Ali Atef Abdelkader
Arab World - Egypt. Anthropology of ethics, rural-urban migration, ethnographic film, mediation and visualization of cinema.
Arab World - Egypt. Anthropology of ethics, rural-urban migration, ethnographic film, mediation and visualization of cinema.
Near East - Turkey. Archaeology/anthropology of societal collapse, rural-urban interactions, animal economies, zooarchaeology, Hittites, Late Bronze/Iron Age, Anatolia. "After the End: Animal Economies, Collapse, and Continuity in Hittite and Post-Hittite Anatolia."
Native North America/Southeast Alaska (Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian). Dispossession, climate change, place and storywork, sacred objects, oral history.
East Asia - China. Political and legal anthropology, linguistic anthropology, ideology, state, sovereignty, bureaucracy, urban space, infrastructure; migrant petitioners.
Caribbean - Puerto Rico; Latin America - Mexico/Chile. Colonialism, statecraft, geography, boundary, global capitalism, social production of space and collective relationship to place, the aesthetics and politics of dispute.
(joint w/ the Divinity School) Middle East - Israel/Palestine; USA. Messianism and temporality , ethics, religion and the secular, Jewish Studies, sensibility and embodiment, political theology, sovereignty and intervention.
(joint w/NELC) Middle East - Turkey/Egypt. Hadith literature, ethical self-fashioning, Islamic practice, anthropology of religion, styles of reasoning, conceptual translation and transformation.
Latin America - Colombia. Political anthropology and anthropology of law, STS; political economy, accountability, and violence; forensics, criminal justice/responsibility; corporations, corporate power, capital; law and aesthetics. "Criminal Enterprise: Forensics and the Reproduction of Corporate Power as Crime in Colombia." Previous Project (SJD dissertation Harvard Law School): "Conviction by Design: Remaking Criminal Responsibility at the Nuremberg Trials."
SE Asia - Singapore. Race and racialization; semiotics of image; time and temporality; nation branding, nationalism, national identity; authority and audience; language ideology; language policy and -planning; media and mediatization; visualization, modeling, cartography, urban planning, and design.
Middle East - Palestine. Techno-scientific capitalism, geopolitics of energy production, political ecology, political economy; renewable electrification of Palestine.
(joint w/CHSS) USA - Sci/Tech. Astronomy and the geosciences; the search for habitable worlds; redefinitions of life and living amidst climate crisis; imaging practices; just futures; speculative fiction. Pronouns: she/hers.
(joint w/SALC) South Asia - India. South Asia: Social and political movements, Marxist theory and India; questions of epistemology and translations of Marxism; the Naxalite movement in West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh, 1967-1991, the shifting contours of "culture" and "politics" in that context. "Revolutionary, or Practical-Critical Activity: Leftist Organising in India, 1967-1992."
(Arch) South Asia - India. Neolithic/Iron Age/Early Historic South India; human-animal relations/human-environmental relations, power and political ecology, historical ecology, animal husbandry and landscape histories, faunal and dental microwear analysis. "Excavating the Deep History of Degradation: Animal Husbandry and the Environmental Impacts of Livestock Grazing in Pre- and Early Historic South India."
Central America - Yucatan, Highland Guatemala. Linguistic anthropology, Mayan languages and culture, language use and media technologies, Maya community radio in Peto, Yucatan. "Voicing the Maya: Media Technologies and the Politics of Ethnolinguistic Identity in Yucatan."
USA. Performance and embodiment, blackness and the diaspora, American fantasy, queer theory. "Ordinary Queens: Blackness, Queerness, and the Search for the Good Life."
(Arch) USA. Archaeology of the contemporary, urban abandonment and reuse; Detroit. "Race, Historicity and the Built Environment in Detroit."
Australia/Oceania/Great Barrier Reef. Ecologies of technoscience; economies of re-production, politics of care. "Life Support Through Extinction: Non-Indifferent Expertise and the Reassembly of Australia's Great Barrier Reef."
