2026 Fellows

Hana Manjusak

Hana Manjusak is a PhD candidate at the School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) and a graduate student associate at the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREES). Her research examines the sociopolitical and environmental impacts of war and its afterlives through a case study of landmine clearance in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It connects mine action to environmental peacebuilding, with implications for policy and practice. Conceptually, she brings political ecology, political geography, and science and technology studies into conversation through questions of meaning, power, and temporality.

Project Description: “Limits of Peace: Landmines, Human Rights, and Environmental Governance in Bosnia and Herzegovina” examines how institutional designs, legacies of war, and ecological conditions shape mine action in post-conflict settings. Through a case study of mine clearance in a landscape shaped by institutional fragmentation and environmental variability, mine action authorities must navigate overlapping mandates, cross-border coordination, and complex terrain conditions. These challenges point to dynamics that cannot be explained through technical or financial limitations alone; instead, they underscore how mine clearance is embedded within broader sociopolitical and environmental processes, making it a space where the afterlives of war unfold. This project frames mine action as a site where environmental governance and peacebuilding intersect in practice. It seeks to advance adaptive and context-sensitive approaches to mine clearance and offer insights for rethinking how environmental considerations are incorporated into postwar recovery.

Cielo J. Barragán

Cielo J. Barragán is currently a first-year PhD student in Romance Languages & Literatures at the University of Michigan. She was born and partially raised in Cotija de la Paz, Michoacán, Mexico, and migrated to the United States in 2010, during a period of escalating violence in Mexico. She continued her education in California’s Central Valley, where she earned her B.A. and M.A. at California State University, Fresno. Maintaining close ties to her hometown, she approaches migration not as a rupture, but as an ongoing condition that binds her to those who remain. Her research is driven by a commitment to understanding how violence and power intertwine in Mexico, particularly in relation to the institutional failures that force communities to live under conditions of fear, to migrate, or to take matters into their own hands by doing the work the state refuses to do.

Project Description: “Rancho Izaguirre: Women’s Search Collectives and the Making of Human Rights in Jalisco, Mexico” examines how women-led search collectives produce human rights knowledge through the recovery and circulation of material evidence from sites of disappearance and femicide. Focusing on Rancho Izaguirre in Teuchitlán, Jalisco, the project analyzes how mothers, sisters, and daughters of the disappeared transform human remains, clothing, personal belongings, testimonies, and digital documentation into archives of evidence when state institutions fail to investigate or account for the disappeared. Rather than approaching disappearance and femicide as isolated crimes, the project understands them as historically produced regimes of disposability. Through historical research, analysis of grassroots archives, and engagement with literary and testimonial texts, the project argues that these collectives function as de facto human rights institutions, generating the evidentiary and narrative foundations of the right to truth.

Keren Marín-González

Keren Marín-González is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology whose research engages the Anthropology of Time, the Anthropology of Liberalism, and Critical Peasant Studies.

Project Description: Her project, "Contested Infrastructures: Materializing the Right to Peace in Sierra de la Macarena" investigates the extent to which the prioritization of the right to peace justifies the restriction of other fundamental rights within Colombian governance. By examining the ruptures, continuities, and frictions between liberal peace projects and human rights legislation over time, the project explores how local actors embrace, mobilize, or contest these liberal values amid prolonged armed conflict and ongoing counterinsurgency and counternarcotics efforts. Central to this inquiry are infrastructures — such as roads, bridges, and schools — which, in contexts of precarity and marginalization, are intertwined with promises of repair, progress, and development, but also exist as contested sites where peace and war strategies are superimposed: built, destroyed, suspended, or left to decay. Their material transformations thus reflect the paradoxes of the right to peace and of human rights frameworks in scenarios of ongoing armed conflict. Bridging the anthropology of liberalism with peace and human rights research, this study expands upon existing scholarship on the tensions inherent in human rights frameworks and illuminates the creative ways in which communities — historically subjected to political violence and restricted access to rights — interrogate liberal logics, discourses, and values.

Sena Kojah

Sena Kojah is a PhD candidate at the School of Information, where she is a sociotechnical researcher in human-computer interaction and social computing. Her research explores the intersections between platform governance, generative artificial intelligence, marginality, and human rights. She theorizes the infrastructural needs of people experiencing high-stakes events in the Global South and develops human-centered frameworks for designing more equitable platforms and platform governance systems. She holds a master’s degree in mass communication from the University of Jos. 

Her research has been published in top human-computer interaction and social computing venues, including ACM CHI, ACM GROUP, and ACM CSCW, where her work was recognized in 2025 for advancing equitable social computing. As a journalist, Sena has worked at news organisations including Tin City 104.3FM and Sahara Reporters, among others. Her Op-eds on press freedom and democracy in West Africa have been published by the Center for International Journalist Assistance (CIMA) and the International Journalist Network (IJNet). Sena has been a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy.

For the Robert J. Donia Fellowship, Sena will explore the experiences of ethnic minorities in Nigeria with GenAI content.

Project description: The difference between life and death for marginalized ethnic minorities in Nigeria who use social media to document human rights abuses against them by state actors or majority groups is often a post on social media. Her prior research shows that ethnic minorities in Nigeria who are unable to access traditional forms of archives, media, and record-keeping due to systemic marginalization rely on social media to document the aftermath of deadly attacks against their rural communities, their living conditions in Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps, seek external protection, and amplify their voices. During the fellowship, she will extend this understudied area to examine how community archiving practices are changing among ethnic minorities in Nigeria as more social media users adopt GenAI tools to create content.