Darlène Dubuisson, assistant professor in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Anthropology, received the Wenner-Gren Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship.
The Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship supports emerging scholars whose work has the potential to transform our understanding of what it means to be human. The fellowship includes a grant for nine months of full-time writing on already completed research.
As a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellow, Dubuisson will use the grant to support the writing of her upcoming book, Reclaiming Haiti’s Futures: Returned Intellectuals, Placemaking, and Radical Imagination, which is under contract with Rutgers University Press. The book argues that fractures in Haiti’s higher education system—the results of the fragmented globality—contributed to the internal displacement of returned intellectuals and ongoing crises in the public university system. The manuscript’s central argument is that returned intellectuals nonetheless created place within and across Haiti’s fractured academe through improvisation, rasanblaj (a uniquely Haitian term invoking creative compilation and assembly), and radical imagination. The book thus provides an analytical framework for understanding how people work within and across fractures to create future-oriented places of belonging.
Reclaiming Haiti’s Futures promises to make novel contributions to anthropology and black futurity studies.