Dissertation Fellows Share Work with Community

By: Ella Brady, Jessica Huang, Safira Schiowitz

The Academy’s three annual Dissertation Fellows—Sherard Harrington, Joud Alkorani and Katherine Morales—shared their life experiences and wisdom with Academy students during Assembly on March 26.

Each scholar gave a separate talk discussing how their experiences influenced their cultural identities and academic pursuits, and all emphasized the importance of including diverse perspectives in their understandings of the world.

Sherard Harrington

Sherard Harrington is completing his doctorate in English Literature at the University of New Hampshire. Harrington’s dissertation, “Othered Ambitions: The Conflation of Villainy, Non-Heterosexuality, and Race in Popular Culture,” focuses on the vilification of sexual orientation and race in 20th-century American media.

Harrington’s life leading up to college and graduate school greatly influenced the focus of his dissertation. His parents were in the Navy, and he grew up traveling the world with them.

“The longest I had lived anywhere was four years and that was for [undergraduate school],” Harrington said. “I’ve been up and down the East coast, West coast, three years in Hawaii, three years in Japan.”

Harrington’s frequent travels in his childhood shaped his perception of the world. “I feel as though my life of doing exactly that has led me to focusing on my dissertation,” he said. “It’s very intersectional.”

Additionally, Harrington’s mother immigrated to the United States from Jamaica. “Kids here made fun of her accent,” Harrington said at the Assembly. “So when I came along, it was imperative that I mastered the English language to ensure my success in this new country.”

Harrington’s mother never taught him Patois for fear of it influencing his English accent. “Colonialism takes many forms and bullying can have generational effects,” he said. Harrington expressed regret for never having learned the language of his heritage, since many of the family members on his mother’s side spoke Patois. Harrington often felt like an outsider— similar to the very characters he examines in his dissertation.

Of his dissertation, Harrington said, “It gets complicated because there’s this whole othering that happens with villains. So it’s not only that they’re coded ‘gay,’ but they’re also often coded as foreign.”

“Ursula [from The Little Mermaid] is literally based off of a drag queen. That the drag queen’s name is Divine,” Harrington said. “If you look at Aladdin, you have Jafar, who is highly feminine, not really interested in Jasmine except for marriage and for power.”

Harrington also made note of racial implications and intersectionality in The Lion King. “You have to create the villain very quickly and easily so that children can recognize them. And how do you know which lion is going to be the villain? Well, of course it’s the darkest lion with a scar on its face,” he said.

It is Harrington’s hope that audiences separate different identities while also keeping intersectionality in mind—if a villain is gay, to separate their sexuality from their villainy.

Despite this, he acknowledged that separation may be difficult for people. “It requires thought. I refer to this as emotional labor. You have to actually stop and think about it for a minute and that can feel tiring or exhausting,” he said.

Harrington also referred to the anti-Asian violence in Atlanta. “There are some people who say that this person murdered these Asian-Americans because they were Asian-American and some people say this person murdered these women because they were women, but it’s really a complex mixture of the two,” Harrington said. “We need to do the work to see where those boundaries are and work to prevent this kind of thing from happening.”

Harrington hopes that by placing difficult topics like the vilification of non-heterosexuals in the context of pop culture, it will allow people to “feel like the chair’s being pulled from underneath them in a safe environment.” He also noted that conducting research to complete his dissertation has left him feeling “irrevocably changed.”

Harrington aims to complete his doctorate towards the end of April. “This summer what I’m hoping to do [is] spend just two weeks away from my computer, just out in nature or wherever, not feeling chained to our current life of emails and Zoom calls,” he said.

Katherine Morales

Katherine Morales is currently completing her Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Morales grew up in a Hispanic and Latino household in Newark, New Jersey, and shared many rich stories about her life experience with Exeter students.

“My life has been a series of cultural shots, some more intense than others” Morales said.

One of these ‘cultural shots’ was her boarding school experience at Choate Rosemary Hall. “I was surrounded by individuals who are as passionate about learning as I was, and it elevated me to a world I was unaware existed,” Morales said. “I was exposed to various cultures, worldviews, and an enriching educational experience, as you all know, but also to individuals from wealthy families whose lifestyle is worse.”

