Dissertation Scholars
2012-13 Dissertation Fellowship Application >>
2011-12 Dissertation Scholars
Jessica Barros
Department of Black Studies
South Hall 3723
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3150
jbarros@blackstudies.ucsb.edu
Jessica Barros is a candidate for a Doctoral degree in the Department of English at St. John’s University, New York. Her dissertation, “Cape Verdean Rhetorical Discourse Strategies in Bandera,” a qualitative study that investigates literacies in bandera, a Cape Verdean feast honoring a patron saint. Bandera rituals reflect social interactions that once existed between masters and their slaves. These social interactions are a critical site of literacy that show how Africans used their culture as education for resisting colonial violence. Jessica’s dissertation is a multi-vocal text that centers itself in two elderly day centers and spans across generations of Cape Verdeans. As a Composition Rhetorician, Jessica brings cultural, post colonial, and ethnic studies with special emphasis on critical race theory, literacy, language, rhetoric, discourse, and pedagogy to English studies. Her research includes how hip hop, as a lingua franca, cuts across ethnic and racial divides and aligns itself with black movements for education, freedom, liberation, and equality; how hip hop’s black rhetorical strategies allow for the awakening of racial consciousness and unmasking of neo-racisms by students of diverse backgrounds; and how hip hop pedagogy prepares all students for the multimodal, multiple literacies, and critical race work of the 21st century and beyond. Jessica earned received her MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College and her B.A. in Political Science and English from Boston College.
Alix Chapman
Department of Black Studies
Room 3702 South Hall
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3150
achapman@blackstdudies.ucsb.edu
Alix Chapman is a Ph. D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. His dissertation, Break It Down: Black Queer Performance and the Politics of Displacement in New Orleans, addresses the ways in which home, heritage, and the body are reconceptualized in the wake of crisis. Through a combination of performance ethnography and historical, and literary critique Alix explores “Sissy” Bounce, a local genre of hip hop that expresses black queer people’s sexual and gendered displacement from the traditional home. Moreover, he looks at how this public culture intersects a public sphere in which socioeconomic disaster and reconstruction determine the life chances of all black people. Pushing Cathy J. Cohen’s 2004 work, further, do the artistic acts of black queer cultural producers constitute “resistance”? If so, what meaning can be drawn from oppositional enactments that occur in contrast to communities that reinforce normative standards of race, gender, and sexuality, enactments that seek to redefine narrow, state-centered understandings of citizenship. Alix is particularly interested in Southern U.S. and Caribbean African diasporas and is deeply invested in interdisciplinary projects that bring art and politics into conversation with each other.
Rafael Mota
Department of Black Studies
Room 3702 South Hall
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3150
rmota@blackstudies.ucsb.edu
Rafael Mota is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture Program at the State University of New York, Binghamton. His dissertation, “Global Racial Regimes and Capitalist Accumulation on a World Scale," examines the world-historical patterns of race-making and capitalist accumulation throughout the Atlantic periphery that undergirded the rise of US hegemony during the long-twentieth century. This research explores the interactions of colonialism and liberal penality in the formation of Military-Keynesianism as the engine of world-scale capitalist accumulation and the shift of modern governance from the liberal-imperial state to a welfare-carceral state. He is particularly interested in the interactions of race, gender and sexuality in the historical formation of capitalism and social classes. Rafael earned his B.A. in Philosophy from Boston College.
Previous Dissertation Scholars
2010 - 2011 Dissertation Scholars
Kevin Moseby
Department of Black Studies
Room 3702 South Hall
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3150
kmoseby@ucsd.edu
Kevin M. Moseby is a Dissertation Scholar in the Department of Black Studies at UCSB for the 2010-2011 academic year. Kevin is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. His dissertation is entitled “Changing the Color of HIV Prevention: Black Community Activism, Public Health and the Biopolitics of Racial Formations in the U.S.” The central aim of his dissertation project is to analyze the changing racialization of HIV/AIDS in the United States. This research explores the dynamic experiences of black Americans as both objects of the field of HIV/AIDS prevention, as well as active subjects in the creation of knowledge within the field. Further, it provides an account of the rise of black American visibility and of black American activism in the HIV Prevention field. Kevin was born and raised in Arkansas and has earned a B.A. in History from Stanford University, and an M.A. in Social and Cultural Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.
LaToya Tavernier
Department of Black Studies
Room 3702 South Hall
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3150
latoyat@gmail.com
LaToya Asantelle Tavernier is a Dissertation Scholar in the Department of Black Studies at UCSB. LaToya is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Sociology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). Her dissertation, “On the Midnight Train to Georgia: Afro-Caribbeans and the New Great Migration to Atlanta,” focuses on the new (post-1990) migration of Afro-Caribbeans to Atlanta, Georgia and its relationship to the larger migrations of African American “return” migrants, and of immigrant newcomers from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, to the urban South. She is particularly interested in the intersections of race, class, gender, and immigration in the incorporation of Afro-Caribbeans, as black immigrants, into Atlanta. She earned received her Master’s degree from Queens College-CUNY in Sociology and her Bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in Psychology.
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