Joseph Ewoodzie, Jr. – NSF CAREER Award

The Office of Grants and Contracts congratulates Malcolm O. Partin Assistant Professor of Sociology, Joseph Ewoodzie Jr., on a National Science Foundation CAREER award (1944961). 

The $400,000 grant will support the project titled, “Transnational Lives in the U.S.” This 5-year project aims to use the experiences of Ghanaian migrants to the U.S. to investigate gaps in current transnational literature along three main lines of inquiry: motivations, processes and consequences. Along with undergraduate student researchers, Professor Ewoodzie will use a mixed methods approach that will include: collecting data from a historical letter archive of over 2,000 letters; oral histories of families who began traveling to the U.S. in the early 1980s; and ethnographic studies in Atlanta, GA, Bronx, NY and Accra, Ghana. During two years of the project, Professor Ewoodzie also plans to teach a seminar on Globalization and Social Change titled “The African Migration Experience” which will culminate in a two-week trip to Ghana for up to twelve students.

The CAREER is NSF’s most prestigious research award, with the vast majority of awardees hailing from large research-intensive universities.  Professor Ewoodzie’s accomplishment is especially notable since it follows his successful 2018 NSF REU grant (1757506) “Collaborative REU Site: Examining the Intersection of Food, Housing and Healthcare,” in the Beatties Ford Road Corridor, Charlotte, NC, which will host its final season summer 2020.