USA - Southern Louisiana Gulf Coast. Political ecology, science & technology studies, environment, water and rivers, geo-engineering, oyster farming, ecological restoration in southern Louisiana. "Making the Future Coast: Ecological Restoration on the Edge of Louisiana."
USA. The senses and knowledge production, commodities and the body, science and technology studies, anthropologies of corporations, food science, taste. "Producing Taste: The Senses in American Food Technology."
Europe - France. Critical race theory, anthropology of religion, the French suburbs (banlieues).
Citizenship and migration; scale-making; semiotics; enregisterment; ethics and politics of sustainability; welfare state. "Ethics of Scale-Making: What is 'Sustainable' Welfare in a Norwegian Neighborhood?"
Middle East - Turkey (Izmir & Aliaga). Materiality, labor, bodies, toxicity, value-transformation, environmental justice. Specific focus on scrap metal recycling factories and their surrounding residential areas.
(Arch) Southern Europe, Mediterranean; North America. Historical ecology, political ecology, domestication, agriculture, arboriculture, archaeobotany, rural communities, posthumanism. "Cultivation Regimes: Political Ecologies of Domestication at Nadin-Gradina, Croatia, ca 500 BCE - 1700 CE."
Central & Eastern Europe - Georgia & Poland. Post-socialist transformations; politics of market places, commodification, and consumerism; global and (trans)national regimes of safety regulation; anthropology of risk, security, and trust; gender, regimes of care, and the politics of the public/private divide. "The Problem of Trust: Food Safety Regulatory Reform and Emergent Ethical Authorities in Contemporary Tbilisi, Georgia."
(Arch) Latin America - Colombia. Archaeology, zooarchaeology, Tairona polity, human-animal interactions, transitions and transformation between the pre-Columbian and colonial periods.
(Arch) Western Europe - Mediterranean prehistory (France). European and Mediterranean pre- and proto-history (Iron Age), material culture, ritual uses of the human body, embodiment, consumption and identity, political economy, food and cuisine, alcohol and feasting, colonialism, isotope analysis, landscape archaeology. "Severing Heads and Social Ties: A Biogeochemistry and Material Culture Approach to Contested Bodies in the Late Iron Age of Southern France."
Middle East/North Africa - Dubai & Sahrjah. Semiotics, epistemology, modes of expertise, anthropology of history, ideology, STS.
Latin America - Mexico. Property, home ownership, and (developmental) housing policy; the financialization of social and political life; work, debt, and social relations; land and urbanization histories; political and moral economies. "'In Property We Trust': Making and Unmaking Home in the Mexican Urban Periphery."
(Arch) West Africa - Mali. Hidden inequalities of heterarchical societies in Iron Age West Africa, bioarchaeological analysis.
Germany & Central Europe, North Africa, Middle East. Perceptions of criminality and criminal embodiment viewed through a raciolinguistic lens. Music as signifying criminality in various languages; gendered politics of criminality -- what looks and sounds criminal in a given place.
Mexican/US Borderlands - Tijuana. Northern Mexico: The making and unmaking of a region; cities, city-dwellers, and urbanity in ethnography; social decomposition. "Invasive Urbanity Across the Mexican Post-Post-Revolution."
USA - Legal/political. American conservative public interest law, semiotics, historical conditions that make litigation possible, how public interest law may alter relations among law, the state and the public.
(Arch) East Africa. African Great Lakes Region: Lake Victoria & Tanzanian Southern Highlands. Rock Art/Community Archaeology; the rock art of East Africa; symbolic meaning; art historical methods and theory, GIS, photography, rock art archiving, ethnoarchaeology, community-based rock art heritage management.
(Arch) North America. Arctic/Sub-Arctic. Settler colonialism, ethics, epistemology, religion, landscapes/seascapes/icescapes, ecology, sovereignty, climate, futures.
