Katie Duarte

      

Katie Duarte is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Brown University. Her doctoral research titled, Tangled: Afro-Latinx Identity in the Natural Hair Movement in the Dominican Republic and New York City, examines how individuals construct and reconceptualize their racial identities through their hair, a physical trait associated with race. With the support of the CUNY DSI Research Fellowship, Duarte will undertake ethnographic fieldwork in hair salons in New York City and Santo Domingo to understand how people of Dominican descent interpret the racialized discourse in their local and transnational contexts through narratives about their hair. While in each city, she will also conduct 25-30 semi-structured interviews about employees and patrons’ personal histories with their hair. This research will be complemented with analyses of social media content about curly hair. During her tenure as a CUNY DSI fellow Duarte will examine several collections preserved in the Dominican archives to study the variety or uniformity, of Dominican women’s hairdos, as reflected in their photographs.