Ryan Gibb( PhD Student, Department of Political Science). Ryan will use his AY FlAS to do dissertation research in Uganda.
After completing his MA degree in International Affairs at Marquette University in 2005, he traveled to Uganda to teach American history for five months. Ryan has studied Kiswahili at KU for two years and spent the last two summers at the Summer Cooperative African Language Institute at the University of Illinois, Champaign.
           
In January, Ryan returned from his second trip to Uganda where he recently completed preliminary field research for his dissertation as well as other research for ongoing projects. Ryan’s dissertation will be on land reform in Uganda, investigating the interaction of markets and interest group influence on institutions. While in Uganda, Ryan was pleased to joke with his Baganda friends about their mother-tongue Kiswahili pronunciations and introduce them to Wikipedia’s Luganda and Kiswahili articles.

This summer, Ryan will attend the Teacher Summer Institute at the University of Kansas and the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan. In the fall, Ryan will take his comprehensive exams, defend his dissertation proposal, and compete in the Kansas City marathon.

Kate Pickett ( PhD student, Psychology) is using the FLAS award to study elementary Hausa. Her research interests concern the cultural grounding of self, relationship, and connection to place. Specifically some of my current interests involve the impact of residential mobility on self and relationship construction, relational mobility (the extent to which one must/can make or break relationship ties in a given social context), and interdependence with place.

Megan Holroyd (PhD student, Geography)
Megan will be in Tanzania fo ra six week intensive course in KiSwahili at KIU (Kiswahili na Utamaduni) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.  During this time, she will also begin work on her PhD field research. Her dissertation concentrates on the experiences of workers in the tourism industry in Tanzania.  She will focus her research on workers who have migrated to Dar es Salaam and found work in this sector, with a concentration on the experiences of women migrant workers.  She will stay in Dar es Salaam after the completion of her summer FLAS to continue this research.

Dustin Crowley (PhD student, Literature)

Dustin is beginning his PhD work in African literatures with a particular focus on postcolonial and ecocritical theoretical frameworks. The trajectory of his research involves issues of scale in dealing with environmental problems; specifically, how we negotiate differing conceptions of the cause, harm, interrelatedness, and restitution of ecological degradation across complexly variegated local and global geographies of concern to best serve the interests of environmental justice movements? In that regard, he intends to investigate the role of African literature in this negotiation and what (if any) impact it has on large-scale environmental (un)consciousness and consequent agency. He will be using his FLAS award to study kiSwahili at the Summer Cooperative African Language Institute (SCALI), being held at Michigan State University this summer(2009).. 

Studying kiSwahili will allow for primary research into local environmental understandings, imaginings, and relationships registered in the oral traditions of the East Africa and how that corresponds to whatever environmental consciousness(es) the literature registers as a result—an effort seriously hindered by having access only to English-language materials. Through this language study, then, I endeavor to gain a deeper and more fully developed comprehension of the complexities, contradictions, and affinities within East African society generally—an understanding I plan to develop further during research travel to the region in coming semesters. 

Jamie Shinn (Masters student, Geography) will use her academic year FLAS to study second year Swahili at KU.  This summer she will travel to Zanzibar, Tanzania for six weeks to begin her thesis research and take introductory Swahili.  Her research interests focus on political ecology and coastal management in Tanzania.  She hopes to understand the ways in which the establishment of marine parks in the country have marginalized and/or empowered local communities, and the relationships these communities have with government agencies, large NGOs, and industry.

Hilary Hungerford (PhD student, Geography). Will use her FLAS to study 3rd year Hausa at the Summer Cooperative Language Institute, at Michigan State.

Molly Mackinnon (MA, Polish Literature and Language; MA, Education-in progress) is currently a graduate student in the School of Education (Graduate Licensure Program) and will teach secondary French and ESL.  She will be using the FLAS to begin studies in Arabic at KU in the fall with the intent to teach the language to middle and high school students.  In addition, she will attend the KASC Summer Institute.