Russia. Law, legal education, legal epistemologies, linguistic anthropology.
Latin America - Colombia (Amero). Materiality, landscapes, disaster, ruination and temporality.
(Arch) USA - Louisiana (New Orleans); French Caribbean - Haiti. Labor and subjectification, urban landscapes, built environment; material culture; craftsmanship, urban experience; loss, displacement, belonging. "Crafting Community: Race, Creative Labor, and Everyday Aesthetics in the Creole Faubourgs of New Orleans, 1790-1896."
USA - New Mexico/Greater Chaco Region. Oil and gas extraction; energy and environment; critical Indigenous studies and settler colonialism; queer theory; technoscience; jurisdiction; sovereignty; atmosphere; climate change. "Land, Law, and Extraction in the Greater Chaco Region: An Ethnography of Jurisdiction."
(Arch) USA - Mid-Atlantic. Urban archaeology, archaeology of diaspora, historical capitalisms, constructions of heritage, memory, public archaeology.
(Arch) Northwest China (Bronze Age). Cultural frontier regions (the Gansu/Hexi Corridor); a study of temporality from the perspective of subsistence practices - utilizing zooarchaeology & paleosoil records.
Southeast Asia - Indonesia. Political discourse; language and gender; bureaucracy, development, and democracy. "Enregistering Democracy: Gender and Political Discourse in Eastern Indonesia."
(Arch) Northern Europe - Scotland (Early Medieval). Semiotics of landscape and collectve social identity in Pictland; archaeology of ethnicity, language, and literacy.
(Arch) East Asia - China. Early Chinese culture; technology and social systems; ceramic analysis. "Community, Pottery, and Political Culture: Crafting the State in the Luoyang Basin, North China, 3000-1500 BCE."
(Arch) Africa - Egypt/Nubia, Gebel Barkal, Sudan. State Power: ideology, religion and material culture; Archaeology of Ideology: iconography, landscape and ritual. "In the Houses of the Ram and the Lion: Religious Displays of Political Subjectivity in the Kushite Temples of Amun and Apedemak."
Egypt, Coptic Christians (claim to pre-Arab/Islamic roots in Egypt). Racialization of Islam, empire and colonialism, transnational racial identity formations, crtical race theory; Coptic nationalism.
USA - Urban and suburban Chicago and virtual. Service dog training for U.S. vetrans; anthropology of ethics and the ordinary; Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and trauma.
(Arch) Mongolia; Inner Asia. Prehistory of Mongolia and the eastern Eurasian steppe; the Xiongnu and steppe empires, mobile pastoralism, bioarchaeological and zooarchaeological methods and theory; multispecies ethnography, human-animal studies, materiality. "Imperial Body-Politic(s): Human-Animal Relationships of the Xiongnu Empire at Elst Ar, Central Mongolia."
East Asia - China. Southwest China (Yi people); ritual and religion, ethnicity, death and mortality, materiality, museum studies. Ritual uses of Bronze Funeral Drums in the highlands of Southwest China/Vietnam/Laos - relationship to social scientific knowledge production and commodification.
USA - Urban. Political and economic anthropology; linguistic anthropology; elder care and aging in the US; housing and demography.
USA - Urban New York/Chicago. Contemporary death practices in the US; cultural histories of African American funerals and memorials; theories of Blackness and death; materiality, mourning and grief.
USA - Texas/Eagle Ford Shale and Permian Basin. Technoscience, liberalism & neo-liberalism, energy & environment, political economy, temporality & historicity, aesthetics. "Reinventing the Earth: The Global Shale Frontier and the Experimental Moment in Petrocapitalism."
Southeast Asia - Singapore. Media, creativity, semiotics, materiality, globalization, textuality.
(Arch) Latin America - Andes, Southern and Central Peru. Cusco, the Inka, Spanish colonialism in the Andes; landscapes, agriculture, empire, cartography, environment, zooarchaeology, archaeobotany. "Colonial Agrarianism: A Historical Archaeology of Land and Labor in Cusco, Peru."
