IHP Cities in the 21st Century: People, Planning, and Politics (Fall)

Faculty and Staff

The faculty/staff team shown on this page is a sample of the individuals who may lead your specific program. Faculty and coordinators are subject to change to accommodate each program’s unique schedule and locations.

Program Director
Forrest Hylton

Faculty
Tabitha Decker	Andrew Wade
Chris Westcott

Country Coordinators
SherriLynn Colby-Bottel	Sally Frankental
Glenda de la Fuente	Liem T. Nguyen

Trustees Fellow
Estefania Sanchez

Forrest Hylton, Ph.D.
Program Director
Forrest Hylton graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Reed College and completed his MA in Latin American history, with a certificate in Latin American studies, at the University of Pittsburgh, with a Foreign Languages and Area Studies Fellowship from the US Department of Education. His MA thesis was published in Spanish in ‘Ya es otro tiempo’: Cuatro momentos de insurgencia indígena (Muela del Diablo, 2003), now in its third printing in Bolivia.

His PhD thesis in Latin American history, supported by a number of grants and fellowships and entitled “Reverberations of Insurgency: Indian Communities, the Federal War of 1899, and the Regeneration of Bolivia,” won the Dean’s Outstanding Dissertation Award in the Humanities at New York University and is being revised for publication. He is the author of Evil Hour in Colombia (Verso, 2006), translated into French and Portuguese, and, with Sinclair Thomson, he is the co-author of Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics (Verso, 2007), translated into French.

Since 2000, he has taught undergraduate lecture courses, graduate and undergraduate seminars, adult education classes, and English as a Second Language, in La Paz/El Alto, Bolivia; Bogotá, Colombia; and Brooklyn/Manhattan, New York, working with grassroots organizations and leaders as well as universities. From 2010–2012, he was an associate professor at the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá), first in political science and then in history. In September 2012, he will be a postdoctoral fellow at the Tamiment Library’s Center for the Study of the US in the Cold War, at New York University, where he will complete research for a book to be entitled ‘Doing the Right Thing’: Labor, Democracy, and Organized Crime on the Brooklyn Waterfront, under contract with Oxford University Press.

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SheriLynn Colby-Bottel, PhD
Country Coordinator: New Orleans, LA
SherriLynn is an urban anthropologist and jazz musician living and working in New Orleans, Louisiana. She holds a master's degree in music as well as a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Virginia. SherriLynn moved to New Orleans just before Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and, with support from the National Science Foundation and the University of Virginia, she has spent the last six years conducting longitudinal research on the recovery of New Orleans and the management of music communities in the city. Her work examines the successes and struggles of rebuilding a city, paying special attention to cultural traditions in urban spaces, local music practices, the economy of heritage tourism, and civic ideologies of community and belonging. SherriLynn's research has brought her into contact with varied facets of the city—from local community radio stations and museums to youth outreach programs at the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park. SherriLynn has taught undergraduate anthropology courses for the last ten years; she has also taught American English language and culture classes to a broad array of learners in Virginia and New Orleans.

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Tabitha Decker, MPhil
Traveling Faculty
Tabitha is an urban sociologist with extensive experience conducting comparative research on cities. She is currently completing a dissertation about the Dubai Metro, in which she interrogates the system’s planning to illuminate evolving concepts and practices of urbanism. Her work broadly examines the interrelated nature of social and spatial change, and she is particularly interested in urban life and infrastructure. Tabitha’s recent research has taken her to several cities in the Middle East, including Dubai, Damascus, and Sana'a. A former Thomas J. Watson fellow, Tabitha conducted an ethnographic study of female taxi drivers in Cape Town, Dubai, Melbourne, and Kuala Lumpur. Her urban research trajectory was launched on an SIT Study Abroad program (Gender and Development in India) where she completed an independent study of an all-female police station in Mysore. She earned a BA with honors in international relations from Wellesley College and an MPhil in sociology (PhD expected in December 2012) from Yale University.

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Glenda de la Fuente, MA
Country Coordinator: São Paulo, Brazil
Glenda de la Fuente holds a bachelor’s degree in translation and a postgraduate degree from King’s College, University of London, in applied linguistics and English language teaching. She was a professor for and coordinator of the extracurricular English program at the University of Buenos Aires, where she was in charge of teacher training courses. Since 1987, she has been a member of the Humanist Movement, an international volunteer organization engaged in the promotion of equity and human rights worldwide; through this work, she has served as a lecturer and promoter of grassroots groups committed to the principles of nonviolence and nondiscrimination in Argentina, Paraguay, Spain, and Brazil. Born in Argentina, for the last nine years she has lived in São Paulo, where she currently works as a freelance conference interpreter and translator. She also promotes humanist education programs with community-based groups. She has been the country coordinator of the SIT Study Abroad/IHP Cities program since 2008, and since 2010 she has also coordinated the SIT Study Abroad/IHP Health and Community program in São Paulo.

