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Affiliated PhD Student

Tayeba Batool

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Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Anthropology

About

Tayeba Batool is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation research focuses on the urban and political ecologies of Miyawaki urban forests in Islamabad, Pakistan, by examining the impacts and transformations of a transnational ecological method on local practices, politics, knowledges, and experiences of greening in a postcolonial planned city. She employs participant and institutional ethnography as well multi-modal methods and spatial mapping in her analysis of how the Miyawaki urban forests are discoursed and adapted towards urban climatic resilience, landscape management, or spatial affect and aesthetic. Her preliminary dissertation work piloted methods to study tree care and practices in arboretums and urban spaces, as well as how landscapes shape forest imaginaries, and was supported by the Humanities, Urbanism, and Design Initiative, and Center for Experimental Ethnography at Penn. Tayeba holds a MA in International Affairs from American University, Washington DC. Her master's thesis investigated the politics of conservation, urban heritage, and community identity in the Walled City of Lahore, Pakistan. Prior to her time at Penn, she worked on international development projects in Pakistan that facilitated institutional capacity building, gender equity in economic participation, and private-public sector collaboration.

Affiliated PhD Student

Jane Abell

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Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania

About

Jane Lief Abell is a thirdyear doctoral student in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research explores Islam in the United States, with a particular focus on how race and religion inform relations among “native” and immigrant Muslim groups. Currently, she is working with Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture, an Arabic language and arts organization based in West Philly, and conducting fieldwork in Northeast Philadelphia. Prior to entering graduate school, Jane held several research and editorial positions at the Center for Middle East Studies at Harvard University; Harvard Divinity School; the Berkman Center for Internet & Society; the Consortium on Gender, Security, and Human Rights; and Law People Management, LLC. Jane holds a BA with High Honors in Sociology & Anthropology and Islamic Studies from Swarthmore College. 

Affiliated PhD Student

Shashank Saini

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About

Shashank Saini is a doctoral student of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on understanding violence in the face of rapid  transformations in the political economy of  urban India. Shashank’s dissertation research uses the optic of gendered embodiment, particularly masculinity,  to understand the subject making processes of male youth residing in peri-urban settings in Delhi.

Affiliated PhD Student

Rachael Stephens

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PhD Candidate in the Anthropology Department

About

My main interests are U.S. political economic inequity, social change (in relation to politicization, ideology, discourse, etc.), and social ethics. l am committed to trying to better understand—and more effectively transgress—the ways we learn to continually re-make our inequitable realities. I examine how many of us—particularly those who identify as “liberal”—learn to construct the “causes” of various social dynamics in ways that disavow our complicity in and responsibility for its “solutions.”  I also consider how normative social scientific knowledge production is itself grounded in analytical paradigms that make it frighteningly easy to reproduce inequity.  

My dissertation explores these dynamics as they are manifested in the concrete interactions that sustain the so-called “real estate market,” property relations (including valuation and taxation), public finance (especially school finance), and perhaps most especially, the public discourses that narrate such phenomena. This focus also allows me to consider contemporary technologies of social differentiation (particularly race-making and related taxonomies of citizenship) as they relate to the late liberal mode of production and to the social ethics with which it is enmeshed. 

Affiliated PhD Student

Tali Ziv

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PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology

About

Tali Ziv is currently a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology with certificates in both Africana and Urban studies. Her research explores the contemporary decarceration efforts in Philadelphia, examining the community-based institutional transformation that has shaped the incarceration alternative landscape. She does this through a structural analysis of the historical economic and political forces that shaped both carceral and decarceral approaches to the social issues of addiction and poverty as well as an intimate analysis of individual experiences navigating these systems. In sum, her dissertation research explores the transformation of urban approaches to racialized poverty from both a structural and intimate vantage point. She conducted this research in collaboration with various city agencies, participating in applied projects both technically and advocacy-based in the field of re-entry. She engages her public health training to bring the qualitative data from her anthropological research into conversation with applied initiatives and interventions at the municipal level.

Selected Publications

Ziv, Tali. 2020. Alienation in the Black Marxist Tradition: Exploring critical epistemology and consciousness in Black Politics. American Quarterly. Under Review.

Ziv, Tali.  2017. “It be hard just existing”: Institutional Surveillance and Precarious Objects in the Northeast Rustbelt. Ethnography. Vol. 18(2):153-174.

Myers, Neely, Ziv, Tali. 2016. “No one ever even asked me that before”: Autobiographical Incoherence, Psychosis and Recovery among African Americans in a High Poverty, Urban Neighborhood. Medical Anthropology Quarterly. Vol. 30 (3): 395-413.

Barg, Frances, Kellom, Katherine, Ziv, Tali et al. 2017. LVAD-DT: Culture of Rescue and Liminal Experience in the Treatment of Heart Failure. American Journal of Bioethics. Vol. 17(2): 3-11.

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