Bryan Moorefield was an NICHD fellow in 2014-2015 during his fourth year as an Anthropology PhD student. He researchers "guestworkers” and farmworkers, transnational labor, migration, and kinship in Mexico and southern United States. Here he describes his fellowship year.

The PSTC has been incredibly generous with me. I mainly used my time as a fellow to complete my classwork here at Brown and to prepare for my upcoming dissertation research in Mexico and Florida. I am about to begin a year’s worth of anthropological research with Mexican migrants.

Thanks to the PSTC, I was able to study with Brown’s leading researchers in anthropological demography and across disciplines in migration studies. The faculty and students that I have met in these classes and the Thursday colloquia at the PSTC have showed me the strengths of other disciplines beyond anthropology, which has also helped me to reflect on the unique contributions of my own discipline.

The PSTC and especially my PSTC mentor Jessaca Leinaweaver were also instrumental in helping me to obtain funding from the National Science Foundation for field research that I completed last summer. During that project, I travelled throughout central and southern Florida learning about labor recruitment and the commodity chains that produce orange juice. The research that I did in Florida allowed me to get a head start on my upcoming dissertation fieldwork.