Professor A. George Bajalia
A. George Bajalia is a sociocultural anthropologist concerned with borderlands, primarily in the Western Mediterranean region, and the convener of Producing and Performing Anthropology. His current book project, Waiting at the Border: Language, Labor, and Infrastructure in the Strait of Gibraltar, dwells on the political, social, and cultural forms that emerge during time spent waiting among cross-border workers and West and Central African immigrants living and working around the Moroccan-Spanish borderlands surrounding Tangier and Ceuta. He has held research fellowships from the Mellon Foundation-CAORC, Fulbright-Hays, Fulbright-IIE, and the American Institute for Maghrib Studies. He is the co-founder and co-director of the Youmein Festival, a 48-hour contemporary art and performance festival and residency in Tangier, Morocco. Throughout his work, he is interested in questions of temporality, circulation and exchange, post-structural semiotics, regional formations, and the practices and politics of boundary-marking, belonging, and difference. His courses at Wesleyan explore the relationships between anthropology, performance, and curation; migration and borderlands; endurance and the otherwise; and theories of cultural and social change.
Josie Dickman
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John Earling
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Jake Gale
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Lucia Glatz
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Lucas Matthews
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Alexandra Segal
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Eli Siegel-Bernstein
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Loren Wang
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Ella Weiner
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Isaiah Williams
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Tracy Wu
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Spring 2024 Students
Megan Bauerle
Hi, I’m Megan :). I grew up in the Midwest and am currently living on the East Coast. My interests include Asian American history, food culture, and archives, so my project tries to incorporate my personal background with a baking archive of sorts. Baking cookies, celebrating holidays with baking, and gifting baked goods is a huge part of how I connect with others. Where I come from: old Wisconsin ovens to Wesleyan dorm kitchens. How I got here: through my mom and sister, who taught me how to bake. Where I’m going: to think about how archiving things changes the way we engage with the world around us.
Dean Bogner
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Ana Camargo
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Marina D. Cañedo-Argüelles
I came to Wesleyan in September 2023 as a Spanish Teacher’s Assistant. In Spain, I studied art history, but somehow all my friends at Wesleyan were related to anthropology and music. Talking with them allowed me to approach art in a way that was new and exciting to me. My curiosity to explore this led me to enroll as an undergraduate in the Producing and Performing Anthropology class.
Felicity Guevara
Hi 🙂 My name is Felicity Esperanza Guevara. Growing up in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, I was always surrounded by people who looked, talked, and shared similar upbringings as me since most of us were raised by Caribbean/Latinx families. When I first came to Wesleyan University, I struggled to feel as though I belonged in this space, an experience that many students like me had. In this project, I explore how familiarity and the idea of “home” bring comfort and strength while studying at Wesleyan University. I focus on how place-making allows me, and many other students, to sit with the unfamiliarity and discomfort that arises while being a student at a predominantly white institution.
Jess Kahkoska
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Linda Lu
Hi! I’m Linda Lu. I grew up in a small city by the Yangtze River in China. Majoring in anthropology is something I had never planned in my life before coming here to Wesleyan. I was enthusiastic about radio dramas when I was in high school and dreamed of being a professional radio play actress or producer back then. My project involves me reapproaching my passion for sounds from an anthropological perspective, which examines our interactions with the physical world through oral sensory experiences.
Luis Luna
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Meera Nemali
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Daniella Porras
Hi! I’m Daniella and I am a studio art and anthropology double major. Being an artist I decided to focus my time as an Anthropology major looking into different aspects of art and the art world. This culminated in my capstone essay focusing on how Instagram is changing the art world.
Lexi Radziner
Hi, my name is Lexi and I’m a double major in anthropology and film, focused primarily in documentary. I’m passionate about visual ethnography and nonfiction arts, and my work seeks to explore these interests jointly.
Lucy Rossi-Reder
Hi! My name is Lucy and in the spirit of this class, I’ll answer three questions one more time. Where did I come from? I came from Quaker Hill, this strange little place in Connecticut. How did I get here? I’m not sure how I got to Wesleyan, but I am glad I did. In terms of my project, I have always had a connection to birds. When I was younger, my dad would read Haroun and The Sea of Stories aloud to me and I loved the Hoopoe bird in it. When I encountered The Conference of The Birds I immediately knew I wanted to create something inspired by it. Where am I going? I have no idea, but I hope wherever I’m going, I can continue to practice art and anthropology and also read some good books along the way!
Diana Zhumalieva (she/her)
I’m Diana, and I came to Wesleyan from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. It’s a post-Soviet country with contesting narratives about its past, present, and future. Since gaining its sovereignty in 1991, Kyrgyzstan has been crafting its national identity by trying to reconcile its fragmented history into a linear narrative. My project refuses the linear understanding of time and represents history as a collage of layered memory-making practices (newspaper headlines). It illuminates the transformative nature of ideology and collective consciousness. After Wes, I will go on to be a part of the everchanging world.
