Current NYU Shanghai Graduate Dissertation Fellows

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (February 3 - May 22):

Lu's dissertation focuses on the intersection of two migration flows: the internal migration of Chinese Hui Muslims from the northwest to the southeast, and the international migration of merchants from Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries to Southeast China. She has been conducting field work at two sites: (1) the city Yiwu in Southeast China, which has the world's largest small commodity wholesale market and is one of the most popular destinations for both Chinese internal migrants and immigrants from MENA countries, and (2) Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and Gansu Province in Northwest China, which have the largest Hui communities in China and are the hometown of most Hui internal migrants in Southeast China. Through in-depth interviews and participant observation, she examines the interactions between the two migrant groups and whether and how these interactions affect the Hui internal migrants’ ethnic identification and conception. She plans to finish data collection and analysis during the award semester.

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (September 2 - December 15) :

Lu's dissertation focuses on the intersection of two migration flows: the internal migration of Chinese Hui Muslims from the northwest to the southeast, and the international migration of merchants from Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries to Southeast China. She will conduct field work at two sites: (1) the city Yiwu in Southeast China, which has the world's largest small commodity wholesale market and is one of the most popular destinations for both Chinese internal migrants and immigrants from MENA countries, and (2) Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and Gansu Province in Northwest China, which have the largest Hui communities in China and are the hometown of most Hui internal migrants in Southeast China. Through in-depth interviews and participant observation, she examines the interactions between the two migrant groups and whether and how these interactions affect the Hui internal migrants’ ethnic identification and conception.

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (September 2 - December 15) :

Omer is a global media scholar from Karachi, Pakistan, whose research explores issues of political sovereignty, ecology, and technological mediation at the indigenous borderlands of Pakistan. She is currently completing her Ph.D. in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. Her dissertation examines critical energy, trade, and internet infrastructures of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC): the Gwadar port at the Arabian Sea, the coal mine and power plant in the Thar Desert, and the Fiber Optic cable across the Karakoram Highway in the Himalayas. Combining ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and visual media analysis, this project reveals how these ecological, political, and technological processes are today inflecting the imaginaries of the Pakistani nation and the Chinese globalization project. As a Global Dissertation Fellow at NYU Shanghai, she will conduct research on the construction of the transnational Karakoram Highway (KKH) from 1966-1978 in order to chart the history of Chinese infrastructure in Pakistan.

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (February 21 - May 21)： 

Brasiskis's dissertation focuses on Environmental Memories in East-Central European Film and Media, 1988—2018 is the first scholarly study of East-Central European post-socialist film and media to focus on representations of socialist environments and their mnemonic affects. This dissertation responds to the growing field of eco-criticism, which, when considered as a method for film and media analysis, helps him to reassess post-socialist representations of socialist landscapes, ideological spaces and architectural sites where the human, the natural, and the material commingle. In this work, he employs ecocritical reading of screen representations, theorizes them from the two perspectives: media production and media reception. He employs the close analysis of his Dissertation Summary 2 films and video works, alongside a range of primary archival sources that include production records, interviews and documentations of reception. He investigates fifteen politically and aesthetically important and yet under-examined films from Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria and Russia. Brasiskis draws his interdisciplinary methodology from the fields of Film and Media Studies, Memory Studies, Anthropology, and Environmental Studies.

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (February 3 - May 22):

Walshe​'s work sits at the intersection of law, governance, and popular media, and he is interested in how these cultures produce and augment ideas of citizenship, identity, and sacrifice. His dissertation project follows the founding, development, and controversies surrounding the Iraqi Martyrdom Foundation (musassat al-shuhada), a post-invasion public institution tasked with regulating and standardizing the state’s legal definition of martyrdom. Cobbled together from digital ethnography, archival research, and visual media analysis methodologies, his project focuses on the political economy of commemoration and asks how the intertwining of supposed profane governance and sacred memorial practices produce and or/augment political solidarities and subjectivities. Concurrent with his usual digital archival work, his work will focus on two field sites in China, the first Longhua Municipal Park, which was redeveloped as a martyrs memorial in the 1990’s, and where a subsequent conflict has developed between long-time recreational users (guǎngchǎng wǔ), and the families of the martyrs who see the re-development as a sacred consecration of Longhua Park. The second component of his research in China will involve archival research in Quanzhou Maritime Museum’s Islamic Tombstone Collection, which holds a trove of martyr gravestones from China’s 12th and 13th centuries Islamic history. At present he is a fourth year PhD candidate in the Middle East & Islamic Studies Department on the Culture and Representation track.