Mneesha Gellman, Ph.D.

mneesha_gellman@emerson.edu


Associate Professor

Emerson College

Year of PhD: 2013

City: Boston, Massachusetts

Country: United States

About Me:

Mneesha Gellman is Associate Professor of Political Science in the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies, at Emerson College, Boston. Her research interests include comparative democratization, cultural resilience, memory politics, and social movements in the Global South and the United States. She is currently focused on a project looking at Indigenous cultural survival and political, civic, and cultural participation among high school and college-aged students in Oaxaca, Mexico, and Northern California. The project examines how access to heritage languages, including indigneous and Native American languages, inform student identity and behavior choices. Gellman is a political ethnographer and also uses mixed methods, including surveys, focus groups, and qualitative interviews in her work.

Research Interests

Comparative Democratization

Human Rights

Latin American And Caribbean Politics

Race, Ethnicity and Politics

Research Methods & Research Design

Political Violence

Memory Politics

Indigenous Politics

Language Politics

Education Policy

Cultural Diversity

Diversity Politics

Countries of Interest

Mexico

El Salvador

Turkey

United States

Sierra Leone

My Research:

Gellman's current research looks at how citizens are formed in the formal education sector and in community-run spaces organized around mother tongue and heritage language learning. She is working with stakeholders in Northern California and Oaxaca, Mexico on a project that documents cultural resiliency projects among high school-aged youth. This project follows cohorts of students enrolled in indigenous language electives, including Yurok and Zapotec, at local high schools and community organizations in order to document the effects of language learning on student experiences of civic, cultural, and political participation.
Gellman's first book, Democratization and Memories of Violence: Ethnic Minority Social Movements in Mexico, Turkey, and El Salvador (Routledge 2017) examines how ethnic minority communities use memories of violence in mobilizations for cultural rights, particularly the right to mother tongue education. She argues that violence-affected communities use memory-based narratives in order to shame states into cooperating with claims for cultural rights protections, and she shows that shaming and claiming is a social movement tactic that binds historic violence to contemporary citizenship.
Gellman's other work investigates how schools, museums, and memorials serve as spaces that can integrate marginalized memories and identities into mainstream vernaculars. Her 2019 article in the Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies Journal, with co-author Michelle Bellino, looks at formal and informal educational spaces in El Salvador and Guatemala as contested terrain for historical memory and indigenous identity. Her 2015 article in Third World Quarterly looked at the role of peace museums as alternative educational spaces in El Salvador and Sierra Leone. She is currently working on an article that addresses language politics in Sierra Leone, and another on neoliberalism in relation to schooling in Mexico and El Salvador.Gellman is the founder and Director of the Emerson Prison Initiative, which brings Emerson College classes and a BA pathway to incarcerated students in Massachusetts. In this capacity, she works to expand educational access for historically marginalized communities.

Publications:

Journal Articles:

(2019) “The right to learn our (m)other tongues: indigenous languages and neoliberal citizenship in El Salvador and Mexico.”, British Journal of Sociology of Education

This article critically examines bilingual, intercultural education policies and practices in El Salvador and Mexico. In the context of legacies of assimilation and neoliberal homogenization, certain kinds of citizenship become prioritized over others. This is visible where performances of local identity clash with state mandates about educational content and the language of school instruction. I address the effects of state agendas in schools on the politics of multiculturalism and argue that the absence of state commitment to bilingual, intercultural education undermines democratization efforts by marginalizing certain types of citizens more than others. By considering ethnic minority education in both El Salvador and Mexico, I analyze in a comparative perspective the ways that indigenous people have been rendered invisible as citizens unless they are willing to assimilate in the arena of formal education.

(2019) “Visible yet Invisible: Indigenous Citizens and History in El Salvador and Guatemala.”, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies Journal

El Salvador and Guatemala underwent civil wars that severely impacted both countries’ most marginalized citizens, including indigenous peoples. Today, teaching and learning the violent past remain challenged in each country, with implications for indigenous and non-indigenous citizens alike. This article examines the impact of democratization in El Salvador and Guatemala in the educational sphere, documenting narrative trends on the topic of the civil wars and indigeneity in formal and informal education settings. We argue that distinct democratization and transitional justice processes have created opportunities and challenges for teaching and learning about indigenous peoples’ roles and experiences in the civil wars in each country. Methodologically, the article draws on analyses of educational policy and formal curriculum in both contexts, supplemented by ethnographic data. We situate the study within democratization, transitional justice, and education literatures to document how teaching and learning the violent past is a highly politicized act with long-term implications for democratic quality in each country.

