Please join us in congratulating OHMA/GSAS Research Grant recipients, Ananya Garg (2023), Clarissa Shane (2023), and Florencia Ruiz Mendoza (2022)!
Ananya Garg
Ananya Garg is completing her thesis project on chosen family networks in LGBTQ+ South Asian communities. She is conducting interviews with community members and leaders, and documenting important community gatherings.
The project aims to provide a space to honor chosen family networks, as they are not recorded and valued in the same ways as blood family networks are. Additionally, the project seeks to offer a blueprint to future generations of queer and trans South Asian people on how to build chosen family networks for themselves.
Clarissa Shane
Clarissa Shane sitting in an Agave cultivation during fieldwork with wild plant medicine practitioners in Paredones, Michoacán, Mexico (their mother’s ancestral land).
Clarissa Shane will be focusing on plant medicine with the goal of capturing the cultural, traditional, and personal narratives of plant knowledge keepers. They intend to speak to women of diasporas who approach plant medicine healing as care work and as connection to their ancestral lands. They will be using the OHMA/GSAS grant to attend the Chacruna 2024 Plant Medicine Conference and to research various cultural ways of knowing wild plants.
Florencia Ruiz Mendoza
In Florencia’s project, “Voices from Wupatki,” several First Nations peoples reflect on their experiences and connections with Wupatki National Monument, an ancestral archaeological site in Arizona. Florencia will direct the totality of this grant to transcribe at least six hours of recording. The interviews represent cultural legacy because of their content, and having them transcribed will allow their dissemination to a broader audience.