Meet the IRC-Zolberg Fellows for Spring 2023
The IRC and the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at The New School are excited to announce the spring 2023 cohort of fellows. Supported by the Arnhold Foundation, master’s and doctoral students at The New School have the opportunity to contribute to or lead design and research projects at the IRC.
Since 2017, fellows have worked at the IRC on a range of teams including policy, innovation, research, health, governance, and emergency response, amongst others. Fellows have a wide range of experience, and come from the Parsons School of Design, the School of Social Research, the School of Nonprofit and Public Management, the School of Global Affairs, and other New School departments. Learn more about the fellowship.
Anwesha Sengupta, Strategic Design and Management, Parsons School of Design, MS, 2023
Anwesha has served as Design Strategist at The People Place Project, a research-oriented firm working towards community engagement and placemaking where she was an intrinsic part of various research projects involving underrepresented communities in India. She also launched her own design consultancy, where she worked on brand strategy projects for small startups, as well as a social entrepreneurship initiative called Get Local, through which she designed an immersive tour of Mumbai focused on architecture, socio-economic issues, and culture. Finally, Anwesha served as design lead for Divine Overseas, where she established their design team and rebranded and launched their new website. Her current research interests include leveraging design research and visual storytelling to improve development through play in early childhood.
As the PlayMatters Research Fellow, Anwesha will directly support the regional research and Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning teams to design, implement, and disseminate IRC-led PlayMatters research, monitoring, evaluation and learning activities that are taking place in Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania. Playmatters is an education initiative funded through the LEGO Foundation that cultivates holistic learning for children ages 3–12+ whose education and social development has been affected by displacement and trauma. She will work closely with the regional team and country-based teams in support of quality evidence-building and actionable learning activities in support of moving PlayMatters forward on the Path to Scale, in addition to closely coordinating with Education Researchers from IRC’s Airbel Impact Lab.
Eben Rose, Economics, The New School for Social Research, MS, 2023
Eben is trained as a geologist with a BS, BSEd, and MS, from Northern Arizona University and MPhil and PhD (ABD) from Yale University. He taught geology, geobiology, and geohazards at Bowdoin College (2008–9) and University of Connecticut (2009–2011). He was active in a grassroots campaign to prevent exportation by tanker of Canadian tar sands from Portland Harbor, Maine (2013–2015) and helped craft a local ordinance to prohibit this activity, and later helped inform its successful defense in Federal Court. He served as a City Councilor in South Portland (2015–2018) where he authored legislation to strengthen renters’ rights, to afford protection of asylum seekers from deportation, and to prevent the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure. He ran for State Senate in 2020 and helped craft a first-of-its-kind vacancy tax on luxury homes to fund affordable housing programs in Maine. His background in Earth science has informed his sense of urgency in policy responses to climate change and ecosystem collapse. He is studying economics in the MS program at the New School as a way to strengthen policy proposals confronting these urgent issues. He is devoted to “living small” with intention and sailed to New York from Maine where he lives aboard his 30-foot sailboat while taking classes in residency in New York.
As the Anticipatory Action for Climate Resilience Fellow, Eben will play a crucial role in mapping out areas of expansion for IRC’s anticipatory action programming and research, which was launched in 2021 and examined the relative effects of pre-shock and post-shock cash transfers to farmers and livestock owner’s economic well-being and climate resilience in the face of floods in Nigeria. Eben will collaborate with colleagues across IRC’s Airbel Impact Lab, Economic Recovery and Development (ERD) Technical Unit, Governance Technical Unit, and various country programs to coordinate anticipatory action workstream with disaster risk reduction (DRR) research and innovation. Eben will assess the availability, type, quality and interplay of hydro-meteorological data that could be used as potential triggers for anticipatory action for predictable climatic shocks, and may also liaise with anticipatory action actors from peer organizations and national meteorological agencies.
Lauren Handley, Global Political Economy & Finance, The New School for Social Research, MA, 2024
Lauren holds a BA from Webster University in International Relations and Human Rights (2018). She has studied around the world, in Leiden, NL, and in Accra, GH where she collected original research for her thesis on international second-hand clothing markets. She has previously volunteered as a human rights organizer for Amnesty International, focusing on campaigns for criminal justice reform, particularly in the St. Louis, MO, area. Most recently, before coming to The New School, Lauren worked with Outreach International on a study of the internal motivators of Nicaraguan women participating in and leading local health initiatives (“I left my shyness behind”: Sustainable community-led development and processes of motivation among rural Nicaraguan women, 2022). Lauren is currently pursuing her MA in Global Political Economy at The New School for Social Research. Her research focuses on trade inequality within the garment industry, the nature of sustainable development programming, the financialization of poverty, and capitalist modes of participation within the global development industry.
