Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship Recipient!
Benjamin Bernard-Herman (Anthropology) named one of twenty fellows
NJ—The Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation has named 20 outstanding PhD candidates as this year’s Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellows. The Doctoral work supported by this Fellowship demonstrates moral or ethical or theological/religious relevance with nuance, depth, and intellectual sophistication.
Started in 1981, the Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship has funded over 1,400 Fellows and is the nation’s largest and most prestigious award for PhD candidates in the humanities and social sciences addressing questions of religion, ethics, morals, or values.
This year’s Fellows are completing dissertations with such rigorous questions as:
• How can marginalized women ethically and creatively transform traditions that have historically limited their visibility, authority, and belonging?
• How do practices of ascetic detachment shape ethical relationships, boundaries, and forms of belonging within and beyond religious communities?
• Can science ever be truly apolitical, or are its claims to neutrality always shaped by underlying political and ethical commitments?
• To what extent should citizenship be understood as a fixed legal status versus a flexible, lived practice shaped by social relationships and institutions?
• Can ethical values remain authentic forms of life when they must be translated into—and potentially distorted by—market systems of consumption?
• Who gets to define a child’s best interest, and how have marginalized caregivers reshaped that standard through their struggles for recognition and rights?
Mentored by Prof. Molly Doane, Bernard-Herman's dissertation is entitled "Beyond the Ethics of Ethical Consumption: Small-scale Biodynamic Farmers and the Paradoxes of Moral Markets in Wisconsin’s Driftless Region Description: When ethics becomes a marketing label, farmers must decide whether to sell their values—or redefine them."