Introducing the 2025 Incite Institute Doctoral Dissertation Fellows - Incite at Columbia University

2025 Fellows

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  Abiola Ibirogba Earth and Environmental Sciences

  Abiola Ibirogba’s dissertation focuses on the lived experiences of migrant communities who moved to the Badagry barrier Islands in the 18th-19th centuries. These communities, caught between European mercantilism, slavery, climatic variability, and war, sought spaces of freedom and safety. Ibirogba interrogates what socioecological factors informed settlement, movement patterns and resource use choices during this time and how they afford safety in the landscape. Using ecological modelling, oral histories, archaeological reconnaissance and excavations, the project foregrounds community practices of place-making by coastal people in a landscape of trauma as a lens to explore overt resistance. By drawing on theories from ecology, environmental science, and archaeology, this research will transform our understanding of the dynamics of escaping slavery in Africa and provide novel insights into the conditions that facilitated marronage in West Africa.

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  Ahmed Zakarya Mitiche Anthropology

  Ahmed Zakarya Mitiche is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology. His research engages Islamic intellectual history, postcolonial theory, and critical anthropology, with particular attention to traditions of ethical self-formation, epistemicide, and the politics of language. His current project examines the political and ethical thought of 20th-century North African Muslim reformers, situating their critiques of colonial modernity in relation to Islamic metaphysics, practices of takwīn al-nafs (formation of the self), and the restructuring of time, knowledge, and land under settler rule.

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  Anusha Sundar History

  Anusha Sundar’s project examines the significance of the ‘coolie’ to the formation, systematization, and contestation of colonial welfare in late 19th and early 20th century Madras, South India. Attending to the ways in which medical knowledge is embedded in the making and knowing of labor, the project traces the accretion of vulnerabilities and displacement during periods of recurrent subsistence crises, the role of scientific expertise in instrumentalizing risks and inequalities in the labor market, as well as the vernacular repertoire around coping mechanisms and care networks. Braiding colonial bureaucratic records with scientific treatises and vernacular medical texts, the project unpacks the social landscape in which ideas about labor and welfare were shaped and contested.

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  Ari Galper Sociology

  Ari Galper’s dissertation investigates the strategies that market actors employ to navigate environments marked by both abundant information and high levels of uncertainty. Using the vintage wristwatch market as a primary case study, it examines how social media, platform-based marketplaces, and related technologies have lowered barriers to entry and mitigated information asymmetries. Although these developments theoretically lead to market democratization, in practice they have exacerbated problems of trust and accountability that are associated with markets for 'lemons.' Through an ethnographic and interview-based analysis of collectors and dealers of vintage wristwatches, the dissertation will elucidate how these actors evaluate goods and exchange partners—and how they actively shape others’ evaluations—within a context saturated by new forms and levels of ambiguous, potentially misleading signals of worth.

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  Christian Mott Psychology

  People constantly impose risks of harm on others, when engaging in behaviors as mundane as driving down the highway or selling a product. Christian Mott’s dissertation project will investigate the ways people understand and respond to risk impositions. This project has three distinct parts. The first part investigates how laypeople understand the mental state concepts that the law uses to describe risk-imposing agents (“knowingly” and “recklessly”). The second part studies how inferences about risk, outcome, and underlying values interact to produce judgments about how much punishment people deserve for creating risks. The third part explores how risk affects punishment judgments for intended – and either completed or attempted – harms and compares laypeople’s judgments to real punishments imposed by federal judges.

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  Julie Gan Ecology, Evolution & Environmental Biology

  How does rapid, short-term environmental variability affect the ability of Arctic plants to absorb carbon? In particular, Julie Gan looks at how fluctuations in temperature, light, and humidity affect plant processes like photosynthesis and respiration – key to their role as global carbon sinks. Using a combination of fieldwork in the Alaskan tundra and tightly controlled greenhouse experiments, Gan is working to understand how resilient these plants really are and what their fate means for ours. People know the planet is getting hotter, but it is also getting less predictable with the Arctic at the epicenter of this transformation. Her research asks whether the plants anchoring these ecosystems can keep pace with this new climate chaos. In doing so, it addresses one of the central challenges of our time: understanding and adapting to an uncertain ecological future.

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  Katy Habr Sociology

  The largest growth in US employment since the 1970’s has taken place in the service sector, where profit margins are smaller and productivity gains are harder to realize. Katy Habr’s dissertation focuses on how this macroeconomic change impacts the day-to-day conditions of workers. Her dissertation argues that new technologies are allowing employers to increase productivity in the service-sector by exploiting just-in-time scheduling, deskilling, underemployment, and outsourcing. Focusing largely on the grocery industry, her mixed-methods dissertation uses unique data sources to explore low-wage service work at the micro, meso, and macro levels. Drawing on political economy, labor sociology, and industrial relations, her work historicizes and contextualizes the technological and organizational factors impacting job quality and the future of work.

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  Mekarem Eljamal Urban Planning

  Grounded in the city of Lydd, Mekarem Eljamal’s dissertation uses the future as an entry point through which to understand Palestinian citizens of Israel’s experience of settler colonialism, relationship to space, and negotiation of citizenship. Looking into the spatialization of the future in Lydd—the spaces where Palestinians in Lydd identify their future in the city as being lost and made—and the processes undertaken to hold onto the city, this research aims to further nuance citizenship as a lived concept. Rather than confining citizenship to its institutional or its insurgent form, Eljamal turns to how Palestinians in Lydd negotiate formal and insurgent citizenship through their engagement with Lydd’s built environment and as they work towards creating, affirming, and maintaining a Palestinian future in and of Lydd.

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  Xuexin Cai East Asian Languages and Cultures

  How did southern Yunnan transform from a remote Sino–Southeast Asian borderland into the center of China’s tropical sciences and industries in the latter half of the twentieth century? Focusing on the nearly simultaneous establishment of rubber plantations, nature reserves, and a modern regime of tropical hygiene in southern Yunnan, Xuexin Cai’s dissertation explores: what roles did rubber production, nature conservation, and malaria control play in Chinese state formation in this previously unintegrated tropical borderland?; how did local and migrant communities—as well as nonhuman beings such as mosquitoes and elephants—shape, resist, or use the policies, laws, and technologies introduced through these efforts?; and, how did China’s tropical sciences and industries evolve alongside shifting discourses of resource insecurity, sustainable development, and what Cai calls “Chinese tropicality,” from the Maoist period (1949–1976) to the Reform era?

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  Dafne Murillo Economics

  Peru’s 1969–79 agrarian reform reallocated large private estates to newly created worker‑managed cooperatives. Drawing on digitised expropriation decrees and an archival administrative boundary that shaped the reform’s roll‑out, Dafne Murillo’s dissertation employs a spatial regression‑discontinuity design to compare neighbouring districts with differing exposure to land redistribution. Preliminary evidence suggests that extensive, equity‑motivated transfers can be compatible with higher agricultural productivity.

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  Kirill Chmel Political Science

  Why do some minority groups succeed in preserving their cultural distinctiveness despite repressive state assimilation efforts, while others fail and face cultural extinction? Kirill Chmel’s dissertation argues that non-political cultural media can be used by minorities to broadcast narratives that reinforce group belonging and support political mobilization. Further, Chmel demonstrates how states respond to such cultural resistance, focusing on the variation in nation-building strategies used to suppress or co-opt minority identity. Using data on identity choices and political behavior among Kurds in Turkey, he shows how access to Kurdish folk songs and plays on Radio Yerevan, broadcast from neighboring Armenia, helped sustain a sense of Kurdish cultural continuity despite the Turkish state's assimilation policies.