Louis Römer, Lecturer in Anthropology, has been awarded a Wenner-Gren Fellowship to complete his book project, Strategic Ambiguities: Race, Class, and Populism on the Caribbean Airwaves. The ethnographic research informing this project was also funded by Wenner-Gren.

Strategic Ambiguities is a study of how populist political discourse unsettles and destabilizes racial and class categories and is based on a corpus of recorded political talk radio shows and long-term ethnographic fieldwork on the production and consumption of talk radio in Curaçao, an overseas territory of the Netherlands in the Caribbean. Drawing on this field research, the project moves beyond “stale dichotomies that surround race and class as explanations for populism and reframes that debate around the creativity of politics as a practice” that shapes the concepts and narratives through which the public makes sense of the world.