Jamaica/Caribbean/Central America. Emergent (local) technoscientific cultures. toxic legacies, politics of uncertainty in the Caribbean. Geoengineering research at University of the West Indies-Mona - local perspectives.
USA; Australia. Theories of technology and emergence, knowledge projects, energy, geographies of management and extraction, the engineering profession/ethics. "'Being Technical': Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) and Energy Engineering in Eastern Australia."
(Arch) South Asia - South India. Archaeology; time, temporality, memory and historicity; periodization, historical narratives and 'the medieval'; ceramic analysis. "Tempered by Time: Ceramics and the Fabric of Time in Medieval (ca AD 500-1600) South India."
Scandinavia - Denmark/Copenhagen. Anthropology of design; cultural politics of energy transition; ethics and aesthetics of green urbanism; political ecology of infrastructure; welfare statecraft; Denmark. "Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow: Copenhagen, Eco-Metropolis."
Latin America - Colombia. Ancestral and forensic genomics, anthropology of history and temporality, decolonial and postcolonial Science and Technology Studies, biopolitics, transitional justice and post-conflict development, genealogies of materialism.
(Arch) East Asia - Japan. Material aspects of Western interaction with early modern Japan (the Dutch at Dejima); Commodities and materiality, cultural property management and tourism; value and commensuration, feasting, early modern globalization and commerce, sociality of economic transactions, alterity. "Dejima: An Archaeology of Intercultural Commerce in Early Modern Japan."
USA; Ireland. Linguistic and Medical Anthropology; addiction studies, drug use and drug intervention; clinical interactions and pragmatics/metapragmatics of clinical knowledge production and translation. "Living with Drugs in the Republic of Ireland: Shifting Trends of Opiate Use and Intervention."
US and South Asia. Science of extraordinary mental capabilities and technologies and techniques for cognitive enhancement.
Native North America. Western Navajo Nation; legal anthropology, sovereignty, place, extraction, energy, environment, infrastructue, activism.
Middle East - Egypt, North Africa. Authority, violence, temporality, postcoloniality, labor, generations, semiotics, aesthetics. "An Eye for the Army: Fantasies and Realities of Military Authority in Egypt."
East Asia - China. The Southern "Gate" cities of China: Xiamen, Shenzhen, Guangdong; law as manifested in everyday lives in China; migrants in cities -- who are neither fully legal nor illegal; practices and discourses around government issued ID papers; state/citizen relationships. "Documenting Uncertainties: Bureaucratic Problems, Reform Promises, and Everyday Documentation Practices in Southern China."
East Asia - Japan. Social movements, ethics and aesthetics of public protest, modern formations of democratic governance and legitimacy; citizenship; anti-nuclear protests in post-Fukushima Japan. "Bodies that Shatter: Mobilization, Atomization, and the Crisis of Political Representation in Post-Disaster Japan."
(Arch) Africa - Tanzania/Zambia. Historical archaeology of hunter-gatherers; historical archaeology; landscape archaeology, political ecology; colonialism and post-colonialism, landscape, political ecology, temporality, ethnobotany and archaeobotany. "An Archaeology of the 'Natural': Historical Landscapes of the Sandawe Homeland, Central Tanzania."
USA - Midwest/Upper South. Whiteness, consumption, commodities, historicity, rural/urban relations, utopia/dystopia. "Securing Utopia, or, The Place of Guns in Small Town America."
South Asia - Tamil-speaking Sri Lanka. Materiality and affect, history and historicities, aesthetics and politics, images and publics, Islam, the 'secular' and 'religious'.
Southwest China/Myanmar/Laos border area. Southwest China/Myanmar border (Shan); Disturbance ecologies; supply-chain infrastructures, the Chinese medicine trade. "The Growing Wilds: Harvesting Chinese Medicines in Farthest Myanmar."