Spring 2023 Students
Terry Yuan
Hi there! My name is Terry / 袁圆 (Yuan-yuan)/ 예원 (Ye-won). I was born in the US and raised in Guangzhou, China, and currently live on the East Coast. Growing up, I have found that my identity(ies) has constantly been shaped and reshaped as I have crossed borders between countries, languages, and cultures. Home has become a floating idea that I keep searching for. In this project, I am inviting my friends at Wesleyan to cook the taste of home together, to describe our homes through our taste buds, and to search for our homes.
Pablo Sanchez
This project, inspired by my senior essay “The Duality of the Mexican Narcocorrido,” explores the War on Drugs through the narco-corrido genre, a Mexican music style rooted in working-class revolution. By analyzing power dynamics between drug trade participants, government entities, and working-class communities, the project challenges mainstream narratives surrounding cartels.
My final product will be a radio show, blending narco-corridos with narration and critiques from various media sources to document tensions between mainstream America, the Mexican working class, and cartels. It seeks to de-vilify rural working-class communities and provide a bottom-up understanding of the War on Drugs, without promoting judgment for narcos.
I raise questions regarding the accuracy of depictions and motivations behind documenting cartel violence. Employing an abolitionist praxis to contextualize narcos within a framework of harm, I emphasize the impact of government decisions on militarization in the Golden Triangle of Mexico.
Samantha Ackiron
Hi, I’m Sam! This project has been in the making since I wrote my college admissions essay in high school, where I wanted to talk about my family’s history and personal relationship with the Jewish prayer shawl, the tallit.
Picking up where I left off, I want to explore how different people, belonging to diverse Jewish communities, make sense of Jewish rituals and traditions– particularly, each person’s own relationship to owning, wearing, keeping, and sanctifying this essential religious and cultural object. I hope to take a peek into how people take an active role in connecting into their larger community, and shape themselves in the process.
Xingyan Guo | 星言
hiii:) My name is Xingyan 星言, the language of the stars. Currently, I live between U.S. / Mexico /China, and I find myself constantly gazing into the silenced ones across cultures and politics. I roll in all different forms from filmmaking, to theater and movement, to writing, and to community organizing. I seek to find new ways of listening beyond the border of geography, culture, gender, and species.
On this project, I collaborated with my dear friends to explore how diasporic queer/women share the same struggle and resistance with trees in urban space. Archiving the letters we wrote in the past three years, I recreate this bilingual visual cut-up poetry anthology 《Dear Tree,》.
My past messy experimentations and collaborations: www.xingyanguo.com
Veronica Goss
Hi! My name is Veronica. I grew up in the US (split between New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut), Chile, Panama, and Germany. This inspired both my interest in anthropology as well as my desire to explore conceptualizations of home in this project! In this project, I am inviting other Wesleyan students who have questions about the meaning of home to participate in making a collage together that represents however they view home.
Hazel Hand
My name is Hazel and I’m from DC! I’m a senior majoring in art history and (formerly) anthropology.
I’ve always been a bit in love with houses, architecture, and anything with some mystery or history behind it. I love traveling whether that’s to another country, state, or just a 20-minute drive away. A part of my love for travel is immersing myself in a new space, seeing the ways that physical communities are constructed, and admiring the houses that I see along the way. Some of my favorite styles are Victorian houses and pretty much all of the New York-style brownstones.
I approached this project looking to choose a building on or around Wesleyan’s campus and research its social history to create an ethnography of sorts. But I realized that the building I have the most access to is my own senior wood frame house. So by recording and filming moments and corners in the home and how its occupants use and have used the space, I hope to capture the charm and comfort that I see in it and that it has provided for my housemates and generations of seniors before us.
Harry Gleicher
Hi, my name is Harry and I’m from the Bay Area! I’m studying English and Anthropology here at Wesleyan with an emphasis in creative writing. When I’m not writing, I love to skateboard and garden.
I’m interested in the practice of love and how shared cultural notions of love impact our ability to practice and feel love. For this project, I interviewed over fifty students and adults on campus and asked them four questions: what is love? what does love feel like? how do you practice love? can you draw love? I explore my findings in this creative endeavor.
Phoebe Stein
Hey, my name is Phoebe. I’m a sophomore majoring in Anthropology and Environmental Studies with a concentration in social, cultural, and critical theory. I was born in Atlanta, Georgia, before moving to California, and I grew up exploring the nature around me. Music has acted as a common thread through each place I have called home, tying me back to my roots and telling the stories of my surroundings. It’s this function of art I endeavor to explore with my Bluegrass circle.
Sophie Clapacs
Welcome, my name is Sophie! While I’m currently an anthropology and studio art student here at Wesleyan, I like to explore the intersections of my background. I come from a half-Pakistani Muslim family, as well as a North Carolinian folksy sensibility. I want to look at the impact of Islamic traditions through food, which has led me to the creation of my recipe-oriented art book which seeks to explore the philosophical and theological roots of cooking right here in Connecticut!
Julia Noriega
Hi, my name is Julia! I am class of 2024 and I am working towards a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology with a minor in Archaeology. I am also a graduate of community college and Middletown is my hometown! I love to spend my free time outdoors or shopping in Thrift and Antique stores – two places that motivated me to create A Collection of Collections.
Spring 2022 Students
