Travelling Fellowships
Dr Barbara Bodenhorn: Communities of knowledge: sciences and other expertises
For the past several years, Barbara Bodenhorn has been working across the boundaries of her on-going fieldwork in Mexico and Alaska. She is currently beginning a third season bringing together young people from the minimalist eco-systems of the Arctic and the mega biodiverse regions of Oaxaca and Michoacan to work with scientists, elders and others in order to learn more about their own environment as well as about global economic and environmental processes. Her own research emerges from these encounters; a paper entitled Meeting Minds; Encountering Worlds: sciences and other expertises on the North Slope is in press, as part of Monica Konrad's edited collection: Collaborators within Collaboration.
Dr Liz Harper: The ecology of New Zealand Brachiopods
Liz visited New Zealand to work at the Portobello Marine Laboratory (University of Otago) and did field work around the Otago Peninsula and on the west coast in Doubtful Sound. The New Zealand fauna is unusual because of the diverse and easily accessible communities of brachiopods. Modern brachiopods are unfamiliar even to most zoologists, as they tend to live in either very deep or cold waters. However for much of the last 500 million years shelly invertebrates have been important members of shallow sea floor communities. Our lack of familiarity with them today has made many aspects of understanding their fossil record difficult. Liz’s work on growth and shell repair rates, predator-prey relationships and population structures aims to shed light on these ancient communities.
Dr Marianne Elias: Interspecific Interactions and Evolution of Mutualistic Mimicry in Butterflies
Why are there so many species on Earth, and why are they so concentrated into a small number of "hotspots", such as the upper Amazon and the Andean foothills?
It is classically assumed that, within a given trophic level, the composition of local species assemblages is governed by competition: only species that use different sets of resources can co-exist. However, the effects of positive interactions among potential competitors, although well-known in a number of organisms, have largely been overlooked. Positive interactions might counteract competition by allowing more species to co-exist in spite of the fact that they use the same limiting resources. The most documented case of mutually beneficial interactions among competitors is Müllerian mimicry in butterflies, where distasteful species have converged in their coloured wing patterns to advertise their toxicity to predators. Species with similar wing patterns benefit from the presence of one another, because co-existence increases the efficiency of the warning signal.
Marianne will investigate the hypothesis that composition of mimetic butterfly communities is governed principally by mutualistic interactions by sampling ten communities of an Amazonian diversity hotspot, and testing whether species sharing similar pattern co-occur more often than expected at random. She will further explore the subtle interplay between mutualism and competition by examining the use of larval host plants, a key resource, among species sharing similar wing patterns.
Dr Madeleine Reeves: Black Work, Green Money: navigating the bounds of legal labour in a Moscow migrant community
Madeleine Reeves’ project develops from her previous interest in the ethnography of the state. This project, which will involve fieldwork in and between southern Kyrgyzstan and Moscow, is a study of the history and current functioning of the system of internal residence registration used for regulating movement within the Soviet Union, which lives on, in different ways, in several post-Soviet states including Russia. It is the contemporary navigation of this system by labour migrants from Kyrgyzstan in Moscow that she plans to focus ethnographically, using this as a way of exploring the documentary production of migrant “illegality”, the lived experience of being “before the law”, and the complex blurring of state and society in interactions between low-ranking state officials and those whose movement they nominally regulate.
