Field of Study USA: Labor/Industrial Relations

Ethan Chiu

Ethan Chiu is a BA/MPP candidate at Yale University studying history and global affairs, with a focus on semiconductor supply chains, democratic institutions, and national security. His senior thesis, “Human Circuits in Cold War Taiwan”, draws on fieldwork across eight major chip hubs and examines the migrant workers who sustain the global semiconductor industry. After his Fulbright-Nehru grant, he will return to Yale to complete his master’s in public policy thesis, which will integrate his India research with comparative findings from his prior fieldwork in Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, Arizona, and Texas.

At Yale, Ethan founded the Foreign Policy Initiative to connect underrepresented students with national security projects, co-organized the Geopolitics of Technology Forum, and manages research on China and Taiwan at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has worked on emerging technology policy at the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. His professional experience also spans RAND, the Center for a New American Security, the Brookings Institution, and the Pentagon. Ethan has coauthored reports on AI and international security, and contributed to policy memos on supply chain security. He was also a Regeneron Science Talent Search finalist for his biomedical research.

Shaped by his Taiwanese immigrant parents and a near-fatal accident, Ethan aims to build industrial and security policies that protect both democratic institutions and the workers who sustain them. He is originally from Jericho, New York, and outside of work enjoys running, managing his residential college gym, playing the saxophone, and cooking Taiwanese food with friends.

For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Ethan is studying the labor conditions in India’s fast-growing semiconductor assembly, testing, and packaging ecosystem. Working with Prof. Binitha Thampi at IIT Madras, he is examining how subcontracting chains, recruitment practices, dormitory housing, and occupational safety standards shape worker well-being. Building on his prior fieldwork across ten chip hubs spanning Asia, Europe, and the United States, he is applying a mixed-methods approach combining semi-structured interviews, ethnographic observation, and quantitative analysis. He will be integrating his findings into his Yale master’s thesis to inform American and Indian policy on dignified advanced manufacturing.

Lucas Joshi

Mr. Lucas Cole Joshi is scholar of Afro-Asian studies. Born to an Indian father and biracial mother, Mr. Joshi now attends Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, graduating in the spring of 2022. At Dartmouth, he served as the Founder and Co-President of cultural magazine, Dear Dartmouth and as the Founder and President of (post)-colonial book club, Chapter Two. A recipient of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, Mr. Joshi worked alongside undergraduate scholars of color in the production of his own research grounded in themes of mourning and memory in a (post)-colonial lens. His honors thesis, entitled “With Deepest Sympathy, a New Mourning in the Hour of Basque Reconciliation,” complicates notions of victimhood and reconciliation as it would lend itself to the post-terrorism era of the Basque Country. Mr. Joshi is a co-author of the book, Transatlantic Letters: An Epistolary Exchange Between Basque and US Students on Violence and Community published within the Human Rights Collection of Deusto University.

Upon completion of the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Mr. Joshi will pursue his PhD in Comparative Literature at Brown University. At Brown, he will work alongside professors Leela Gandhi and Leila Lenhen in responding to questions of the Indian Ocean as an autonomous body of violation and solidarity. Ultimately, he intends to realign Afro-Asian Studies through an emphasis on critical mixed-race theories and affinities.

A relic of the Portuguese colonial era, Goa’s Civil Code presents a complex story of labor governance and rights, particularly with respect to domestic workers throughout the community. Through this research, Mr. Joshi’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating the contemporary conditions that define the lives and livelihoods of domestic workers in Goa. Further, he is contextualizing domestic labor as a continuation of the legacy of Afro-Asian enslavement. The project represents a deeper inquiry into the labor that has stood as the backbone of Goa: once the “Rome of the East” and now the heart of Indian interculturality.