2017-2018 Fellows | Scholarship Matters - Center for Engaged Scholarship - CES

Michael D. Aguirre, PhD

Staff — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 15:00:35 +0000

Michael Aguirre explores the aftermath of the guest worker Bracero Program that brought Mexican farm workers to the U.S. between 1942 and 1964. Focusing on the Eastern California borderlands of Imperial County, California, and Mexicali, Baja California Norte, he shows how policymakers and business people on both sides of the border strategized to create new agricultural and industrial regimes that continued to disempower working people.

Brian Callaci, PhD

Staff — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 14:00:55 +0000

Brian Callaci uses a unique, original, hand-collected data set of five hundred and thirty franchise contracts in one state to understand the relationship between big restaurant chains and their franchisees. This is important since the big restaurant chains have insisted that the franchise owner is the employer for the purposes of labor law, forcing any potential union drive to organize one fast food outlet at a time.

Daanika Gordon, PhD

Staff — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 13:00:23 +0000

Daanika Gordon completed her dissertation at the University of Wisconsin in 2018. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology & Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University.

Daanika analyzes policing in a large Midwestern city to show the relationship between residential segregation and policing practices. Through extensive fieldwork that included ride-alongs with police officers, she shows how police react to and help create segregated spaces, producing racialized outcomes even in the absence of racial intent.

Yasmeen Mekawy, PhD

Staff — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 11:00:13 +0000

Yasmeen Mekawy examines how emotion works to either mobilize people to participate in high-risk protest, or conversely, keep people in their homes. Through an in-depth examination of the use of social media in the 2011 uprising in Egypt, she shows how emotional responses to events can help explain why groups mobilize when they do or fail to mobilize at other times.

Adam Mertz, PhD

Staff — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 10:00:44 +0000

Adam Mertz completed his dissertation in 2019 at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Adam’s research seeks to understand rural/urban political polarization by examining the rise of Wisconsin teacher unions during the 1970s.

He argues that Wisconsin’s previous farmer-labor coalition was disrupted as rural voters felt that Democratic politicians were unresponsive to their concerns over taxation.

By examining this history, Adam seeks to illuminate the possibilities for reconstituting a progressive farmer-labor alliance.