On May 1st 2018, I started my new role as Postdoctoral Early Career Researcher in the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. The team I am joining is part of an exciting, four-year global project addressing “gender and cultures of equality” through collaborative work between researchers and NGO/activist partners. The project is called GlobalGRACE [website under construction], and it launches officially on June 29 – join us for a reception if you’re in London!

My role over the course of the project will include both ethnographic research as well as a great deal of hands-on curation, which marks somewhat of a departure for me as a scholar while feeling like a natural progression given my work on creative, interactive, visual, and exhibiting projects over the years. I’m excited to see where it will lead.

I am also quite overjoyed to be living back in the UK after seven productive yet challenging years in the United States. I’m particularly grateful to the faculty, staff, and students at Georgetown University for their excellent company and support over two excellent years. I am sure I will miss teaching — but for now, on with the research!

 

After a short hiatus, we’re back with a new bite-sized overview of a key concept in anthropology: feminism. I spoke to Dr Christa Craven about the foremothers and groundbreakers in feminist anthropology, and about the politics of citations.

Click here for resources, links, additional background, and Teaching Tools connected to the podcast.

Episodes on Sovereignty and on Scientific Racism are also available at the Society for Cultural Anthropology.

Over the past year, I’ve been working on a collaborative experimental film project with interlocutors who identify as LGBTQ+ and are asylum seekers or asylees. Our aim has been to take journeys through local “gaybourhoods” or “villages”–areas renown for being LGBT-friendly. We discuss what thoughts and memories these spaces evoke while moving through them, allowing our conversations to meander in step with, and in response to the built environment.

I shared initial findings at the recent EASA “Media and Mobilities” workshop, and am honored that our work has been featured as part of the “Representations of Displacement” series on the excellent AHCR-ESRC-sponsored Refugee Hosts project website. We’re in great company: entries in the series each address the politics and (un)intended consequences of particular tropes and mediums for representing experiences of displacement, and most offer compelling and creative alternatives in an effort to “disrupt humanitarian narratives”. The collection is vital reading for those of us engaged in creating and/or perpetuating images and imaginaries in this realm.

Great to see my research getting a platform in the popular press. Thanks to Oscar Lopez for taking the time to conduct an in-depth interview, and to understand the nuances of LGBTQ+ immigration to the United States.

Read the article: “For LGBTQ Refugees in the United States, ‘Visibility is a Two-Sided Sword'”

My aim in writing this article was to contest the myths and fallacies behind claims that modern Pride events must be corporate-sponsored, apolitical, and pro-military / pro-police. I am proud to see that it has been well received (shared on Facebook over 1.6k times and one of the most-read across Rewire in the past month).

You can read the full article here.

Edited volume. Proposal deadline: 31 July, 2017

[Click here for PDF]

Co-editors: Dr. Siobhán McGuirk, Georgetown University (sm3276@georgetown.edu) and Dr. Adrienne Pine, American University (pine@american.edu)

Overview: While the power to grant or deny asylum to people remains overwhelmingly within the purview of States,[1] we approach the actors and institutions forming around asylum systems internationally as “the asylum industry.” Our position engages analyses of commodification and industrialization in multiple, related spheres under neoliberal capitalism.

Call for Contributors: The proposed collection will unite international academics, activists, journalists, artists, and people directly impacted by the asylum industry to explore how current practices of asylum align with the neoliberal moment more broadly, and to present visions for alternative systems and processes. We are looking for contributions in a variety of forms, for example:

• research papers (3,000-4,000 words)
• journalistic articles (800-1,000 words)
• photo-essays, data visualizations, political artwork, and other creative formats (e.g. diary entries; graphic novella; cartoons; poems, etc.).

Continue reading →

Following the call published by the anthropology magazine Savage Minds, my colleagues and I in the Women and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University will host an #AnthReadIn event on Friday 17 February, 12.30-2pm.

We’ll be reading Chapter Nine from Hannah Arendt’s On Totalitarianism (which you can find here), alongside Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (which is available here).

Join the conversation on social media under #AnthReadIn.