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The Ethnography Collective at UMass Amherst has awarded its inaugural Fieldwork Fellowships to Lara Sabra, a doctoral student in anthropology, and Omogbolahan Bello, a doctoral student in political science. An honorable mention was also extended by the collective to Marybelle Issa, a doctoral student in linguistic anthropology. The fellowships will support ethnographic fieldwork this summer and provide critical funding for dissertation research.

The awards were made possible through donations to the Ethnography Collective Fund, created in 2024 to promote the professional development of graduate students pursuing the Graduate Certificate in Ethnographic Research. Through this fund, the Ethnography Collective aims to invest in the next generation of ethnographers and their innovative, field-based research.

Sabra is a graduate assistant at the UMass Jail Education Initiative. As a university student in Beirut, Lebanon, she was actively involved in state-opposition groups, an experience that influenced her academic goals.

Sabra’s dissertation fieldwork project is “Building Futures Beyond Carceral Warscapes: A Creative Ethnography with Lebanon’s Formerly Incarcerated Women.” Drawing on life-history interviews, collaborative storytelling and other creative ethnographic methods, the project examines how diverse trajectories and ongoing histories of war are instilled in modes of incarceration in Lebanon, while also excavating relational survival strategies amidst carceral landscapes of war.

Bello, who is from Ibadan in western Nigeria, was influenced by the city’s culture and history, sparking his early interest in literature – especially poetry – sports, music and the human experience.

Bello’s fieldwork project, “As If Random: The Intellectual and Political Life of Field Experiments in Africa,” questions the implications of knowledge produced by Western institutions in non-Western climates. His work is the result of an ethnography in an unusual locus of study – an experimental research team in its fluid state, planning, implementing and adapting to situational challenges arising from a project that involves multiple field sites across space and time. It will focus on the enterprise of producing social science research and the ways in which researchers inhabit the worlds of the methods to which they lend themselves.

Issa, who is Lebanese Canadian, specializes in semiotic landscapes and resistance movements. Her work focuses on artistic interventions in colonial contexts and explores the interconnections between materiality and critical consciousness.

This summer, Issa will conduct multisited predissertation ethnographic fieldwork in Montreal, Beirut and Amman. Exploring contemporary Palestinian art across major cities in the diaspora, she will spend two months creating preliminary connections and attending art exhibitions, poetry readings and academic events to witness the creative processes, investigate the institutional side of the art world and gain insight on the artistic landscapes in the current political climate.

The Ethnography Collective is a resource for all things ethnography, organizing events, fostering creative and meaningful dialogue across disciplines, and engaging in mutual mentoring with the valued involvement of graduate student colleagues. Grassroots and faculty-driven, the collective draws active participants from four colleges and schools at UMass Amherst: Education, Humanities and Fine Arts, Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Public Health and Health Sciences.