DR. JESSE W. SHIPLEY, Haverford College, Haverford, Pennsylvania, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in April 2008 to aid research and writing on 'Living and Preaching the Hiplife: Afro-Cosmopolitanism and Moral Mediation in Ghanaian Popular Culture.' In the 1990s in Accra, Ghana, musicians and producers created hiplife, a musical genre blending local highlife and hip hop-oriented Black diasporic music. This research examines how young entrepreneurial artists create and circulate music reshaping styles, aspirations, and possibilities for Ghanaian urbanites.

Preliminary abstract: Shortly after the collapse of the central government in Somalia in 1990, there began to sprout up clan-based Islamic or Shari'a courts in southern Somalia. The courts began a process of centralization which culminated in the formation of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) in 2004. By 2006 the ICU was in control of all of southern and central Somalia. An Ethiopian invasion of the country in 2006 resulted in the disintegration of the ICU as a unified political movement and governing entity.

Preliminary abstract: This study focuses on the outcomes and root causes of inequality and violence in a pastoralist community in Kenya. In the marginalized and marginal North Eastern Province (NEP) and Eastleigh area of Nairobi, ethnic Somalis live in conditions of chronic inequality and low-intensity violence. Malnutrition and illiteracy rates are among the worst in the region, access to healthcare and education is minimal, crime and conflict are rampant, and social alienation is rising. As Muslims, Somalis are in the religious minority in Kenya.

NOAH D. SALOMON, then a student at the University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, received funding in November 2004 to aid research on 'Sufism and the Struggle for Islamic Reform in Contemporary Sudan,' supervised by Dr. Saba Mahmood. While recent literature on Islam in Sudan has focused primarily on the Islamized state and its attempts to create an Islamic society, Islamic activism in Sudan is propelled by a large set of non-governmental actors as well.

Preliminary abstract: Migrant populations present one of the greatest challenges to treating the dual epidemics of HIV and TB because most health systems are designed on the assumption that patient populations are static. Little is known about care-seeking behaviors and experiences among HIV- and TB-infected migrants, even in South Africa, a country with a century-long history of labor migration and one of the world's most daunting HIV/TB epidemics. This study investigates why sick migrants return to their rural homes for care.

DR. TODD SANDERS, London School of Economics, London, England, was awarded a Richard Carley Hunt Fellowship in May 2002 to aid research and writing on sex, gender, and rainmaking in Africa. Sanders explored two separate but related themes: first, rainmaking and gender epistemologies among the Ihanzu of Tanzania, and second, the Euro-American analytical preoccupations that undergird anthropological explanations of gender, ritual symbols, and power.

INGE MARIETTE RUIGROK, then a student at Free University, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, was awarded funding in May 2006 to aid research on 'Negotiating Governance: Politics, Decentralization and Cultural Ideology in Post-War Angola,' supervised by Dr. Jon Abbink. The aim of this multi-sited ethnography is to come to an understanding of the changing political relations and identities in Angola in explicit connection with the current negotiation process of governance and power.

DR. LAUREL L. ROSE, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, received funding in October 2007 to aid research on 'Swaziland's Customary Land Law in the Era of HIV/AIDS.' This research project aimed to collect detailed, contextualized data from select communities in Swaziland for the purpose of contributing first, to social scientific understanding about the intersection between law and medicine, and second, to policy debates about the relevance of customary law, particularly customary land use and inheritance rights, in the context of the AIDS pandemic.