2023 Rose Olver Student Research Fund Co-Winners
Sofia Hincapie-Rodrigo '24
Double-major in Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies and Political Science
Research Project:
The Festival del Bullerengue is an annual cultural festival that celebrates the Afro-Colombian musical and dance tradition known as bullerengue. The festival takes place in various locations throughout the Colombian Caribbean region and typically features musical performances by bullerengue groups, as well as dance performances, parades, and other cultural activities. The origins of bullerengue music can be traced back to the musical traditions of slaves who were brought to the region during the colonial era, and it incorporates elements of African, Indigenous, and Spanish cultures, and was traditionally performed by women as a form of resistance and cultural expression. The festival is an important cultural event for Afro-Colombian communities, because it promotes the preservation and celebration of their musical and dance traditions, and it has also increasingly become a platform for promoting LGBTQ+ visibility and acceptance within the Afro-Colombian community.
Sofia hopes to achieve valuable insight into how historical processes of colonialism, slavery, and racism have impacted gender and sexuality in Afro-Colombian culture, and how contemporary efforts to promote cultural heritage, such as the Festival del Bullerengue, intersect with broader struggles for social and economic justice in Colombia.
Mica Nimkarn '24
Double-major in Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies and Anthropology
Research Project:
Mica's research project will study care networks in Asian Women’s Organizations, focusing on the Philippines Women’s Centre (PWC) in Vancouver started in 1989. This project builds off of Valerie Francisco-Menchavez’s work in Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age. In her book, Francisco-Menchavez theorizes about the multidirectional transnational network of care that Filipina migrant workers must form as a part of the political economy that they are forced to enter as exported labor forces from the Philippines. She explains how this economic situation and neoliberal globalization create renegotiations of family, care, and care work. Her site of analysis is a community-based organization, Kabalikat Domestic Women’s Support Network, which serves migrant domestic workers in NYC. She theorizes that this organization plays a key role in the creation and establishment of new forms of fictive kin relationships in the United States as a part of a transnational care network of migrant workers. Building on these ideas, Mica argues that we must see organizations like the PWC as necessary formations of third-party care in these networks due to the political economies and neoliberal globalization that forces migrants to act as outsourced labor from their home countries.