PROVIDENCE – When the call came through, Ieva Jusionyte just let it ring. A professor of international security and anthropology at Brown University's Watson School of International and Public Affairs, her area of research demands she closely follow legal cases, court proceedings and even interview incarcerated individuals – whatever it was could wait.
Jusionyte later learned that the phone call in question was to inform her she was one of 22 individuals across the country to be named a 2025 MacArthur Fellow.
The fellowship, which comes with an unconditional $800,000 stipend, is awarded to those who show "exceptional creativity" in their work by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Jusionyte's specialty is ethnographic research, the study of specific cultures from their own perspective. Her scholarship focuses on the violence centered around national borders.
Having written three books on the subject, Jusionyte plans to use the award to fund research for her next book, which will discuss the effects of extraditing organized crime leaders from Mexico and other Latin American countries to the United States.
“I realized that a lot of [cartel leaders] were sitting in prisons in the United States, and their crimes in Mexico remain uninvestigated," said Jusionyte in a statement to Brown University. "This led me to this broader question: Can justice be exported from Mexico to the United States?”
The foundation selects fellows over the course of years, considering a vast range of recommendations, largely from their peers.
“Each class doesn’t have a theme and we’re not creating a cohort around a certain idea," said Marlies Carruth, director of the MacArthur Fellows program. "But I think this year, we see empathy and deep engagement with community figures prominently in this class."
Through different methodologies, many of the fellows “boldly and unflinchingly” reflect what they see and hear from deep engagement with their communities, she said.
This year, the fellows include Hahrie Han, a political scientist who studies what helps people connect across differences; Tommy Orange, a novelist whose books about Native American communities in Oakland, California, sparked a passionate following; and Matt Black, a photographer whose black and white images investigate poverty in America.
The full list can be found
here.
Material from The Associated Press was used in this report.
Veer Mudambi is the special projects editor for Providence Business News. You may contact him at Mudambi@pbn.com.
