The UMass Amherst Ethnography Collective has named Ashley McGraw and Marco Trigoso as the recipients of its 2026 Fieldwork Fellowships. The awards support students’ ethnographic fieldwork and provide critical funding to advance their dissertation research at various stages.

This fellowship was made possible by the Ethnography Collective Fund, created in 2024 to promote the professional development of graduate students pursuing the Graduate Certificate in Ethnographic Research, which provides interdisciplinary training in humanistic and social scientific approaches to immersive research methods including digital storytelling, photovoice and collaborative ethnography. The fund aims to invest in the next generation of ethnographers and their innovative, field-based research.

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McGraw is an anthropology doctoral student working at the junction of linguistic and medical anthropology. Her work is centered in Western North Carolina, her home state, which influenced her interest in Appalachian studies and the study of rural experiences and how people interact with place. She is passionate about anthropological methods as a space for creativity and advocacy, and "deep hanging out" as a community building practice.

McGraw’s dissertation project, titled “Navigating Housing and Social Service Care In Western North Carolina after Disaster,” studies the aftermath of an unexpected and devastating hurricane that hit the mountains of Southern Appalachia. Unhoused and tenuously housed residents of Western North Carolina entered a new landscape of governmental aid and housing resources, as the hurricane revealed existing weaknesses and strengths in webs of care across the region. Utilizing arts-based research methods such as zine-making alongside participant observation and a focus on accompaniment, she explores how residents of Western North Carolina build trusted networks of governmental and community resources as well as a sense of home after disaster and exercise their autonomy despite systemic social inequality.

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Trigoso is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication whose research examines how Peruvian bureaucrats negotiate digital technology policy models in the context of structural dependence on international actors and technological trends. More broadly, his interests include the environmental implications of AI development, the platformization of social relations in South America and the depoliticization of digital technologies in the region.

Trigoso’s dissertation project examines how Peru’s state-led digital transformation policies simultaneously pursue digital inclusion while relying on the structural dependency of global technological infrastructures. Focusing on the Digital Girls program and the national AI governance strategy, Trigoso analyzes how these initiatives are shaped through partnerships with international organizations and foreign governments. Using an institutional ethnography approach, his research traces how the everyday work of policymakers within the Secretaría de Gobierno y Transformación Digital co-produces the national digital transformation through policy texts, institutional routines, and transnational coordination.

The UMass Amherst Ethnography Collective is a grassroots, faculty-driven initiative with participants from four colleges and schools – Education, Humanities and Fine Arts, Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Public Health and Health Sciences – based in the following departments: Anthropology; Communication; Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies; Political Science; Public Policy; Sociology; Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies; and Community Health Education.