This month we highlight the research of 2024–25 Fellows whose projects explore accountability as an ongoing process of revision, and how the pursuit of serving and tending to ourselves reveal new insights concerning discrimination, surveillance, and peacekeeping.
Belle Boggs
North Carolina State University
Angela Sun
Washington and Lee University
R. Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Belle Boggs
Project: Big Yellow Bus: The Essential American History of a Disappearing Public Good
Belle Boggs is professor of English at North Carolina State University, where she directed the MFA program in creative writing for six years, and she writes and edits the Frog Trouble Times, a Substack about parenthood and childhood during climate change, with her daughters, Beatrice and Harriet. She is the author of The Gulf: A Novel, The Art of Waiting, and Mattaponi Queen: Stories. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, newyorker.com, The Atlantic, Orion, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Ecotone, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Her next two books are Plant Pets: 27 Cool Houseplants to Grow and Love (with Beatrice Allen) and History’s Outlaws: One Town’s Legacy, from Reconstruction through Black Lives Matter (with Sylvester Allen, Jr.).
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
I found myself in an elementary school car line when my daughter was in kindergarten, wondering what my choice to drive meant—for her, for me, for the community, and for the environment. I thought about my time as a bus rider in rural Virginia, and how getting on the bus was a community experience, very separate from the parented world at home or the world of desks and teachers at school. The chance to be bored, to play games with kids not in my grade or class, to daydream was a real part of my every day. If I took that away from my child, to “optimize” her time, what was that removing? And if we don’t “need” as many buses, because privileged parents are picking their children up and dropping them off, how does that affect kids whose families don’t have that ability? How are these choices reflected in our unequal history of education?
In the course of your research, have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
The more I read, dig into archives, and talk to people about their own school bus memories, the more I realize how intricately the bus is connected to the modern history of American education, and to the best values and greatest weaknesses of our system of free public education for all. There have been so many surprises—I didn’t know, for example, that the very first case to make up Brown v. Board of Education, Briggs v. Elliott, was about equal access to school transportation, which had not been available to Black students in South Carolina. But there are contemporary examples of unequal access, too—in my own NC county, I heard parents tell our county commissioners about being called to leave their hourly jobs early to pick up kids, all because there was no school bus to take them home that day.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
I’m a narrative nonfiction writer, writing for a general audience. My work is about storytelling with purpose, and showing how everyday, individual choices impact our present-day communities but are also driven by larger, historical contexts, like the American history of racism and segregation. I’m interested in writing about collectivism and the public good in a time when these values are threatened, and to show how one small (or big and yellow) lens can offer a way of understanding our country both at its best and at its worst. As a prose writer and former public school teacher, I’m also interested in gritty educational spaces. I’m drawn to that particular, evocative school bus space—the privacy of a kid’s first independent travel, the noise, the sneakers-and-lunchbox smell of it all.
Angela Sun
Project: The Ethics of Reporting Wrongdoing
Angela Sun is assistant professor of philosophy at Washington and Lee University. She received her PhD in philosophy from the University of Michigan in 2022 and her BA in philosophy and architecture from Wellesley College in 2017. Her research is primarily in ethics, social philosophy, philosophy of action, and aesthetics. While in residence at the National Humanities Center, Sun will be writing a series of papers concerning the ethics of reporting wrongdoing under conditions of injustice. Her work will touch on moral issues surrounding police informants, mandatory reporting policies, and whistleblowing.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
My project uses philosophical tools to examine how powerful institutions compel civilians to police one another, sometimes nefariously (e.g., when law enforcement incentivizes vulnerable informants to provide false testimony against their peers) and sometimes in ways that are well-intentioned but still problematic (e.g., when “mandatory reporters” are required to report incidents of sexual violence to university officials). I began researching this topic because I think it’s morally and politically important but really vexing. On one hand, I feel strongly that snitching is bad, but on the other, I know that supporting victims of wrongdoing sometimes requires going to the authorities for help. I still don’t know how to reconcile these conflicting intuitions, but I hope I find some answers while I’m at the NHC!
In the course of your research, have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
I have been genuinely surprised by how messed up informant law is. I’ve been reading and rereading Alexandra Natapoff’s eye-opening book Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice, and have been shocked to learn about the prevalence of informant testimony in false convictions and the utter lack of accountability in informant use. One of the papers I’ll be writing over the course of my fellowship is on the ethics of snitching. I hope that my examination of snitching through a moral lens complements Natapoff’s historical and legal analysis.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
Political philosophy often takes as a starting point highly idealized, optimal social structures and asks what our rights and duties are in this kind of utopian society. But there is another political philosophical tradition (led by thinkers such as Charles W. Mills) that denies that normative debates can take place under the assumption of perfect institutions. This is known as the debate between ideal and non-ideal theory. I hope that my project prompts further thinking on how important it is to keep our real political institutions in mind when doing political philosophy.
R. Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada
Project: Intersectional Justice Denied: Warring Masculinity, Violence, and Peacemaking in Post-Accords El Salvador
R. Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada is assistant professor of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist specializing in intersectional justice and violence, gender relations, and racialization in Latin America, with a focus on El Salvador. She received her PhD in social anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. Through her work on the gendered dynamics of grassroots peacemaking, Velásquez Estrada examines the central paradox of male gang members who simultaneously position themselves as purveyors of violence and peacemakers. Using intersectionality as an analytical lens, her work specifically traces how women relatives of male gang members engage in a complex politics of solidarity with their relatives’ peacemaking efforts and explores the layered politics of women’s demands for intersectional justice to transition Salvadoran society from conflict to peace.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
Since childhood, I’ve been passionate about transitioning societies from conflict to peace. I grew up in El Salvador, witnessing war and domestic violence. Like many Salvadorans, I was overjoyed that the 1992 Peace Accords ended 12 years of war. But the accords delivered a violent peace with high rates of homicide and femicide. The state held gangs responsible and implemented punitive measures against and negotiated a truce with them, without success. Today, El Salvador touts near-zero daily homicides and the incarceration of over 76,000 alleged gang members. But femicides persist. This peace clashes with the reality of gendered and state violence. My book explores a paradox: men who are perpetrators of violence and peacemakers. How do women support and challenge their gang relatives’ inadvertent reproduction of the state’s peacemaking?
In the course of your research, have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
During my fieldwork in El Salvador, I was surprised to learn that for women relatives of male gang members, attaining peace meant not only challenging the state’s racialized violence against their relatives but also addressing gendered violence and economic inequality. Women critiqued their relatives’ peacemaking efforts as una paz masculinista (masculinist peace). Masculinist peace assumes the absence of violence among conflicting groups of men, while women continue grappling with gendered violence and exacerbated poverty due to neoliberal economic policies. Women demanded a multi-faceted justice praxis in bottom-up and top-down peacemaking efforts to attain peace for all.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
Scholars working within the decolonial feminisms and abolitionist traditions have rarely linked the study of abolition of the carceral state with a gender-just approach to peacemaking. My work with Salvadoran women’s complex practice of solidarity and demands for intersectional justice in peacemaking practices asks us to acknowledge their interconnectedness. My work opens new lines of inquiry about how a decolonial feminist lens, or an abolitionist framework, may help us grapple with the extent to which gendered and racialized peacemaking practices and notions of peace persist throughout our lives. Or will the abolitionist framework match that of decolonial feminism, contributing to the theoretical debate and practical alternatives for peacemaking initiatives that may successfully reduce violence and poverty in post-war societies?