As the Power Measurement Fellow, Lauren will help advance the IRC Governance Technical Unit’s understanding of the “power within”, which refers to intangible assets like self-esteem and self-confidence that influence how refugees, Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), and marginalized communities gain awareness of the power dynamics at play in their lives and realize their ability to act and improve them. She will do this by identifying ways to measure “power within” and drafting a measurement tool to capture changes in its levels at the individual and community levels. Lauren’s work will include a literature review on the concept of “power within”, including identification of illustrative cases where communities and individuals themselves engaged in processes that resulted in changes in levels of “power within”, as well as a review of approaches used by development and humanitarian actors, community-based organizations, or communities and individuals themselves to influence changes in levels of “power within” and methods to measure these changes.
Marianna Poyares, Economics, Political Philosophy, The New School for Social Research, PhD, 2023
Marianna is currently a Ph.D. candidate at The New School for Social Research. She holds an M.A. in Philosophy from the University of São Paulo, and an M.A. in International Relations from Fundação Getúlio Vargas. She was a Capes/Fulbright Scholar (2016–2019), and a Mellon Foundation GIDEST Fellow (2020–2021). She has worked with the United Nations Development Program, the Rio de Janeiro City Government, and the Brazilian National government in areas such as human rights, education, and public policy. As a doctoral student at The New School, Marianna was a Teaching Fellow (2018–2020), teaching courses in the departments of Philosophy, Global Studies, and at the Zolberg Institute. She has worked as a legal clinic volunteer with the NYC New Sanctuary Coalition, providing assistance to asylum-seekers in the NYC area. Since 2020 she is a researcher at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, focusing on new technologies of migrant governance, bordering technologies, and solidaristic rearticulations of citizenship and belonging. She has published and presented her research on topics such as Critical Theory, Science and Technology Studies, and Critical Migration Studies.
As the Signpost Fellow, Marianna will support the rapid global expansion of Signpost, the world’s first scalable digital community information service that delivers timely, accurate and responsive information to people over the entire arc of a crisis. Her work will include research and writing related to Signpost’s partnership model and growth story, with the goal of showcasing our work and our collaboration model with the private sector, largely technology companies. Marianna will be at the forefront of a push to consolidate learning from Signpost and help bring it to scale, including investigating topical questions of social media’s impact on the world.
Patrick Cleary, Global Political Economy & Finance, The New School for Social Research, MA, 2024
Patrick Cleary is a Master’s student in Finance and Global Political Economy at the New School for Social Research. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Geography and Economics from the Ohio State University. His previous research experience has examined the transformation of indigenous food systems in Latin America, climate change, and world systems theory. Prior to entering graduate school, Patrick worked as a paralegal and translator serving indigent migrants in central Ohio, where he gained a deep understanding of the challenges facing asylum-seekers and the overall architecture of migration in the Americas. His current research focuses on climate finance. In his free time, Patrick captains the New School soccer team and supports his beloved Liverpool FC.
As the Research and Design Fellow, Venezuela Crisis Response (VCR), Patrick will provide research and strategic design support to the VCR team in close collaboration with the Deputy Director of Innovation. The IRC VCR provides support to crisis-affected Venezuelans throughout the arc of their displacement in Latin America and is on the ground in Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Peru. Patrick’s work will focus on conducting research, gathering examples of innovative programs in economic development and financial inclusion, and creating and sharing examples and tools that can inspire new ideas and thinking for the VCR team. He will also work with the Deputy Director of Innovation to create 2–3 pilot programs (focused on financial inclusion) that can be tested with clients in partnership with VCR program teams, specifically in Colombia and Ecuador. A vital element of this work will be helping define learning questions — about the ecosystem and our clients — that will eventually enable VCR to test and implement financial inclusion and livelihoods programming more effectively in the region.
Khadijah Ally, Eduardo Mora Zuniga, Jennie Spector and Sarah Wilson will be continuing their fall 2022 fellowships into spring 2023.
