Preliminary abstract: In post-apartheid South Africa, the figure of 'the Black consumer' has become the focal point for key tensions surrounding 'race' and identity. While marketers and advertisers are under increasing pressure to tap the spending power of Blacks, what it means to be both 'Black' and a consumer is contested, both within the industry and in broader society.

Preliminary abstract: Global road safety experts have increasingly turned to biomedical and epidemiological frameworks to shape interventions, treating injury as a disease and accidents as an epidemic to be curtailed. While anthropologists have begun to identify ideologies guiding injury prevention policies, they have paid little attention to related policies that concern the 'scale up' of national trauma systems.

Preliminary abstract: My project constitutes a 16 month-long ethnographic study of changing normative ideals of gendered propriety and purity among Xhosa people in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. I am especially interested in gendered and intergenerational negotiations surrounding ideals of moral comportment; my overarching research question is: what cultural institutions are mobilized to reinforce and/or contest moral discourses and values relating to kinship, sexuality and reproduction, and how is this accomplished?

DENIS REGNIER, then a student at London School of Economics, London, United Kingdom, received a grant in April 2008, to aid research on 'Social Organization, Identity and Consciousness among Betsileo Slave Descendants, Highland Madagascar,' supervised by Dr. Rita Astuti. Fieldwork was carried out among the southern Betsileo of Madagascar and focused on explaining why, although slavery was abolished in 1896, free descendants today still strictly avoid marrying slave descendants. The research found that free descendants use a hypodescent principle to categorize people as slave descendants.

DR. TRICIA REDEKER-HEPNER, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee, received funding in May 2010 to aid research on 'Generation Asylum: New Eritrean Refugees, Human Rights, and the Politics of Forced Migration.' This project investigated the proliferation of rights-based discourse and organizing among recent refugees and asylum seekers in Eritrea.

DR. SUSAN JANE RASMUSSEN, University of Houston, Houston, Texas, was awarded funding in April 2006, to aid research on 'Performance, Modernity, and Memory in Contemporary Tuareg Theater and Acting in Northern Mali.' This research examined theatrical performances, actors, and acting in semi-nomadic, Islamic, traditionally-stratified, Tamajaq-speaking communities of Tuareg in Kidal, northern Mali.

Preliminary abstract: This project proposes a novel perspective of transnational Islamic NGOs in sub-Saharan Africa. It is an ethnographic investigation of the globally renowned UK-based Islamic NGO - Islamic Relief Worldwide in Mali. The research takes as its central concern the ways in which Islamic aid is brought about through the effects of multiple factors and motivating logics. It asks the ways in which notions of development, humanitarianism, and Islam are brought together in new ways through the practices of Islamic Relief in Mali.

DR. MIROSLAVA PRAZAK, Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont, was awarded funding in May 2007 to aid research on 'Kuria Family in the Era of HIV/AIDS.' The study collected quantitative data to examine how HIV/AIDS is reshaping domestic groups and qualitative data to understand how community members are changing their concepts of family. The survey represents the fourth phase of a longitudinal research charting changes and continuities in the structure and size of domestic groups over two decades.

Preliminary abstract: This project investigates the simultaneous rise of Pentecostalism and growth of cities in northern Mozambique. It focuses on new urban migrants whose aspirations for a new beginning resonate with the Pentecostal promise of rebirth. Pentecostal discourses of prosperity and demonization, insisting that money be sacrificed and 'traditions' renounced, would seem only to exacerbate adversities of dislocation.