East Asia - Japan. Medical anthropology, mental health, environmental disaster, ecology. "Mobilizing the 'Ecological': Disaster Mental Health in Post-2011 Tsunami and Nuclear Disaster in Japan."
South Asia - South India (Tamil Nadu). Anthropology of Islam, religion, sensory experience; tradition, embodiment, affect, temporality, forms of knowledge production, place-making. "Formations of Tamil Islam: Negotiations and Contestations in Contemporary South India."
Southeastern Europe - Greece/Athens. Linguistic anthropology; ekphrasis, image-texts, chronotope and qualia; aesthetic communities and "well-being"; the arts and culture sector of contemporary Greece.
(jt w/ Social Service Administration) US, linguistic anthropology, the discursive construction of "youth" in America, expressive psychotherapies.
(Arch) East Asia/China (Anyang, late Shang). Bronze Age China, bioarchaeology; childhood; personhood and gender; sacrifice; stable isotope analysis; skeletal pathology and trauma; mortuary practice. "Revisiting Lineage: A Bioarchaeological Life Course Approach to Relatedness in the Late Shang Capital of Yinxu (c. 1200-1050 BCE)."
Middle East - Turkey. Religion and ethics (in Islam), circulation of ideas, translation, logics of comparison, temporality, media/mediatization, bureaucracy, documents, liberalism, language/semiotic ideology. The "Presidency of Religious Affairs" (Diyanet) in Turkey and its Media.
Middle East; Turkey/Kurdistan. The politics of language within the Kurdish movement, language ideologies, nationalism studies, language and politics, post-colonialism. "Publics of Value: Youth, Language, and Higher Education in Turkey."
(Arch) (joint w/ EALC) East Asia - China. Shang China, Erligang, agriculture.
(jt w/Divinity/Anthropology and Sociology of Religions). Middle East, Islam, anthropology of religion.
Southeast Asia - Thailand. Anthropology of architecture and designed objects; theories of affect; embodiment and experience; cosmologies and spatial order. "Designing Cosmopolitics: An Ethnography of Design Activism and the New Thai Parliament."
(Arch) Mongolia, Eurasian Steppe. Landscape/space/place, pastoralism and mobility; ritual; GIS, regional survey, mortuary archaeology, human osteology, lithics; Bronze Age/Iron Age subsistence shift in West-Central Mongolia. "Tracing a Transition: Political Economies of the Bronze and Iron Ages of Mongolia."
Archaeology. Production of scientific knowledge and digital technology: digital applications in archaeology, fieldwork recording, systems of documentation - Ontology Gap and Living Archive(s).
(jt w/ Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science). Anthropology of science & medicine, STS, and feminist/postcolonial scholarship; expertise; knowledge production and translation; the microbiome and its relationship to genomics; U.S. and Mexico.
East Asia - Japan. Urban space, technical infrastructures, art and architecture, sense and aesthetics, governance, the planning and development of the 2025 Osaka World Expo.
Caribbean - Jamaica; Middle East - Israel/Palestine. Police and policing, colonial modernity, law and vengeance, state and kinship, consciousness. "Freedom Arrested: Policing after Slavery and the Promise of Abolition." Previous project: "Inappropriate Acts: Law and Violence on Israel's Colonial Frontier."
Latin America. Digital colonialism and data mining in Andean communities -- material resource extraction entangled with informational flows and data gathering; material-semiotics, algorithms, cybernetics, Latinidad, feminist STS.
(Arch) Latin America - Peru. Inka Empire to Spanish Colonialism in the southern highlands of Peru; historical archaeology, postcolonial theory, indigeneity, religion, bureaucracy, state building.
US Southwest (Imperial Valley, California): Environmental anthropology; new/historical materialisms, the desert, temporality/theories of the end of time, toxic threat, the body, waste, modern ruins, post-apocalyptic tourism, the Hollywood film industry, the Frankfurt School.
