Programme design, institutional review, postdoctoral fellowship
Marilyn J. Gittell Collective, CUNY Graduate Center, 2022–2025
Context
The Marilyn J. Gittell Collective sits within the CUNY Graduate Center and supports scholars across CUNY’s 25 colleges whose work engages social justice, participatory research, and public scholarship. As Gittell Postdoctoral Fellow, I was responsible for programming that supports emerging scholars through dissertation, first book, and early-career stages; a remit that sat somewhere between academic fellowship, programme design, and institutional review.
Approach
Over three years I ran three parallel programmes and designed a fourth.
The Gittell Dissertation Fellowships is a peer-mentorship programme supporting nine graduate students across three cohorts through the final stages of dissertation writing. I facilitated monthly meetings, coordinated 18 individual presentations, and managed the annual selection process across CUNY.
The Public Scholar Book Writing Workshop was developed from an original idea by Celina Su, with early development support from Heath Brown. I launched and ran the programme from 2022, through three cohorts. It provides first-time academic book authors with structured manuscript feedback from expert reviewers in their field. Building and running it required outreach to all 25 CUNY colleges (75 departments across three years), designing the application, running selection, recruiting and matching reviewers, and managing 6-8 week review cycles with 10 participants across three cohorts.
I also administered honoraria for roughly 25 adjunct and graduate researchers across projects spanning abolition studies, budget justice, environmental psychology, community decision-making, and policing research.
Undiscipline: Geopoetic Explorations was a self-designed experimental workshop series I developed and ran in 2024. It convened poet-scholars and doctoral researchers at CUNY’s Graduate Center to explore what research as affective attunement could mean and do. We worked with collaborative mapping, exquisite-corpse writing, and embodied methods drawn from Glissant’s opacity and Erin Manning’s minor gestures; treating the body as a site of knowledge, an analytical tool that registers what the mind has not yet articulated.
The series produced a zine of geopoetic explorations, edited by me and published in December 2025. It gathers poems, sticky notes, and collaborative traces from the workshops on solid and tracing paper, designed as an invitation to see research as a series of overlaps, a lack of coherence, a rejection of linear progression.
Output
- Public Scholar Book Writing Workshop, Gittell Collective programme page
- Undiscipline: Geopoetic Explorations, Gittell Collective programme page
- a zine of geopoetic explorations, edited by Kahina Meziant, Graduate Center CUNY and Center for the Humanities, December 2025
- Books published by workshop participants include work by Rhea Rahman and Anthony Dest (2023–2024 cohort), with further books in production
Impact
The Book Writing Workshop now runs as an established Gittell programme beyond my tenure. Across three years, 22 emerging scholars received direct support. The Undiscipline series produced methodological frameworks that other scholars have reportedly drawn on in their own teaching and research. The zine lives as both archive and provocation. The programming model, combining peer structure, expert review, and experimental form, has shaped how the Collective thinks about supporting scholars at different career stages.
Collaborators
Programme participants across CUNY’s 25 colleges; expert manuscript reviewers across disciplines; workshop co-facilitators at the Graduate Center and Center for the Humanities.
Interested in programme design, fellowship programming, or institutional review for research centres and foundations? Get in touch.
Kahina Meziant 