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Sally Frankental, PhD
Country Coordinator: Cape Town, South Africa
Sally Frankental is a sociocultural anthropologist who taught at the University of Cape Town for many years. She directed the university’s Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research from 1980 to 1992. Her current research interests are in the areas of migration, identity, ethnicity, and citizenship. Her association with the SIT Study Abroad/IHP Cities program (since 1999) has been facilitated by her teaching of anthropology of development and applied anthropology, her supervision of a wide variety of graduate students’ research projects conducted locally, and the consultancy work she has done for the city of Cape Town. Her book South Africa’s Diverse Peoples (with Dr. Owen Sichone), commissioned as part of a series specifically for American university and public libraries, was published by ABC-CLIO in 2005. She was a founding member of the anti-apartheid organization Jews for Justice.

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Liem T. Nguyen, PhD
Country Coordinator: Hanoi, Vietnam
Liem is a sociologist and demographer who was born in Hanoi, Vietnam, where he continues to live and work. He earned a master’s degree and PhD in sociology from Brown University in 2001 and 2004 respectively. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Asia Research Institute under the National University of Singapore between 2004 and 2005. Liem was a founding member of the Institute of Population, Health and Development and has been the institute’s deputy director since 2009. He worked for the Government's Institute of Sociology under the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences between 1996 and 2011.

His major areas of interest include migration, urbanization, and health. He is particularly interested in the dynamics and interactions among those three areas within the context of rapid economic development. Liem has broad research and consultancy experience with government institutions, local organizations, NGOs, and international organizations, including the Department for International Development (UK), the World Bank, the United Nations Population Fund, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the Canadian International Development Agency, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Care International, Population Council, and the United States Agency for International Development.

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Estefania Sanchez
Trustees Fellow
Estefania is a social responsibility consultant who has a particular interest in youth as a stakeholder. For the past years she has worked in Ecuador and Venezuela with companies implementing social projects along their value chain and has developed local and international networks to bridge knowledge, initiatives, and resources from various sectors. She has a double degree in policy studies and Latin American studies with a focus on education from Lafayette. She is an IHP and SIT alumna as well as a former group leader for The Experiment in International Living. She has visited Canada, India, Mexico, Chile, and Argentina where she learned what people are creating in different spaces, whether in formal or informal classrooms, organizations, factories, houses, streets, or former torture centers, with different philosophies, politics, and tools. Her research interests are exploring links among learning systems, modes of intercultural respect, media, art, and collaborative management models for youth to create social value.

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Andrew Wade, MSc
Traveling Faculty
Andrew is an urban designer, planner, and researcher based in New York. He worked for several years in professional architectural practices in London while serving on the board of directors of the UK chapter of the American Institute of Architects. He has contributed to development reports commissioned by the government of Ghana and the United Nations Environment Programme, focusing on sustainable processes and outcomes of informal settlement upgrading. Most recently, he assisted studio teaching in the Bartlett Development Planning Unit and traveled for fieldwork in Rome, Mumbai, and Bangkok, where he nurtured key research interests in critical spatial practice, informality, and participatory processes. He has been a writer for Polis—a collaborative blog about cities across the globe—since its founding in 2009. He holds a BSc from the McGill University School of Architecture in Montréal, and an MSc with distinction from the Development Planning Unit of University College London.

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Chris Westcott, MA
Traveling Faculty
Chris is an urban social justice practitioner, educator, and changemaker based in New York City. Most recently, Chris worked with Freelancers Union and consulted with the Urban Justice Center and Right to the City Alliance, New York, strengthening member and community-based organizations to overcome injustices of the urban environment. Before coming to New York, Chris worked for many years at the intersection of study abroad and social change. For three years Chris worked in San Francisco as a founding staff member of ENGAGE, a network that organizes returned study abroad students to effect local and global change. Before that, Chris was a program facilitator for two years on CIEE’s Thailand program focusing on globalization and development. Chris has a BA in environmental studies from Bates College, and an MA in international educational development, focusing on peace and justice education, from Columbia University. While at Columbia, Chris was assistant teacher for courses on social identity, social change, and human rights education, and he launched a community fellowship program.

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Credits: 16

Duration: Fall, 17 weeks

Program Sites:
New Orleans, LA, USA; Sao Paulo & Curitiba, Brazil; Cape Town, South Africa; Hanoi, Vietnam.

Prerequisites: Previous college-level coursework and/or other preparation in urban studies, anthropology, political science, or other related fields is strongly recommended but not required. Learn More...

Fall program travel itinerary

Other Program Options:

Spring program travel itinerary