Tali Gires - Human Rights and NGOs
While also winning the Florence Palmer Prize in Political Science in 2014 for her work on NGOs, Tali wrote her ISF thesis on constructions of gender relations among different ethnicities living in rural communities in the San Martin region of Peru in order to understand how gender and ethnicity play a role in survival strategies for these communities and how gender and ethnic constructions relate to the development of economic and political structures. Based on fieldwork conducted in this region, she analyzed the ways in which these mestizo and indigenous communities have organized themselves economically and politically, and invetigate whether or not women have access to these structures. In particular Tali studied which groups have the power to determine legitimate forms of work and legitimate knowledge production. She paid attention to the suppression of groups devalued as workers and unable to fully participate in social, economic and political structures. In concluding, she called attention to knowledge sharing, where historical universalized categories are used in partnership with local thought, as a potential tool to deconstruct discriminatory structural hierarchies that have been created.
After graduation, Tali traveled to Central and South America for an undecided period of time. She writes: nothing like a one-way ticket to ignite that post-grad passion!. She looks forward to creating adventures in new places and connecting with both herself as well as people that she meets in the communities that she will visit. She attributes her ability to work abroad to the skill set she acquired through fieldwork experience in Peru that was a result of generous funds from the Center for Race and Gender, the Global Poverty and Practice Fellowship, and with the support of the ISF major. Tali writes: ISF gave me the canvas to create and stemming from this, the ability to immerse myself in a new culture and consensually conduct interviews and fieldwork in the Northeast Amazon region of Peru which has made me confident in my travels and ability to study and work in Latin America. After my travels, I look forward to furthering a career in the realm of immigrant rights and Mexican-American border relations and am toying with the idea of law school.
