matters. Criminal cases and police records will also be reviewed because they offer valuable quantitative and qualitative information about the application of legal rules. The sampling frame in this study is broader than in previous studies. It includes a cross-section of urban women-including enslaved women, working class white and free women of color, and upper class white women. This breadth will permit an assessment of the influence of ethnicity and socio-economic status in the deployment of law.
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0.915 |
2012 — 2015 |
Melnick, Amiel Morris, Rosalind |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Doctoral Dissertation Research: Roads and Accidents in Kenya
Columbia University doctoral student Amiel Melnick, under the guidance of Dr. Rosalind Morris, will undertake research on traffic accidents and roads in Kenya. Through an examination of the role of traffic accidents in Kenyan policy and public discourse, the regulatory techniques of road safety interventions, and the lived experience of those who travel on roads known as "death stretches," this research will consider the relationship of infrastructure, social practice, and everyday hazards. Focusing on the expert calculation and bureaucratic management of traffic accidents, as well as moral and practical responses on the part of accident victims and their families, religious leaders, and the Kenyan public more generally, this study aims to provide an empirically grounded account of the everyday management of road traffic accidents that will contribute to discussions of infrastructure, contingency, and risk management in African contexts.
The research will involve social science methods such as interviews, participant observation, archival analysis, and GIS mapping in both the capital Nairobi and an accident "black spot" (a stretch of road that sees frequent accidents). The study will both describe the burden of coping with accidental death and injury in everyday life and offer critical purchase on international and local road safety interventions. It will expand the social scientific study of infrastructure with an ethnographic case study of accident-prone "black spots" in Kenya. The project will also rework classic anthropological questions on contingency and hazard, which have traditionally been focused on occult causation, by studying a range of epistemological frameworks for understanding "accidents."
Traffic accidents, which are a leading cause of death and injury in Africa, remain understudied by social scientists. The researchers will share their findings with a broad range of audiences in an attempt to inform road construction and road safety efforts in Kenya and beyond. The project will also contribute to the training of a graduate student.
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0.915 |
2021 — 2022 |
Morris, Rosalind Maier, Alexander (co-PI) [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Doctoral Dissertation Research: the Political Economy of Migration, Labor, and Documentation
This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).
Regularized bureaucratic strategies are demonstrated to prevent migrants with legal status from lapsing into illegal status. This can also adversely impact communities whose livelihoods depend on migrant labor. This doctoral dissertation research asks how individuals negotiate securing documentation to support their claims in changing political contexts. It focuses directly on the continuum of documents that support claims of national identity in an attempt to move beyond binary characterizations of legal status. This project trains a graduate student in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis. The results will be widely disseminated to academic and non-academic audiences.
The project integrates theory in legal anthropology, the anthropology of bureaucracy and political economy to investigate three research questions: 1) How does paperwork relate to legal status? 2) What strategies do migrants pursue to secure documentation and how is this adjudicated by government officials? 3) What are the consequences of documentation on migrants’ lived experiences? The student investigator uses participant observation, interviews, and archival research in multiple settings where processes of documentation unfold to characterize the effects of different forms of documents on legal status and lived experiences. The work informs efforts to regularize documentation processes to benefit communities and individuals impacted by labor migration.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
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0.915 |