Tamara Manik-Perlman is pursuing a Master's degree in Geography. She received her B.A. in Sociology and Anthropology from Swarthmore College, where her undergraduate thesis focused on the cultural practices and processes that influence conversion to Islam in the United States.

Her current work explores how citizenship, as a means of producing governable subjects, is being reshaped and rescaled in respone to neoliberal globalization and the emergence of transnational identities. Her thesis will focus on members of a "double diaspora": largely Christian, ethnic Chinese Indonesian immigrants living in South Philadelphia. They occupy a unique place at the intersection of ethnic, political and religious interests on multiple spatial scales. Defined as outsiders and subject to persecution in Indonesia, they face a hostile national discourse on immigration in the United States, but are welcomed locally as part of the city of Philadelphia's redevelopment strategy and globally as part of the greater Chinese diaspora. Tamara's thesis will examine how members of this community negotiate the complex and often conflicting demands of institutions and interests that attempt to define them. She is particularly interested in how they claim rights and challenge the received notion of citizenship by mobilizing strategies and tactics that rely on space.