Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellowship 
Program for Academic Diversity

Past Fellows

Todd Honma, 2011-12 DOWNLOAD CV

• Ph.D., American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California
• M.L.I.S., Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles
• M.A., Asian American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles
• B.A., Molecular Cell Biology and Japanese, University of California, Berkeley

As a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Honma will be conducting research in the area of race, aesthetics, and tattooing in Southern California. In particular, he will be looking at how the development of tattoo aesthetics have been coded through the specific lenses of race, class, gender, sexuality, and criminality in the Los Angeles region.

Dr. Honma’s work is concerned with issues of diversity by examining how marginalized populations express themselves through the modification of the body, how this functions as a form of both individual and collective expression within particular constraints based on race, class, gender and sexuality.

Dr. Honma’s dissertation, “Cartographies of Skin: Asian American Adornment and the Aesthetics of Race,” examines the construction and performance of tattooed bodies as sites of circulating materialities: where art, labor, culture, and ideology converge to color our understanding of race and the politics of visuality. By analyzing a series of case studies of transnational Asian and Asian American tattoo practices in California, he locates skin as the site of identity, difference, and possibility and how this relates to racial formation and local and global creative practices.

Dr. Honma is extremely grateful to be awarded the UCSD Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellowship and is thrilled to be working with Professor Nayan Shah in the History Department. He is excited to be joining the intellectual community at UCSD and looking forward to a fun and productive year ahead.

Anna L. Anderson-Lazo, 2010-12 DOWNLOAD CV

• Ph.D., Anthropology University of California, Santa Cruz
• M.A., Anthropology University of California, Santa Cruz
• B.A., Honors, Anthropology Stanford University

The research that Dr. Anderson-Lazo will perform during the fellowship aims to advance social science and broader understandings of community organizing for social change, history-telling as political practice, and participatory ethnography by collaborating with community organizations focused on improving the food system in underserved communities of Southern San Diego. In the year to come, Dr. Anderson-Lazo will continue working with community-based co-researchers and university students to collect localized histories and create interactive maps related to food and economic security, political empowerment, and development as they pertain to community health and health disparities. In addition to individual and collaborative publications, these stories will be featured in the People's Produce Project "Good Food Legacies" Storytelling Festival (Summer 2011 & 2012) and on the “Foodways and Foodscapes” interactive site, where residents’ analyses of community-specific health challenges will connect with “public domain” policy-related data.

This research makes an intellectual contribution to the ongoing study of diversity by employing participatory research methods that emphasize building collaborative relationships among partners in the university and in multi-ethnic as well as socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods of San Diego to address health disparities related to the food system. By conducting research in collaboration with and in support of organically diverse community-based efforts such as the People's Produce Project and the One in Ten Healthy Food Coalition, this project can contribute to research about diversity as it relates to urban community development, public health and neighborhood resource allocation, as well as foster relationships with residents, organizations and potential students in some of the communities least represented at the university.

Dr. Anderson-Lazo’s dissertation was based on ethnographic fieldwork in Guatemala during the 1996 to 1998 Peace Process that ended the civil war between the government and the revolutionary army. Over the course of two years, Dr. Anderson-Lazo lived among the afro-indigenous Garifuna people and worked alongside community organizers, peace and development workers, and political storytellers. The written text describes how the Garifuna organizers and storytellers used their collaborations in the context of the negotiations of the Peace Process to reclaim their history and political rights after surviving 36 years of political repression and ethnic genocide.

Resources