The Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility is pleased to announce that the following PhD students at The New School will receive research grants in the amount of $2,500 to support their research during the 2020-2021 academic year. Congratulations!

Noah Allison
Noah Allison is PhD candidate in Public and Urban Policy at The New School. Prior to his visiting appointment at McGill University’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, he was visiting researcher at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design. He has ten years of experience working as an urban planner and architectural historian in Los Angeles and New York City and is currently the digital research director for New York University’s City Food research group. His work explores the evolution, use, and meanings of urban space at the intersection of migration, everyday life, and food.
Feng Chen
As an advanced PhD student at the department of sociology, New School for Social Research, Feng Chen has been working on her research “Anti-Stereotyping Strategies in the Era of Pandemic: A Visual Ethnographic Study with Chinese Immigrant Artists in New York”. As an interdisciplinary study, her work highlights the intersection of migration, race and ethnicity, and cultural studies. Focusing on a group of Chinese immigrant artists and their coping strategies against the escalating anti-Asian sentiment and xenophobia in the pandemic, her study contributes to better understanding the Asian group’s experience and unravelling the myth of Asians who have long been paradoxically stereotyped as “the model minority” and “the perpetual foreigner” in the United States.


Douglas de Toledo Piza
Douglas de Toledo Piza is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at The New School for Social Research. He also holds an M.A. degree in Sociology, and a B.A. in International Relations, both at the University of São Paulo. His fields of interest are Migration and Mobility, Economic Sociology, Political Economy, and Anthropology of the State. His doctoral research addresses the political economy of illegalisms at the intersections of borders, markets, and migration.
Emmanuel Guerisoli
Emmanuel Guerisoli is a PhD Candidate in Sociology and History at the New School for Social Research. Previously, he studied law in Argentina and France, specializing on criminal, international criminal law, constitutional law and human rights, and a masters on politics and international studies in the United States, focusing on international security and terrorism. Emmanuel’s research explores the legal institutional framework and its devices, such as travel bans, deportations, enemy combatant categories, military commissions, and denationalization among others, that have emerged during the war on terror and that have critically altered the borders of U.S. jurisdiction. Emmanuel relies on race critical theory and (post)colonial studies, making use of a historical comparative methodology and critical legal analysis, in order to trace the complex genealogies of each different legal mechanisms, revealing their settler colonial legacies and showcasing how they have generated differential citizenship by extending jurisdiction beyond U.S. borders and by fragmenting constitutional protections to certain subjects within the country.


Maya Herman
Maya Herman is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at The New School for Social Research, from which she also received her Master’s degree. She holds a BA in Political Science and Gender and Women Studies from Tel Aviv University.
Maya’s research interests are citizenship, racialization, protest movements, space, and belongingness. Her current research, sponsored by the Zolberg Institute, explores state, governmental, and public discourse regarding the immigration of Ethiopian Jews into Israel and how they shaped the community’s racialized citizenship status. Later on, she hopes to expand her research to include other moments of race-making vis-a-vie discourses of immigration and citizenship.
Audrey Jenkins
Audrey Jenkins is a PhD candidate in the Public and Urban Policy program at the Milano School of Policy, Management and the Environment seeking to understand and shape theory, discourse, and policy at the intersection of human migration, climate, and community. She is interested in how development, resource management, and political structure shape outcomes and resilience for sending and receiving communities and the lived experiences of migration. She is currently studying how racial and ethnic minorities in the United States are and may be impacted by sea-level rise, and the scope of policies and programs that may help address racial disparities for impacted communities. Audrey completed her Masters of Public Health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, and her B.A. in Political Science and B.S. in Molecular, Developmental, and Cellular Biology at Purdue University.


Orsolya Lehotai
Orsolya Lehotai is PhD student in the Department of Politics at the New School for Social Research. She earned her Masters degree in Gender Studies from Central European University and in Political Science from Corvinus University, Budapest. Her research interest focuses on the politics of spectacle, as well as the conditions, articulations, and multiple forms of belonging and exclusions in relation to the construction of the suffering Other in contemporary Hungarian politics, and in state-led Hungarian diaspora politics in North America. Her research will explore questions around the historical and legal discourses of social membership and social value pertaining to who is perceived to be vulnerable, and thus worthy of being granted asylum in North America based on the cases of Hungarian refugee claimants after 1956. You can read her recent article on contemporary Hungarian politics in Foreign Policy here.
Jacquelin Kataneksza
Jacquelin Kataneksza is a Zimbabwean doctoral candidate in Public and Urban Policy in the Milano School of Policy, Management and Environment at The New School. Jacquelin is concerned with how Zimbabweans use Internet communications technologies to navigate daily political and economic precarity and what that navigation reveals about Zimbabweans’ relationalities across racial and social boundaries.
Jacquelin holds a master’s degree in International Affairs from the Studley Graduate Program in International Affairs. She is a regular contributor to Africa is a Country and has previously written for Mobilisation Lab, as well as appearing on Al Jazeera’s The Stream, This is Hell Radio and Cape Talk Radio, to discuss Zimbabwean politics. She has also previously consulted on international development policy in various offices of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.


Helidah Ogude
Helidah Refiloe Ogude is an interdisciplinary scholar with research interests in racialized and transnational masculinities, racialized citizens, news discourse, immigration policy and race-critical and postcolonial theories. Her current PhD research, in the broadest sense, focuses on the complex and mutually constitutive relationships between media, public attitudes and migration policymaking. Her PhD dissertation, titled, Migrant Representation, Discourse and Determination: The Case of Britain at the Height of the Mediterranean ‘Crisis’, explores how British mainstream news media and political elites depicted black African and Arab/Muslim male migrants during the height of the Mediterranean ‘crisis’, and how this representation relates in turn to immigration policy.
Helidah has over ten years of experience in international affairs and development spanning countries across Africa, East Asia and the Middle East. She is currently on extended leave from the World Bank where she is a Social Development Specialist. She holds a MSc in Global Affairs from New York University
Marianna Poyares


Mónica Salmon Gómez
Mónica Salmón Gómez is a PhD student in Sociology at the New School for Social Research (NSSR). She holds a BA in International Relations from ITESO and a Masters in Social Sciences from the Universidad de Guadalajara in Mexico. Mónica co-founded FM4 Paso Libre (NGO in defense of the human rights of migrants in transit during their journey through Mexico), coordinated it from 2009 to October 2014, and is a current board member. Her research topics focus on international migration, borders, illegalization, international protection, human rights, and migration policies.
Yichuan Zhou
Yichuan Zhou comes from Beijing and is currently a fourth-year Ph.D. student in political theory at The New School for Social Research. Before coming to NSSR, he earned a Bachelor’s degree from Peking University and a Master’s degree from The London School of Economics. His research interests include Western political theory and the intellectual history of East Asia in the twentieth century. He is currently working on three projects. The first one is a comparative reading between Carl Schmitt’s and Confucius’s writings on several political concepts. The second one, supported by Zolberg, studies Hong Kong’s democratic crisis by referring to the discourses of Hong Kong Right and Chinese statist formed in recent years which are little-known to the westerners. And the third one concerns a critique of Western modernity by focusing on the “Third World” consciousness among Sino-Indian intellectuals in the early twentieth century.
