American Geographical Society Awards 2016 Council Fellowships

Description:  The AGS Council Fellowship, awarded by the American Geographical Society (AGS), is the latest of prestigious scholarships to be made by the Society. The graduate students selected are Ms. Debangana Bose of The Ohio State University for her work on the “Forced Resettlement, Illegality and Everyday Life in Peri-urban Delhi in India” and Ms. Rakhee Kewada of the CUNY Graduate Center for her research into “‘Till China and Africa Meet: Infrastructure, Development and Social Reproduction in Bagamoyo, Tanzania”. The winners were announced by the AGS Council on April 28, 2016 in New York City.

[New York City, NY] — [April 28 2016] – The American Geographical Society (AGS) announced today the recipients of the AGS Council Fellowships to support student research. Debangana Bose, who is a Ph.D. scholar at the Department of Geography at The Ohio State University, Columbus and Rakhee Kewada, who is a Ph.D. student at City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, were selected from a highly competitive field of applicants. The winners were named by Council Fellowship Selection Committee Chair, Dr. Marie Price, who is Chair of the Department of Geography at George Washington University. The fellowship recipients will be recognized at the American Geographical Society’s Fall Symposium held in New York City on November 17th and 18th of 2016.

For Ms. Bose the fellowship will continue to fund her interests in the dynamics of displacement and resettlement in India and the implications for the rest of the world as well as for urban theory. Her dissertation research is on “Forced Resettlement, Illegality and Everyday Life in Peri-urban Delhi in India”. Through ethnographic field research in Delhi’s resettlement colonies, she is interested in understanding how illegality and precarity are understood and experienced by multiple actors such as the residents, land mafias, local leaders, NGO workers and actors of Delhi’s growth coalition. Her research aims at explaining a regime of planning and poverty, connecting governmental rationalities of eviction, displacement, and resettlement and the associated effects with rounds of urban expansion and illegal land markets.

Ms. Kewada will use the funds to support preliminary research in Tanzania during the summer of 2016. Her research will revolve around the question of how different institutional forms of Chinese capital impact outcomes and struggles over uneven development at the local and global scales. The central goal of the preliminary research is to explore how ‘to empirically’ investigate this question. At the global scale, Rakhee will analyze the terms and conditions of the port construction projects, and their articulation with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Maritime Silk Road Project and will conduct interviews with business and government officials. At the local scale, she intends to examine the level of investment on the part of Chinese capital in the social reproduction of the labor force. This exploratory research will be vital in assessing whether or not the lens of social reproduction will enable the answering of the research question, as well as the feasibility of such a study.

“These scholars were selected from a competitive pool of 27 applicants from Masters and Doctoral programs at 20 different universities in the United States and Canada” said Dr. Marie Price, the Chair of the Selection Committee. “The lifeblood of geography is exploration and discovery,” Price added. “These students are engaged in important research in Tanzania and India, and through their field research they will produce new geographic knowledge and understanding.  This is precisely the kind of investigation that the American Geographical Society supports and publishes.” The AGS intends to add more Council Fellowships next year to grow this popular program.

The Council Fellowship was created in 2013 to support AGS student members in their pursuit of geographical knowledge and is worth $1,000.00.  In addition, AGS will promote the work and results of Ms. Bose and Ms. Kewado through its 2016 activities and publications.

Established in 1851, the American Geographical Society (AGS) is the oldest professional geographical organization in the United States.  It is recognized world-wide as a pioneer in geographical research and education in Geography for over 165 years.  The mission of the American Geographical Society is to advance and promote geography in business, government, science, and education. Our goal is to enhance the nation’s geographic literacy so as to engender sound public policy, national security, and human well-being worldwide.  AGS seeks to engage the American public, from its youngest to its oldest citizens, with new and amazing ways to understand and characterize our changing world.  The Society maintains its headquarters in Brooklyn Heights, New York.