Biography
Lorna Hadlock is a PhD candidate and anthropologist in the department of Comparative Human Development. Her research focuses on indigenous Amazonian and Andean healing traditions and interactions between humans and non-humans as well as cross-cultural encounters. She is specifically interested in language use in those contexts. Through examining language use in healing and cross-cultural and cross-species contexts, her research contributes to theoretical discussions about both the agency of non-human actors and how language and culture influence experience, especially perception of altered states of consciousness and healing/illness. She is currently conducting ethnographic field research in Peru as a Fulbright Hays DDRA Fellow. She has also been the recipient of other awards including multiple FLAS Fellowships and research funding from the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Chicago.
Dissertation: Called by the Plants: The multicultural, mutinatural world of humans and teacher plants in the Peruvian Amazon
In the Amazon jungle near Iquitos, Peru there is a tree called Noya Rao. Noya Rao means “flying (plant) medicine” in Shipibo, an indigenous Amazonian language, and indeed Noya Rao is believed by many Shipibo people to possess the remarkable ability to confer the power of flight onto humans who undertake to learn from her.1 Decades ago, at a time when many indigenous Shipibo believed she was extinct or merely mythical, a Shipibo master healer began a ritual practice referred to as a pipe “diet” with a pipe made from her wood. He ingested the smoke and prayed to her until she appeared to him and revealed her living location far from the Shipibo homelands of Ucayali. Today, the healer’s son-in-law runs an ayahuasca retreat center on the land where Noya Rao grows. Ayahuasca2 is a hallucinogenic brew used traditionally by Amazonian indigenous peoples and increasingly by foreign tourists who attend ceremonies at retreat centers focused on spiritual, physical, and mental healing. In the midst of the broader context of ayahuasca-based spiritual tourism in the area, some Westerners feel called to this corner of the world not by the lures of ayahuasca but by Noya Rao and the other teacher plants in her pantheon. They travel to the Amazon to fast and ingest an extract of Noya Rao, learn Shipibo songs to sing to her in ayahuasca ceremonies, and walk to her daily to sit at the base of her trunk and pray. Through this process (known as a plant diet, dieta in Spanish, or sama in Shipibo), they begin to communicate with her and cultivate metaphorical seedlings of Noya Rao inside their bodies, minds, and souls. My dissertation seeks to illuminate why Westerners are called to her and what world-making effect this pilgrimage has by examining Noya Rao and other teacher plants as agentic beings who communicate with and shape the humans in their world. Furthermore, this project explores this global impact and import of Amazonian plant diet pilgrimages as the global plant diet community grows and Westerners who learn this practice of dieting plants through Shipibo healers then go home to apply Shipibo dieting practices to plants in the U.S. or Europe. Through telling the stories of both Shipibo and Western dieters collected through 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork at both the center where Noya Rao grows and in Shipibo communities in the Shipibo homelands, I explore the teachings and behavior of teacher plants such as Noya Rao and others in her pantheon such as Bobinsana, Marusa, Chullachaqui, and Chiric Sanango. What can these Amazonian plants teach us about human social relations, bodies and healing, language, and the relationship between personal and political trauma? I investigate each of these areas to explain how: (1) plants and humans create new kinds of shared social worlds which challenge and contribute to ongoing debates about the relationship between nature and culture, (2) humans become hybrid human-plant bodies through digestive routines designed to remove humanity and inject plant essence, (3) new forms of human language and communication emerge via the intervention of the plants and the ritual sharing of Shipibo healing songs among Western and Shipibo dieters, and (4) plants guide healing on the individual but also structural and societal levels. The goal of this project is to provide a portrait of these teacher plants through the lens of human perspectives and interpretations that come with all of the expected human baggage - language, culture, individual experience. Just as a portrait of these plants will materialize, so too will insights about how culture, language, and individual experience shape how humans understand the plants and their messages.
