News

Kathleen C. Riley, an Assistant Research Professor at Rutgers University, has received a Fulbright US Scholar Program award in Anthropology to France for the 2026-27 academic year from the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.

Riley’s research project, "Marquesan Migrants in France (Ènana en France): Language, Food, Sex, and Cultural Sovereignty," asks: why do French Polynesians migrate to France, and how does life in the metropole change their sense of identity and imagined community? Ethnographic research with Marquesan migrants living in Paris and Toulon will focus on their shifting language practices, their adjustments to the foreign foodscape, and their engagement (or not) in the cultural sovereignty movement. Imèra and the CREDO lab at Aix-Marseille University will offer an excellent homebase for pursuing this fieldwork, for developing theoretical approaches and research findings with French colleagues, and for supporting Marquesan endeavors to reclaim their language and foodways and preserve their island environment will explore these questions.