Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

Alan Sharlin Memorial Award Fellows, 2002-2003

Mark Hunter, Geography: AIDS and the Materiality of Everyday Sex in South Africa. This study examines the social roots of AIDS in South Africa through an historical ethnography based in the municipality of Mandeni, a South African "rural industrialization" point and an area with one of the highest HIV prevalence rates in the world. In sub-Saharan Africa, where HIV prevalence rates are typically 1 in 4, the frightening reality of AIDS has fostered an urgency that has led many of the emerging social studies to focus almost exclusively on the present. Addressing this, and operating at the intersection of political economy, gender studies, and history, this study examines how sex and money have become historically interwoven and how this relationship drives multiple concurrent sexual relationships and thus AIDS. This "transactional sex" -- sex linked to gifts -- has been little researched, even less understood, and yet underpins the AIDS pandemic. The 18-month study will combine ethnographic, quantitative, and archival research and challenge the emphasis given to "prostitution" as a cause of AIDS as well as simplistic interventions of "education" that do not address underlying social relations and particularly the materiality of everyday sexual relations.

Rebecca Manley, History: The Evacuation and Return of Soviet Civilians, 1941-1946. This dissertation examines the politics and processes of population displacement in the Soviet Union during the Second World War as well as its social and cultural significance. Between the German invasion of June, 1941, and October of the following year, as many as seventeen million Soviet citizens were evacuated to the country's interior in a relief effort of hitherto unprecedented proportions. Conceived not to purge but to protect, the evacuations constitute a unique instance in the history of Soviet population transfers. As an administrative initiative, they were a critical branch of state policy towards the noncombatant population and an integral component of the Kremlin's response to the war. Displacement became a defining feature of life on the home front, affecting Soviet citizens from all walks of life: writers as well as workers, women and children along with party members, government officials and peasants. The history of this episode casts new light on the priorities and functioning of the Soviet government, the nature of the relationship between citizen and state, and the civilian experience of the war.