Emily Bailey Awarded Chateaubriand Fellowship & Provost's Dissertation Research Award

Programs in Anthropology are proud to announce that Emily Bailey has been awarded the Chateaubriand Fellowship by the French Embassy. Bailey is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology & Education and has received this grant to support her dissertation research. The Chateaubriand Fellowship enables PhD students from US institutions to conduct critical research in France and collaborate and exchange with French researchers. More information about the fellowship can be found here. Bailey has also received the Teachers College Provost's Dissertation Research Award for the 2024-2025 academic year.

Bailey's dissertation project is titled "'This is our lives': Co-Production of Autistic Futures in a French Cafe." This project examines a special education program in Paris, France for non/minimally speaking autistic adolescents additionally diagnosed with an intellectual disability which has, guided by State-level priorities, imagined a particular future of autism in which autistic adolescents are equipped with the skills necessary to participate in a version of a normative, neurotypical future through labor. However, this imagined future assumes autistic adolescents to be passive recipients of intervention and fails to consider what they might imagine for themselves. The project is therefore guided by the question: How are imagined normative futures translated, mediated, unraveled, and rewoven by autistic adolescents and those sent to dispatch said futures? Through 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this project seeks to amplify alternative conceptions of an embodied and relational personhood, broadening anthropology’s scope of what it means to be a person and to have a future.

We congratulate Emily on these great achievements!