A Welcoming City? The Reception of Asylum-Seekers in Chicago
Over 20,000 mostly Venezuelan asylum-seekers have arrived in Chicago since August 2021 when Texas Governor Greg Abbott sent the first bus of asylum-seekers to the city as part of a political ploy to test the stated openness of migrant-friendly Democratic legislatures. In response, the City of Chicago bolstered its immigrant integration policies by vastly expanding asylum-seekers’ access to the welfare state, including by developing a brand-new shelter system to house new arrivals, which is separate from the network of existing homeless shelters and cannot be accessed by unhoused Chicagoans. This study is an urban ethnography of the City of Chicago that examines the experiences of asylum-seekers, as well as how the state, civil society, and residents have responded to new arrivals. Actions have ranged from providing housing, welfare benefits, and volunteer aid to the migrants, to organizing protests and appealing to the city to shut down shelters. Through observations in town hall meetings, neighborhood events, volunteer initiatives, police stations, and migrant spaces, as well as interviews with local residents of neighborhoods where migrant shelters have been opened, volunteers, and migrants themselves, we seek answers to the following research questions: (1) How do Chicagoans perceive and respond to the arrival of asylum seekers and city funded facilities to house them in their neighborhoods? (2) What role do existing axes of inequality–race, class, and gender— play in shaping grassroots responses to new arrivals, ranging from conflict to solidarity? (3) How are Venezuelan asylum seekers adapting to life Chicago?
Biography
Chiara Galli is Assistant Professor of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California Los Angeles in 2020 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell from 2020 to 2022. She studies Latin American migration to the US, focusing in particular on the experiences of children and asylum-seekers, on how immigration policies shape migrants’ lives, and on the role of non-profits and volunteers in managing migration. She is the author of the book, Precarious Protections: Unaccompanied Minors Seeking Asylum in the United States (University of California Press. 2023), an ethnographic study that chronicles the experiences and perspectives of Central American unaccompanied minors and their immigration attorneys as they pursue applications for refugee status in the US asylum process. Currently she is working on two studies. First, with the support of the American Bar Foundation’s Access to Justice Scholars Program and in collaboration with Dr. Tatiana Padilla (Boston University), she is studying access to legal representation and determinants of case outcomes for unaccompanied minors in the U.S. immigration court using a large administrative dataset. Second, with a team of research assistants, she is conducting an ethnographic study on the reception of asylum-seekers in Chicago, with funding from the Center for International Social Science Research.
2024- 25 Pilot-testing a cross-cultural field-friendly infant-directed speech preference paradigm
Tsimane infants, growing up in a small-scale subsistence society in lowlands Bolivia, encounter relatively little talk directed to them from adults. Instead, they encounter higher amounts of talk directed to them from other children. In this project, we ask how this set of early experiences shapes Tsimane children's attention to different kinds of language in their environment. Specifically, we will use an experimental paradigm ("preferential looking") to examine whether and when Tsimane infants prefer infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS) that is either produced by children or by adults. This classic experimental paradigm needs major adaptations and piloting before it is ready to be implemented with Tsimane participants, or any other rural field site. The goals of the project are therefore to develop and test an appropriate method for immediate use with Tsimane infants. The results of this project will add to our knowledge about the influence of early language exposure on infants' perceptual preferences and attention to language beyond the English-speaking North American populations typically studied. The primary product of this project will be a freely available and thoroughly documented set-up for adapting this paradigm in a field-friendly, low-cost, and cross-cultural experimental manner.
2023-24: Implementing a cross-cultural field-friendly Infant-Directed-Speech Preference study
Biography
Dr. Marisa Casillas is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. Trained in linguistics and psychology, she is interested in exploring how cognitive and social processes shape the ways in which we learn, perceive, and produce language. She uses a combination of experimental- and observation-based methods to comparatively investigate communication and language in both urban and rural contexts, with both children in and adults. Dr. Casillas and her lab—the Chatter Lab at the University of Chicago—work on these topics in populations around the globe. In the last few years, their work has taken place in: urban and suburban North American communities, urban and suburban communities in the Netherlands, a rural Tseltal Mayan community in Chiapas, Mexico, and in a rural island community in Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea. More information about current projects in her research group can be found at: https://chatterlab.uchicago.edu. This work has been collaboratively developed by Drs. Camila Scaff (University of Zurich), Ruthe Foushee (New School for Social Science Research), and Marisa Casillas (University of Chicago).