Barbara Y. Roth
Barbara Y. Roth, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science, at The Ohio State University, has been awarded the prestigious Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) Fellowship by the U.S. Department of Education, International and Foreign Language Education (IFLE) office. Doctoral candidates can engage in full-time dissertation research abroad in modern foreign languages and area studies through the DDRA grant. Nationwide across all disciplines only 100 Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowships were awarded.
Roth will conduct research in Bosnia and Herzegovina for 12 months examining the Settlement Social Norms and Conflict Migration in Bosnia.
The events that aggregate into an armed conflict are the result of countless individual decisions that simultaneously form and are shaped by complex system dynamics. While early research tended to focus on outcomes and processes at the conflict-level, recent work has uncovered the vital importance of studying conflict microdynamics and their emergent properties. This project addresses a key gap in this literature by examining the vastly under-theorized component of civilian responses to war. Using archival and ethnographic evidence from rural Bosnia and Herzegovina, this project explores how local spatial trajectories of conflict and settlement-level social norms shaped civilian responses to war and migration decision-making in rural areas. It uses comparative case studies of Orašje, Raštani, and Vikići to examine the role of local practices of Komšiluk or neighborhood sociality and its constituent social figurations in migration decisions and outcomes. By exploring the social dynamics which caused these otherwise similar settlements to display such divergent mobility patterns, it facilitates a deeper understanding of both forced migration and contemporary Southeast Europe.
Roth earned her Bachelor of Arts in media studies and political science from the Free University of Berlin, Germany (2014) and a Master of Arts in political science from the University of Utah (2016). Her faculty advisor is Amanda Robinson.
The Office of International Affairs administers the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) Fellowship Program for The Ohio State University, and grant competitions are held annually. Doctoral candidates interested in applying for the Fellowship must contact Fulbright-Hays program director, Joanna Kukielka-Blaser, kukielka-blaser.1@osu.edu.