Mourning in Colombia, delivery routes in Chengdu: UChicagoans recount discoveries abroad

Dispatches span research on human evolution, gig labor economics and ethnography of state violence

This story was originally published on UChicago NewsOpens in new tab as part of Dispatches from Abroad, a series highlighting UChicago community members who are researching, studying and working around the world.

As University of Chicago students and faculty dig into Autumn Quarter, we’re looking back at some of their recent global research. The dispatches below take us from a UNESCO World Heritage site in South Africa to China’s fourth-largest city and Colombia’s waterways. 

Studying ancient human ancestors in South Africa

For two weeks this summer, Madeleine Kelly, a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, worked at the Kromdraai site in South Africa. Kromdraai is a fossil-bearing cave within the Cradle of Humankind UNESCO World Heritage site, in Gauteng Province near Pretoria.

Kelly is part of the Darwinian Sciences cluster in the Biological Sciences Division. Her thesis focuses on “understanding the environmental context that our early ancestors evolved in,” she said. 

“I primarily look at fossils from around 2 million years ago, trying to understand how to reconstruct what those environments were like and how do these different sorts of complementary proxies for the environment either agree or disagree with each other,” Kelly said. “Basically I’m asking, how do we know what we know about the past?”

Her dissertation fieldwork has taken her mainly to eastern Africa, particularly in northern Kenya on the border with Ethiopia. The opportunity to visit Kromdraai in South Africa was an excellent contrast. 

“The geology in eastern Africa is super well characterized and simpler to understand, versus southern Africa, where the relevant fossil sites for human evolution are all caves—and cave geology is way more complicated,” she said. 

Kelly’s time at Kromdraai overlapped with a field school comprised of undergraduate and master’s students, and she enjoyed chatting with them about their career interests and helping them with the intricacies of fossil identification. Kelly’s visit to Kromdraai was facilitated by her advisor, Prof. Zeray Alemseged, who also was doing research at the site.

Kelly is nearing the end of her Ph.D. work and plans to defend her thesis in January. Her time at Kromdraai helped crystalize her desire to pursue a research career, one that investigates the broad circumstances of what was happening on the African continent 2 million years ago. 

“Much of what we understand about South Africa and the fossil record there is conditioned on things that we know from eastern Africa, and that assumption deserves to be tested,” Kelly said. “Something that would be really interesting going forward is pursuing broader scale comparisons and comparing fossils from the same species from these two places.” 

Tracing the food delivery economy of a Chinese megacity

This summer, fourth-year economics Ph.D. student Haoyang (Stan) Xie spent time researching the sprawling ecosystem of food delivery in the Chinese city of Chengdu,. His work there, conducted together with Chicago Booth School of Business Ph.D. student Zhen Yuan, was made possible by UChicago Global’s Ph.D. student travel grantsOpens in new tab.

In Chengdu—China’s fourth largest city and the capital of southwestern Sichuan Province—food delivery in recent years has seen astronomical growth, making drivers ubiquitous on the streets. 

Xie conducted fieldwork to better understand “the everyday behaviors, constraints and decision-making processes of food delivery workers and their station managers,” he said. “Through time spent in the field, I was able to observe how riders respond to platform incentives, delivery deadlines, route familiarity, order bundling, fatigue and managerial practices.” 

Xie chose to research food delivery because it’s a crucial sector that affects all Chengdu residents. It also provides employment opportunities to people who may have had trouble finding other jobs. Delivery in Chengdu is “incredibly fast and efficient,” Xie said, but it has also led to significant increases in traffic accidents, raising concerns about safety.

In his research in Chengdu, Xie focused on delivery drivers, their managers, and the traffic-safety and regulatory environment surrounding their work. He sought to better understand how delivery work is organized and managed and drilled deeper into the process by which orders come in and are delivered across the city.

Xie’s research in Chengdu will form the basis of his doctoral thesis, along with other data and surveys. The goal, he said, is to “develop a richer risk profile of delivery workers and to begin formulating platform governance recommendations aimed at improving safety without ignoring the operational realities of delivery work.”

Documenting grief in Colombia’s countryside

This past summer, anthropology Ph.D. student Lorenzo Granada completed extensive fieldwork researching mourning practices among displaced peasant communities in the wake of state violence and militarization in Colombia. Granada was born and raised in Colombia and spent the last three years conducting research on his doctoral thesis.  

Granada’s ethnographic work was concentrated in Puerto Berrío, a small port-town along Colombia’s Magdalena River, as well as Barbacoas, a lagoon located further north downstream. There, he lived with peasants who had been forcibly displaced from small rural plots and whose way of life had become severely undermined by the expansion of agribusiness projects and state-led violence in the region during the late 1990s and early 2000s. 

During this period, counter-insurgency paramilitary groups such as the AUC allied with government military forces and led a campaign of extermination of “internal enemies” throughout the country. The rivers were not only fought over but were used to dispose of the bodies of victims as well as to occlude evidence of massacres, turning the Magdalena River into what many called the largest graveyard of the nation.

In Puerto Berrío, Granada worked at a cemetery along the river that received the bodies of victims, many of whom had been made nameless.  There, he learned from mothers who dedicated their lives to mourn and seek the missing dead as a response to increasing state violence. This past summer was the culmination of his years-long research into the ethical and political challenge of mourning in a world in which “the boundaries between what is a graveyard and what is not become increasingly untenable.”