Visiting Scholars, 2015-2016

Sonja Thomas

Sonja Thomas is an Assistant Professor of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. She is at Lehigh completing a book project on minority rights and women’s rights in postcolonial India. The book, The Politics of Belonging: Gender, Caste, Race and Religion in Postcolonial South Asia, focusses on the Syrian Christian community in Kerala, India. In the book, Sonja argues that the political interpretation of minorities in India seeks to homogenize minorities as subordinated in order to protect their rights while on the ground, caste, class and racial hierarchies are reified in numerous ways between minority communities. This engenders differing definitions of “womanhood” and indeed, “women’s rights” amongst minority groups making feminist solidarity between religions, castes, races and classes and among minority populations, contentious. In The Politics of Belonging...

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Nessette Falu holds a PhD in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from Rice University (2015). Her research investigates how self-identified black lesbians (lesbicas negras) draw upon everyday lived experiences to self-advocate and demand respectful recognition toward their sexuality by their gynecologists. This study interconnects various angles that pivot the reproduction of “preconceito” (prejudice) such as the socio-political limitations of Brazilian healthcare reform to combat lesbian discrimination, the entrenched prejudicial attitudes manifesting during gynecological exams, and the thriving and transcending ideas of “bem-estar” (well-being) and sexual health, broadly. Her ethnographic study explores and exposes invisible acts of freedom by lesbicas negras. She is the recipient of a generous fieldwork grant from the Ruth Landes Memorial Foundation, which included seed funds for media production leading to film footage...

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Dr. Chiara Minestrelli, Visiting Scholar

Chiara Minestrelli holds a PhD in Australian Indigenous studies from Monash University (2015). Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, her dissertation examined identity, culture and politics in ‘Australian Indigenous Hip Hop’. More specifically, her research focuses on the politics of Indigenous identity and culture in Australia’s metropolitan areas and it investigates the ways in which young Indigenous people creatively respond to the challenges imposed by a growing interconnected and globalised society and hegemonic narratives. Her study has shed further light on the strategies adopted by Australian Indigenous rappers in negotiating their identity between the cultural protocols and traditions of their community of origin and the demands of modernity. Dr. Minestrelli’s first monograph, ‘Still the Same Corroboree’? Culture, Identity and Politics in Australian Indigenous Hip Hop, is currently under review with a major academic...

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