Congratulations to the following PhD students on being awarded the James T. Wagoner '29 Foreign Study Scholarship.
The Wagoner Scholarship is named for James T. Wagoner ‘29. His love of travel spurred him to establish this scholarship for students and alumni in memory of his parents and late wife. The Rice Graduate Council grants the awards to students who have demonstrated outstanding achievement and promise in their research.
Nabiya Khan will be traveling to Delhi, India, to study marginalised and segregated neighbourhoods and the everyday effects of state surveillance and infrastructural neglect. Her research focuses on how residents in marginalised neighbourhoods navigate heightened monitoring, inadequate infrastructure, and moral regulation in everyday life. She examines how interactions between residents and local institutions shape experiences of belonging and constraint. Through ethnographic fieldwork, she aims to document how social life is organized under conditions of sustained monitoring, infrastructural neglect, and political marginalization.
Sylvia Wemanya
Sylvia Wemanya is traveling to western Kenya to reconstruct the foodways—how foods were procured, processed, combined, prepared, and consumed—of the Kansyore (a particular ceramic-using group) that lasted for the last 10,000 years. Moving beyond viewing animals merely as sources of calories, she examines how foodways structured human relationships, including those with animals and landscapes, especially during forager-food producer interactions. By excavating a newly discovered site (Wadh Mbawe) and combining traditional zooarchaeology with biomolecular techniques, she aims to determine when domesticates were introduced to the Lake Victoria Basin and whether the foragers maintained their practices while interacting with incoming pastoral groups, such as the Elmenteitan.
Kevin Yu will be traveling to China and Africa to trace the movements of Chinese migrants across the Global South. His research focuses on how young people from China, particularly those who are rural, queer, or otherwise marginalized, enter the expanding network of Chinese factories through labor intermediaries and “encounter” local societies, generating distinct political-economic, cultural, and lived experiences. As a legal anthropologist, Kevin is especially interested in the disputes that arise in these contexts and the possibilities that emerge beyond conflict.