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SIS is thrilled to congratulate the following winners of the 2024 Research and Teaching Fellows awards! 

Sam Bradshaw, Will Akoto and Trey Herr are the winners of the SIS Collaborative Research Award (CRA) for their new, interdisciplinary research project. Their project aims to unravel the complex diffusion of knowledge regarding tech localization policies among nations. They will create a novel dataset of tech localization laws and then use content analysis to analyze the data and search for underlying patterns and motivations in tech governance. They intend to use the SIS CRA to develop the methodology and a pilot dataset. They will then apply for a foundation grant from Internet Society (ISOC), Open Society Foundation (OSF), or the Shuttleworth Foundation.

Anthony Fontes and Claire Brunel are the winners of the SIS High-Performing Scholar (HPS) Award recognizing their recent high productivity and supporting their research in a (new) grants-oriented direction.

• After more than a decade of ethnographic research in Central America on state-criminal networks, carceral systems, and forced migration, Professor Fontes intends to bring his research “home” to the United States through a project that ethnographically explores the US immigration detention system, including the conditions, experiences, and consequences of detention. With the SIS HPS award, Fontes will conduct preliminary fieldwork, and write proposals for a Harry Frank Guggenheim Distinguished Scholars Award and/or The Russell Sage Foundation grant.
• Building on her prior work developing the “Brunel-Levinson” indicator, an index of policy stringency, Professor Brunel will examine if there is a causal link between the stringency of EU climate regulation and the concentration of market power in French industries. Brunel will use the SIS HPS award to gain access to French firm-level data, which is confidential and renown for the richness of the data, while she is a Visiting Fellow at the Universite Cote d’Azur. As a follow-on to this work, Brunel plans to submit an NSF grant.

Maria De Jesus and Garrett Graddy-Lovelace are the winners of the SIS Innovative Teaching Fellow award.

• De Jesus will develop and teach a community-based participatory research (CBPR) practicum with migrant youth centered on CBPR principles and methodologies. The CBPR practicum will be applied to a 300-level undergraduate course, titled “Power, Justice, and Global Health: Migration in the 21st Century” and to a 600-level graduate course, titled, “Migration, Equity, and Health”. Students will collaborate with DC Doors to identify the social and structural factors that shape the health and well-being of migrants at DC Doors and to co-develop a research question that prioritizes their specific needs. De Jesus will train the students in CBPR principles and supervise their data collection and analysis.
• Graddy-Lovelace will develop and teach a newly EPC-approved SIS undergraduate gateway course on Environment, Community and Equity (ECE) The ECE Gateway Seminar will introduce students to social, political economic, (agri)cultural, and epistemic contexts and consequences of what are framed as mere environmental problems. The class will also include community-based learning (CBL) opportunities with frontline agrarian movements and CBL partners, experiential field trips, and community-based research methodology in action. Graddy-Lovelace will train the students in theoretical and methodological approaches connected to these themes and will supervise the students’ CBL activities. This gateway will be linked to a new undergrad cohort program titled the Environment, Community & Equity (ECE) Scholars, which is being jointly sponsored with the Department of Environment, Development and Health, and AU’s Center for Environment, Community, & Equity (CECE).

Congratulations to all the winners!