(2015) “Teaching Silence in the Schoolroom: Whither National History in Sierra Leone and El Salvador?”, Third World Quarterly

This article addresses the divergent cultures of silence and memorialisation about the civil wars in Sierra Leone and El Salvador, and examines the role that sites of remembering and forgetting play in crafting post-war citizens. In the formal education sector the ministries of education in each country have taken different approaches to teaching the history of the war, with Sierra Leone emphasising forgetting and El Salvador geared towards remembering war history. In both countries nongovernmental actors, particularly peace museums, are filling the memory gap. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in each country, the article documents how the culture of silence that pervades Sierra Leone enables a progress-driven ‘looking forward’ without teaching the past, while El Salvador is working on weaving a culture of memorialisation into its democratisation process. The article argues that knowledge about civil war history can raise young people’s awareness of the consequences of violence and promote civic engagement in its deterrence.

(2011) “Memories of Violence: The Role of Apology in Turkey’s Democratization Process.”, Democratization

In this article I ask the question: how do citizens use memories of violence in dialogue with a democratizing Turkish state? To address this, I unpack how memories of violence influence solidarity communities in addition to those who are direct descendents of survivors. I also examine how these solidarity communities are widening political space for contemporary dialogue about the Armenian Catastrophe. To demonstrate the connection between memory and political participation, I identify three discursive moments where Turkish and Armenian citizens invoke memory in dialogue with one other and with the state. I use the 2009 online campaign for a Turkish apology to address the Armenian Catastrophe, the aftermath of the murder of Hrant Dink in 2007, and a controversial 2005 academic conference on the events of 1915 as focal points to discuss how memory impacts the way people behave as citizens. My argument is twofold: first, elite-led solidarity networks play an integral role in shaping the discursive space between citizens, the state, and the international community; and second, dialogue about memory can grow space for citizen participation in Turkey.

Books Written:

(2017) Democratization and Memories of Violence: Ethnic Minority Rights Movements in Mexico, Turkey, and El Salvador,, Routledge

Ethnic minority communities make claims for cultural rights from states in different ways depending on how governments include them in policies and practices of accommodation or assimilation. However, institutional explanations don’t tell the whole story, as individuals and communities also protest, using emotionally compelling narratives about past wrongs to justify their claims for new rights protections. Democratization and Memories of Violence: Ethnic minority rights movements in Mexico, Turkey, and El Salvador examines how ethnic minority communities use memories of state and paramilitary violence to shame states into cooperating with minority cultural agendas such as the right to mother tongue education. Shaming and claiming is a social movement tactic that binds historic violence to contemporary citizenship. Combining theory with empirics, the book accounts for how democratization shapes citizen experiences of interest representation and how memorialization processes challenge state regimes of forgetting at local, state, and international levels. Democratization and Memories of Violence draws on six case studies in Mexico, Turkey, and El Salvador to show how memory-based narratives serve as emotionally salient leverage for marginalized communities to facilitate state consideration of minority rights agendas.

Book Chapters:

(2020) https://www.igi-global.com/chapter/higher-education-access-and-parity/257578, IGI Global

This chapter presents the educational intervention of the Emerson Prison Initiative, which offers a pathway to a Bachelor of Arts in Media, Literature, and Culture to incarcerated students at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Concord. A program of Emerson College, the Emerson Prison Initiative serves Emerson's mission to increase educational access for historically marginalized students, including those in prison, and maintains rigorous standards for academic excellence for students and faculty comparable to those at Emerson's Boston-based campus. The Emerson Prison Initiative is rooted in the notion that access to a college education can help transform how people engage in the world.

(2014) “Insurgents and advocates: women’s claim-making in El Salvador.”, FLACSO

Este artículo aborda las formas de participación de las mujeres en El Salvador en procesos de reivindicación con el Estado y cómo sus experiencias de violencia han informado las mismas. Utilizo una serie de viñetas basadas en mi trabajo de campo y literatura de testimonios para ejemplificar las razones por las cuales las excombatientes escogen diferentes posibilidades de reivindicación tanto durante la guerra civil como después. Al enfocarme en las mujeres que fueron activas durante la guerra y por tanto, estuvieron expuestas a la violencia perpetuada por el Estado (y que continuaron sus luchas después de los Acuerdos de Paz), sitúo la forma a partir de la cual la violencia facilitó una renegociación de demandas entre los y las ciudadanas y el Estado.