Graduate Student Clara Lee Receives a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant
Graduate Student Clara Lee Receives a Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant.听 These grants听are awarded to aid doctoral or thesis research. The program contributes to the Foundation's overall mission to support basic research in anthropology and to ensure that the discipline continues to be a source of vibrant and significant work that furthers our understanding of humanity's cultural and biological origins, development, and variation. The Foundation supports research that demonstrates a clear link to anthropological theory and debates, and promises to make a solid contribution to advancing these ideas.
This award will help Clara continue her research and complete her dissertation.听 See her research abstract below.
Refusing Empire through Care- Anti-base Dissent in Soseong-ri, South Korea听
South Korea has been a key site for US military presence in the Pacific since the mid 20th听century. Despite the democratization of South Korea and the nominal end of the Cold War, the听US maintains an imperial relationship with South Korea. This is evident in the continued听expansion of US military sites, such as a strategic 鈥榣ily pad鈥 created in the rural village of听Soseong-ri in 2016. While the South Korean state sanctions this site, dissent at the local level听remains. Despite lack of attention from the media and contrary to the narrative that this dissent community is backwards, hyper localized, and brainwashed by external forces, their practices of mutual aid and solidarity reveal a lifestyle that defies state conceptions of security. Framed as 鈥渉uman security鈥 as opposed to militarized security, local forms of 鈥榗are鈥 inform new anthropological conceptions of political subjectivity, activism, and refusal of empire and its military security. How do these seemingly unremarkable practices reveal divestment from听militarized life and expose the limits of imperial militarism? Through ethnographic research听examining intimate forms of care as radical relationality, this research aims to expose the limits听of political affect and expand conceptions of dissent.听
Congratulations, Clara!