Current Students
Yuki Kashima – kashima@wisc.edu
Yuki Kashima is a Ph.D. candidate in Educational Policy Studies with a concentration in Comparative and International Education. Her distributed minors are anthropology and Swahili. Using a qualitative and ethnographic approach, she explores how women with graduate degrees in Japan construct meanings of graduate education in Japan. She is also interested in how these highly educated women deal with their precarious situations and the dilemmas that arise between their personal expectations for their lives and the constraints of the traditional gender roles. By learning from the lives of highly educated women, her research aims to see how individual agency and structure dynamically interact and shape the significance of education for women in Japanese society, where the government has recently promoted graduate education. Although her dissertation research focuses on Japan, she is interested in other areas of the world, including Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, especially East Africa. Prior to enrolling at the University of Wisconsin, she worked as an intern for UNESCO in Bangkok and as a staff member for UNDP headquarters for African development. She has also visited several countries in Africa, including Tanzania for Swahili training.
Brian W. Lagotte - lagotte@wisc.edu
Brian’s work centers on the anthropology of policy. He sees this as an interesting mix of critical social theory around power, anthropology of law, and engaged research. Currently, he is investigating the influence of NCLB regulations regarding public schools and military recruiting (Section 9528). His research looks to the variety of actors influenced by the policy -- parents, students, administrators, and recruiters -- to evaluate the effects. By connecting disparate angles of a particular issue, Brian hopes to increase our understanding of the mechanics of these regulations. As the policies are currently reflected in two competing House bills, a richer understanding is in demand before legislation is passed.
Jinting Wu - jwu8@wisc.edu
Jinting is a joint Ph.D. candidate in Educational Policy Studies and Curriculum & Instruction, with a minor in Anthropology. Since the summer of 2006 when her anthropological instinct brought her to the remote mountain region of Guizhou, China, she has been introduced to a rhythmic space whose intensity offers a glimpse into the harmoniously cacophonous Chinese society, a space penetrated and penetrating, fragmented by labor exiles, tourists, market ideologies, nationalist education myths, and ethnic youth’s coming of age in a landscape of performance. In her research, Jinting brings three interlocking pedagogical practices of state schooling, ethnic tourism, and labor migration into a joint purview, to understand the distinctive role public schooling serves in citizenship/subjectivity formation, the ways it variously intersects with interventionist state programs and market practices, how it embeds a desire to govern, and how it is reworked at the margin. She believes children’s social conditions of being and becoming in ethnic sites can speak volumes about the dynamics and consequences of China’s modernization discourse and the fundamental features of contemporary Chinese governmentality. Jinting is currently living in the Miao/Dong community of southwest Guizhou, conducting a 15-month ethnographic research, partially funded by the Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship and the Tashia F. Morgridge Wisconsin Distinguished Graduate Fellowship.
May Hara- mhara@wisc.edu
May’s dissertation is an ethnographic study of how families and school staff co-construct definitions of "successful" home-school relationships in a middle school experiencing significant demographic change. She is particularly interested in exploring how factors such as race, socio-economic class, immigrant status and linguistic background intersect to privilege certain definitions of home-school relationships in a diverse school community. Additional research interests include the experiences of immigrant families with U.S. public schooling in non-gateway communities, middle school education, and teacher education geared towards working with diverse populations.
Annalee Good – aggood@wisc.edu
Annalee's research interests include the landscape of teacher-student relationships in K-12 classrooms, as well as the role of teachers in educational policymaking. Her dissertation research is focused on investigating influences of various institutional contexts on the propensity of K-12 teachers to participate in educational policy advocacy. She also is a project assistant for the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, conducting qualitative research for the Multisite Evaluation of Supplemental Educational Services.
Andrew Epstein - aiepstein@wisc.edu
Andrew investigates the intersections between education, globalization, and forced migration in East Africa. He uses primarily ethnographic methods in school sites to examine how global interconnectedness and population displacement impacts social, economic, and political landscapes in particular communities. His dissertation is on education and the return of refugees in rural areas of southern Sudan. Andrew is also a monitoring and evaluation and teacher training consultant for international humanitarian aid organizations working in the area of education in emergencies and post-conflict situations. He also has conducted research on refugee education, internationalization and interdisciplinarity in higher education, and alternative education in the United States. Prior to beginning his doctoral work, he was a high school English teacher and alternative school principal for over 15 years where he worked primarily with at-risk youth in both urban and rural settings.
Carl Egner – egner@wisc.edu See two attached documents (CV and bio)
