CHR is thrilled to have the support of George Mason's Graduate Division to offer competitive summer fellowships to doctoral fellows conducting research in the humanities.
Read on to learn about our summer 2025 fellows. All will give research talks at the CHR during AY 25-26.
Dhruv Deepak (PhD Candidate, Sociology and Anthropology) is a PhD candidate in Sociology at George Mason University, exploring the intersection of technology, community, and political economy through a critical lens; he views technology as a deeply social phenomenon embedded in complex historical, cultural, and institutional contexts. Through his research, he advances a reimagined vision of technology that puts democracy and community empowerment at the center. His dissertation is an investigation of how “democratic experiments” with technology — such as digital cooperatives and peer production networks — can reconfigure extractive data relations into spaces of collective wealth and social innovation. As Project Manager of the Digital Commonwealth Project, a community-engaged research and development initiative in Northern Virginia, he demonstrates a commitment to technology that builds more resilient communities.
Project: "Community-Owned Digital Resources: Experiments to Democratize ‘Data Relations’ for Community Wealth"
My dissertation examines communities that collectively own and govern digital resources, producing alternative models that challenge power and reclaim digital space as territory for empowerment. I analyze four types of "democratic experiments" — digital cooperatives, data sovereignty initiatives, peer production networks, and participatory governance models — to investigate how community-led initiatives transform extractive data relations into spaces of collective empowerment. Early insights show they can deepen democratic practices and create community wealth; for instance, platform cooperatives reconfigure labor relations so workers retain economic value. Communities are producing terrains where they contest the dominant paradigm of extraction; this project spurs interdisciplinary dialogue on grassroots efforts to reimagine the relationship between technology and territory.
Debamita Guha (PhD Candidate, Sociology and Anthropology) is a Graduate Research Assistant at the Global South Research Hub under the Center for Social Science Research (CSSR), George Mason University. She has previously completed a Master's in Sociology and an M.Phil. in Development Studies from India. Her research focuses on the impact of neoliberalism and forces of globalization on queer activism in India through a critique of development perspective. She explores activist praxes in queer spaces and LGBTQ+ rights organizations in urban India using qualitative research methods.
Project: "Building Archives as Spaces of Queer Resistance"
This research intends to map the trajectory of the queer movement in India and in turn the queer history of India through the presence (or lack thereof) of queer archives. Looking into four archives, the project will interrogate how urban spaces have contributed to the development of queer experiences and have facilitated queer activism within the country. Analyzing this archival material, the project will locate queer history and activism in India, through changes in urban landscapes and neighborhoods and transformations of spaces of activism, the impact of LGBTQ+ movements of the Global North and of international donor/ aid agencies on activisms in the Global South, mobilities of agency-activist networks, and spatial and material effects on the lived experiences of queer persons. The project will emphasize the significance of documenting queer struggles to counter archival neglect, archives thereby metamorphosing into spaces of queer resistance.
Toby Hickson (PhD Candidate, Cultural Studies) received a BA in Comparative Literature with a focus on 19th-century prose followed by an MA in English with a thesis centered on the unspeakability of class in Victorian discourses. He is currently a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies department at GMU working on a dissertation about the connections between the obfuscation of gendered labor in mass culture and moral panic legislation across different media epochs.
Project: "Invisible Labors, Visible Panics: Sex Work, Moral Panic, and the (Un)representability of Gendered Labor in Mass Culture"
In my dissertation, I examine how different mass media forms—print media in the late-nineteenth century, televisual media in the mid to late twentieth century, and digital media in the twenty-first century—have systematically erased the material conditions and labor practices of sex workers. My project explores how representational absences intersect with anxieties about class, gender, and sexuality, and how these anxieties fuel moral panic legislation that regulates the spaces and mobility of working-class sexuality and labor. Given that legislative interventions targeting sex workers often restrict movement and access to public spaces, my research directly aligns with the 2025–2026 CHR theme of “Space, Territory, and Mobility.”
Janine Hubai (PhD Candidate, History and Art History) is a PhD candidate at George Mason University in the Department of History and Art History. Her research interests include military history, historical racial structures, indigenous history, and digital public history. She has worked on projects for the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, the Center for Mason Legacies, the Center for Humanities Research, Dr. Gabrielle Tayac, and the U.S. Army.
Project: "Four Miles to Integration: The U.S. Army, Race, Family, and Community during Desegregation at Fort Dix, 1945-1963"
My dissertation explores racial desegregation and integration of the U.S. Army from 1945-1963 at Fort Dix, New Jersey. After WWII, the U.S. Army faced unprecedented changes that caused an expansion of manpower to mitigate the threat of nuclear warfare during the Cold War amidst the Civil Rights Movement and Executive Order 9981 which pressured the army to desegregate. My dissertation examines the contentious process of integration of the U.S. Army and Black soldiers’ lives at Dix through their work, recreation, housing, and communities as they experienced differing degrees of acceptance; insider and outsider status; and freedom and unfreedom. As a CHR fellow, I will expand on the themes of “Space, Territory, and Mobility,” as I argue that although Black soldiers and their families operated in cultures rooted in racism, they formed new communities and advocated for their full rights of citizenship, economic mobility, and respect.
Müge Yüce (PhD Candidate, Cultural Studies) is a Ph.D. student in Cultural Studies at George Mason University and a graduate certificate student in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research explores the intersections of gender, sexuality, and political economy with a focus on visual and performance cultures in Turkey, engaging questions of visibility, space, memory, and resistance, particularly through the lens of political humor and transnational feminisms.
Project: "Displaced Intimacies: Mobility, Morality, and the Politics of Urban Space under Neoliberal Islam in Istanbul’s Istiklal Avenue"
My project examines how Istanbul’s İstiklal Avenue has been reshaped under the AKP government through a fusion of neoliberal urban development and Islamic moral governance, aiming to regulate public intimacy, desire, and dissent. Through aggressive gentrification, securitization, and cultural sanitization, independent bookstores, LGBTQ+ venues, and radical art spaces have been replaced by multinational retail chains, surveillance infrastructure, and state-sanctioned “family-friendly” leisure zones. Using ethnographic observation, oral history interviews, spatial mapping, and archival research, my study explores these shifts in detail, investigating how neoliberal Islam restructures urban space, regulates mobility, and displaces oppositional communities along İstiklal Avenue. In its questioning of how material, cultural, and political transformations of space under AKP's neoliberal Islam have produced new forms of exclusion, visibility, and belonging, this project connects directly to the CHR’s 2025–26 theme of “Space, Territory, and Mobility."
May 02, 2025