2017-2018
Samuel Shearer
PhD in Cultural Anthropology, May 2017: "The Kigali Model: Making a 21st-Century Metropolis"
Duke University, Durham, NC
Washington University departmental affiliations: African and African-American Studies and Anthropology
samuel.shearer@wustl.edu
Shearer earned a PhD in cultural anthropology in May 2017 from Duke University. His dissertation, "The Kigali Model: Making a 21st Century Metropolis," focuses on the markets, neighborhoods and streets where residents of Kigali (the capital city of Rwanda) encounter new architecture and design strategies that are aimed at converting their city into a global metropolis with world-class tourist facilities, high-tech service industries and a “green” urban metabolism. Many city residents, however, experience these processes through mass evictions, market closures and an ongoing utility crisis in the city. In response, they are going kukikoboyi (literally “to cowboy”), creating rogue markets, housing settlements and ad-hoc utility networks. His research explores these divergent practices of city-making to show that in the process a new Kigali is being built: a 21st-century metropolis that, despite being a rogue version of its planned future, is a cosmopolitan urban center that no single interest, process or population fully controls.
While in residence at the humanities center, Shearer will be working on two projects. First, he will edit his dissertation as a book manuscript. Second, he will pursue a new research project following the lives of Rwandans who have recently left Kigali for other cities in the region: Lusaka, Zambia; Lilongwe, Milawi; and Kampala, Uganda.
Terrance Wooten
PhD in American Studies, May 2017: "Lurking in the Shadows of Home: Homelessness, Carcerality, and the Figure of the Sex Offender"
University of Maryland, College Park, MD
Washington University departmental affiliations: Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and African and African-American Studies
twooten@wustl.edu
Wooten earned a PhD in May 2017 from the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland, having spent the last year as a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellow through the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. His dissertation, “Lurking in the Shadows of Home: Homelessness, Carcerality, and the Figure of the Sex Offender,” was a multi-methodological and interdisciplinary project that examined how those who have been designated “sex offenders” and are homeless in the Maryland/DC area are managed and regulated by various technologies of governance such as social policies, sex offender registries and architectural designs. Drawing on scholarship in African American studies, carceral studies, and gender and sexuality studies, his dissertation considered how the very construction of home is bound up in processes of sexual regulation and management that produce certain people as homeless by virtue of their proximity to sexual impropriety, deviance and blackness.
During his fellowship at Washington University, Wooten plans to build on his dissertation research to develop a better understanding of the social, economic and political implications of homelessness and housing deprivation in both urban and suburban geographies. “I Am Not a Number: On Housing Acuity Scores and the Necropolitical Construction of Vulnerability” offers a humanist critique of contemporary homeless-services delivery models attempting to capture and convert human suffering into discrete, measurable acuity scores. These scores are then used to determine housing options for people experiencing homelessness, often mobilized around the discourse of death — how, when, where and why people die as well as how much their slow dying costs the state. This method has been used to not only construct and subsequently manage homeless populations but also obscure the material impacts of the very systems of oppression that make some people more vulnerable to death than others.