Having grown up surrounded by poverty, Morales described Choate as her exposure to a privileged “new world.”

“My connections to both worlds, the privileged and the underprivileged, began my journey into developing a comprehensive awareness of the social inequalities plaguing our nation, and the ways in which invisible forces behind systemic oppression not only influenced the gap in educational attainment, but also psychosocial functioning, well-being and interpersonal dynamics,” Morales said. “It was this awareness that birthed my interest in helping others from communities like mine, forgotten and rejected, and the marginalized in society.”

This inspired Morales to take an official position at her middle school’s high school placement program as a mentor for students applying to boarding schools and secondary day schools. “In many ways, I was a counselor to the parents of students, navigating an emotional and anxiety inducing process as many parents were Hispanic and Latino immigrants, trying to not only navigate American culture, but also understand their own children, who now embody the same cultural values that were foreign to them,” she said.

All of these experiences contributed to Morales’ determination to pursue psychology. “This experience, equity, the value of empathic understanding, safety, and cultural awareness, ignited a hunger to support marginalized individuals as a counseling psychologist,” she said.

However, Morales struggled to fit in and find confidence in herself at graduate school as a Hispanic female. “I found myself doubting whether I had anything to truly offer, and whether I could be a true academic. How could someone like me, be an academic,” she said.

After speaking with members of her program and her advisor, Morales was able to “separate my reality from my fears.” “The great revelation was learning that the biggest tool that I needed to succeed, was myself, me,” she said.

Morales’s research, “A Mixed-Method Study: Client Perspective of Therapists’ Missed Cultural Opportunities and Its Effect on Working Alliance and Client Session Satisfaction,” focused on marginalized communities.

“I believe it is crucial to actively pursue and integrate a multicultural lens to sensitively and effectively address cultural factors in therapy,” Morales said. “I've come to realize that my research is centered on the needs of the marginalized because it is really rooted in who I am, my experiences and my values, my research is not separate from me. It is an extension of me.”

Morales hopes students can recognize what has been an essential part of their lives and what makes them unique. “Really, truly believe all that you bring matters,” she said.

Joud Alkorani

Joud Alkorani is currently completing her Ph.D. on the ways that Muslim women in Dubai pursue purpose at the University of Toronto’s Department for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. “My dissertation explores what that looks like in a cosmopolitan urban context that is shaped by Islamic piety and on the one hand and also neoliberal visions of progress,” she said.

Alkorani grew up in Toronto, Ontario, New Liskeard, Ontario and Dubai, the United Arab Emirates.

“The first question people ask when they see you is where are you from? Some people have a very simple, easy answer to that [but] it takes about 10 minutes for me to actually explain all these places that are part of who I am,” Alkorani said.

Her familiarity with a variety of places has provided her a unique anthropological perspective. “It shapes not only who I am and how I act in the world, but the kind of knowledge I produce as a scholar. At an early age, constantly moving between different communities with radically different norms, practices, and belief systems taught me to reflect upon my own world,” Alkorani said.

Alkorani continued, “cultural knowledge and experience is positional. It is shaped by the class racialized gendered positions of people in the world.”

Alkorani’s dissertation focuses on the relativity of the experiences of Muslim women in Dubai. “My work examines how middle-class migrant Muslim women living in Dubai understand what it means to be a good person and what it means to live a good life. I explore how a focus on individual self-help in Dubai can distract from and even prevent deeper structural change… because the UAE is a place where people are not able to settle long-term if they're not citizens,” Alkorani said. “What that means is there's no continuity for migrant lives; there's no longer period of time where people can actually rally together to create some kind of difference in society.”

Alkorani hoped that students remember the importance of genuine diversity and how one’s upbringing can affect their perspective. “Diversity is not something that you just kind of tack on to at the end of a project, just to add a little bit of flare to it, but it should be something that we incorporate into any account of the world that we produce from any discipline, from any perspective,” Alkorani concluded. “We need to think, ‘What do the different perspectives that people have bring to the conversation in a way that actually changes and enriches it?’”