Meet the IRC-Zolberg Fellows for Summer 2019
Through the Zolberg-IRC Fellows Program, supported by the Arnhold Foundation, master’s and doctoral students at The New School have the opportunity to contribute to design and research projects at the IRC. They lead and contribute to projects at IRC headquarters and in the field. Learn more about the fellowship here.
Anjali Bhalodia, MFA Transdisciplinary Design, Parsons School of Design
Anjali is a design educator, researcher, and strategist. She is passionate about bringing human-centered approaches to organizational and community-driven projects and processes. Anjali is currently pursuing an MFA in Transdisciplinary design at Parsons. While at IRC, Anjali will help build capacity for human-centered design across IRC’s educational product portfolio.
David Baum, MFA Transdisciplinary Design, Parsons School of Design,
David is a design researcher and strategist who is currently pursuing his MFA in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons, The New School for Design. At Parsons, he is currently pursuing research on how to design more inclusive ecosystems of healthcare for the LGBTQ+ community. Most recently he was a behavioral design fellow at Memorial Sloane Kettering where he worked in the Design & Innovation team to better integrate behavioral science into designers’ workflows. Prior to this, he worked in Corporate Social Responsibility consulting for three years working with a range of Fortune 500 clients and startups to craft award-winning CSR plans. David has lived and worked in Buenos Aires, San Francisco, Dublin and various places internationally throughout his career. He holds a B.S. in Environmental Economics & Policy from Michigan State University graduating in 2013 with honors. While at the IRC, he will be working on creating user-centric solutions to address the key constraints that keep countries from resettling more refugees.
Douglas De Toledo Piza, PhD Sociology, New School for Social Research
Douglas de Toledo Piza holds an MA in Sociology, and a BA in International Relations, both at the University of São Paulo. His fields of interest are Migration and Mobility, Economic Sociology, Political Economy, and Anthropology of the State. Douglas’s research interests include Chinese migration, borderlands, special economic zones, markets, and informality. His current research focuses on the conditions for Chinese migrants’ mobility in a commercial circuit between Ciudad del Este, a Paraguayan city in a tri-border area, and São Paulo, Brazil. In order to understand this issue, his doctoral research addresses the political economy of illegalisms at the intersections of borders, markets, and migration. Douglas will be working on Signpost, a humanitarian information and communications project that seeks to overcome common obstacles to traditional information services in order to better serve the complex needs of people in crisis. He will help articulate the project’s evidence base and shape further iteration of the project design.
Evan Newirth, MA Psychology, New School for Social Research
Evan is a 32-year-old Psychology Master’s student based in New York City. Evan runs a small tutoring business that specializes in executive function remediation, and has a history working in documentary filmmaking and creative writing. At the IRC, Evan will be working on the recently developed Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Framework to help foster programming to achieve mental health and psychosocial wellbeing outcomes for crisis-affected populations
Johanna Case, MA Media Studies, New School for Social Research
Johanna is currently studying Documentary Film making. She also works as a photographer, an interdisciplinary designer and a musician. She is particularly interested in working on arts-centric ways to address anti-immigrant/refugee sentiment in the US. and interrogating the western liberal model of documentary and humanitarianism. Johanna got her BA from the New School, where she studied photography, oral history, and Arabic. She was also a part of the Riggio honors program for writing and Democracy. In 2016 she was the primary photographer and co-interviewer for ‘Transilient’ a Trans-centric photojournalism project that drove 10,000 miles across the US hi-lighting Trans and gender non-conforming folks. More recently, she is the creator of ‘Cooking a Portrait’ a web series exploration of relationship, identity, and storytelling through the preparation of a meal. Johanna will be working with the IRC’s Amman-based Middle East Research and Development Hub, creating profiles of community innovators working with the Mahali Lab.
Saba Aregai, MA Theories of Urban Practice, Parsons School of Design
Saba is currently in the Theories of Urban Practice MA program at Parsons. She has worked on digital communications and marketing teams as a content creator for both municipalities and organizations that advocate for urban issues and city rights. With a passion for storytelling and community engagement via digital platforms, she hopes to continue strengthening her technical and research skills in order to reach, engage, and spark conversations with a wider digital audience around topics such as displacement, development, mental health, and much more. Saba will be working with the IRC’s Amman-based Middle East Research and Development Hub, focusing on strengthening information flows, through channels that include social media, to aid displaced people’s decision-making and make their circumstances easier to manage.
Amanda Porter, Katja Starc-Card, and Kendall A Pfeffer joined as IRC-Zolberg Fellows in early 2018 and spring of 2019. They are continuing their fellowships into Summer 2019.
