Recognizing Our 2025 Grant Recipients

The Society for the Anthropology of Work (SAW) is pleased to recognize five early-career scholars, whose research the section is supporting in 2025 with small research grants. These grants are open to current graduate students and post-PhD scholars who do not hold a tenure-track faculty position, with priority given to SAW members. A call for proposals is issued each spring.

SAW Research Grants

Heba Ghannam is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at American University, where she teaches courses in Arab World studies and feminist research methodologies. Her dissertation, “Digital Fugitive Domesticities: The Egyptian Digital Housewife, Gendered Extraction, and Evasion in the Age of Big Data,” is a digital ethnography of Egyptian women content creators who monetize domestic care routines on platforms like YouTube. The project explores gendered labor relations in the digital platform economy and the tactical strategies women use to survive amid economic crisis, algorithmic governance, and moral policing. The grant will partially support Ghannam during the writing phase of her dissertation.

Avdhesh Kumar is an independent researcher in Delhi, India, having completed his PhD at Jawaharlal Nehru University in February 2025. His doctoral research focused on the dynamics of selfhood, surveillance, and resistance within the domestic BPO industry in Delhi, particularly exploring how digital technologies and surveillance systems influence workers’ sense of identity and agency within call centers. The grant will support his ongoing fieldwork to further understand the changing patterns of surveillance, the autonomy of workers, and how modern workers become colonial subjects with new surveillance technologies acting as colonial masters. The current phase of research focuses on the food delivery apps Zomato and Blinkit.

Matlhabeli Molaoli is a PhD student in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, who is also pursuing a certificate in African and African American Studies. Her dissertation project studies the experience of chronic unemployment for Basotho women with a postsecondary education. Across her work, Molaoli asks: how is unemployment difficult? How do the unemployed improvise their lives and theorize about them? The grant supported three months of preliminary fieldwork in Lesotho.

Rohan Sengupta is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at New York University. His research chronicles the lives, labor, and sentiments of an emerging community of political publicists in India to ask how these spaces shed light on and complicate the broader relationship between digital labor, media production, ethics, and political life in contemporary liberal democracies. The grant supported the final phase of his long-term fieldwork in West Bengal, India.

SAW Engaged Research Grant

Morganne Blais-McPherson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Simon Fraser University. She is collaborating with the Italian labor union SUDD Cobas on a research project entitled “Building Union Infrastructure for Native and Migrant Women: A Feminist Experiment in Industrial Labor Organizing.” The grant will help create a space designed by and for Pakistani and Italian women, where participants can self-organize activities such as physical exercise, child care, language lessons, and sewing workshops. This space will also serve as a research site for investigating the barriers to belonging faced by Pakistani wives of male union members—many of whom arrive in Italy through family reunification—as well as the potentially transformative effects of such a space on participants’ sense of belonging, both to Italy and to the union’s comunità di lotta (community of struggle).

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