LESLEY L. DASPIT, then a student at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, received funding in October 2007 to aid research on 'Market Women in Central Africa: Transnational Interface of Wildlife Commerce and Conservation,' supervised by Dr. Melissa J. Remis. This dissertation project examines the roles of women in the commerce and conservation of wildlife in the Dzanga-Sangha Dense Forest Reserve (RDS), Central African Republic (CAR). Commercialized hunting and trade of wildlife is seen as the largest threat to wildlife in this region.

JOANNA H. DAVIDSON, while a student at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, was awarded funding in October 2001 to aid research on the salience of ethnicity in intergroup conflict in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa, under the supervision of Dr. Bruce M. Knauft. Davidson conducted twenty-two months of ethnographic and historical research, focusing on recent conflicts within and between ethnic groups in northern Guinea-Bissau.

BIANCA JANE DAHL, then a student at University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, received funding in April 2006 to aid research on 'Transforming Children: The Contested Socialization of Orphaned Youth in Contemporary Botswana,' supervised by Dr. Jennifer Cole. In the wake of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Botswana, where over a third of adults are HIV positive, an entirely new population group has captured the national imagination: orphaned children.

Preliminary abstract: Guinea sits on the vanguard of global trends in localized energy provision. In the wake of widespread cuts to public utilities in the 1980s and 90s, blackouts became permanent features of Guinea's urban landscape. Since then, Guinean traders have emerged as crucial energy entrepreneurs--wiring generators and solar panels from their shops to nearby households in exchange for cash.

Preliminary abstact: No one agrees on what or where Abyei is, but everyone has an opinion. The transhumant Misseriya, who move their cattle south through the region in the dry season, are less concerned with where it is, than that they are part of it. The Ngok Dinka, a pastoralist group who live in the region, think Abyei is their ancestral homeland, and claim that the Misseriya have no residency rights at all. The Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), now the ruling party in South Sudan, insist that Abyei is part of the South.

Preliminary Abstract:
Classic anthropological perspectives on personhood and ethno medicine, are turned towards research on the perceptions and experiences of termination of pregnancy amongst Nurses and young people in a Xhosa speaking township on the Cape Flats, South Africa. Gendered analysis of stigmatized attitudes to abortion and cosmological beliefs in fetus ghosts are linked to questions of gender identity, sexuality, tradition and modernity in the impoverished and marginal spaces of post Apartheid South Africa.

Preliminary abstract: How does the colonial legacy of two parallel legal systems -- one ostensibly customary, the other under the jurisdiction of the state -- frame contemporary nationhood in Ghana, and, in particular, the often violent conflicts over property regimes that govern the ownership and extraction of resources in its neoliberal economy? How does that legacy register tensions and aspirations in postcolonial citizenship, sovereign government, environmental politics, and law in this African postcolony?

Preliminary abstract: This research will investigate how major demographic changes in Sub-Saharan Africa, including the so-called 'youth bulge' and 'orphan crisis', affect the reproduction and change of social values and practices. To do this, the research will focus on the transitions to, and perceptions and practices of, adulthood and parenthood among a cohort of young women and men in western Kenya who were orphaned during their childhoods between the years of 1990 and 2005.