PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] – PSTC Trainees Fiori Berhane and Sara Hefny have been granted Fulbright Open Study awards. Berhane and Hefny are both third year Anthropology students and will spend the coming year doing dissertation fieldwork in Italy.

Berhane will conduct participant observation, oral historical interviews, and archival research on the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front’s relationship with the Italian Communist Party in the 1970s and on contemporary youth activism among Eritrean refugees. Her project, "Italo-Eritrea: Tracing a Post-Colonial Italy in the Contemporary Migration Crisis," examines Bologna’s role as the center of a de-territorialized Eritrean state during the nationalist war and how this shapes the contours of community life and what is ‘sayable’ within the Eritrean diaspora, more generally.

Hefny's project, "Curated Care: Evaluating Refugee Vulnerability in Italy’s Humanitarian Corridor," examines a humanitarian initiative started by a group of Italian ecumenical organizations that is resettling approximately 1,000 displaced Syrians from Lebanese refugee camps to different cities in Italy. She will analyze the assessment and selection process, as well as compare the kinds of social services that this group of refugees receives with the services provided to other asylum seekers and refugees living in Italy.

Berhane and Hefny, along with PSTC Trainee Alice Larotonda (Anthropology), have also received dissertation fieldwork grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Read more about the Fulbright awards here.