Emily Bailey Awarded Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant

Programs in Anthropology are proud to announce that Emily Bailey has been awarded the Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant. Bailey is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology & Education and has received this grant to support her dissertation research.

The Wenner-Gren Foundation is committed to playing a leadership role in anthropology. They help anthropologists advance anthropological knowledge, build sustainable careers, and amplify the impact of anthropology within the wider world. More information about the foundation can be found here.

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 this great achievement!