(joint w/ Linguistics) North America. Semiotics, language revitalization, intellectual property, Hopi. "Translating Hopi: Knowledge, Property, and Language Revitalization."
Latin America - Mexico. Urban and semi-urban areas; violence, media, politics; crime and its mediations; gender and sexuality.
Africa - Senegal, Francophone West Africa. Anthropology of Age: childhood, inter-generational relations, work and play, lifecourse. Anthropology of Medicine and Science: care, biopolitics, embodiment, technocracy, epistemology. Anthropology of Development: political economy, value, materiality, urbanism, policy. "Entrepreneurs of the Future: Speculative Care and Early Childhood Education in Senegal."
Latin America - Colombia (Amazon). Colombia, ethnobotany of the Uitoto diaspora, displacement and migration, magic and trauma, personhood and interspecies adoption, gender and generativity, epistemology and divination, politics of the sensory, post-natural forms of life, militarized ecologies; semiotic theory, critical theory, queer theory, decolonial theory, STS. "Cultivating Futures: Botanical Economies and Knowledge Ecologies in Colombian Amazonia."
Trans-local religious networks, Islam, the religious and the secular, history and historicities, tradition, temporality, aesthetics, materiality, forms of knowledge production, language, South-South exchange.
Western Europe; USA; Afghanistan. Landscape Studies; Media Studies; Architectural Theory; Remote Sensing; History of Cartography; History and Anthropology of Knowledge; History and Anthropology of Science and Technology.
South Asia - India. Medical anthropology, STS, capitalism, globalization, global health; public-private partnerships, outsourced clinical trials in public health infrastructure.
Latin America - Mexico. Violence, sovereignty & national historical imagination; moral economies; secrecy/spectacle, fiction; mass mediation, affect.
(Arch) Latin America - Argentina. Contemporary ethnoarchaeolgy, mortuary monuments, material sources and oral/textual counterparts, practices of resistance. Assemblages of memories curated by loved ones of those who were disappeared during Argentina's "Dirty War."
South Asia - Pakistan. Television news production, privatized media, democracy, mediation, sensationalism, South Asian public culture. "Sab Drama Hai/'It's all Drama': The Politics of Producing Publicity in Pakistan."
Latin America - Brazil, Argentina; US. Sociocultural and linguistic anthropology; anthropology of number, metrics, scale, ‘qualia of quantity’; public/universal health cultures (e.g. “collective health”); quantitative interpretations and experiences of morality (e.g. inequality, proportionality, integrality); science and technology studies; semiotics; bureaucracy and public policy cultures; megacities, “municipalization”, social effects of geographic sciences and ideologies. Dissertation is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Greater Sao Paulo, Brazil; I also have long-term fieldwork roots in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and have co-authored applied qualitative research publications in medical anthropology based in Chicago, IL.
Caribbean - Puerto Rico; Europe - Germany. U.S. Politics of blockchain technology, decentralization and peer-to-peer economy movements; data, value, personhood, subjectivity, (non)sovereignty; geopolitics and geopoetics; theories of nature and evolution; political and economic anthropology, ethics, translation.
USA - Urban. Social-media fueled activism; narratives of power/disempowerment generated by marginalized communities; politicized use of media, political activism, violence; Charleston, SC; Black Lives Matter.
East Asia - China. Urban development/renewal, political ecology, politics of aesthetics and design, environmental studies. "Urban Interrupted: Rethinking Urbanization and Development in Contemporary China."
(joint w/ Political Science) USA - Chicago. Prisons, incarceration, imprisonment, movement, stasis, vitality, ontology, race, queer theory. "Cook County Jail/Ethics and Vitalism."
USA - South. Anthropology of time and historical consciousness, political anthropology especially nationalism and identity, the ontological turn, landscape and space, phenomenology, subjectivity, anthropology and history.
(Arch) West Africa - Senegal. Historical archaeology and anthropology of West Africa, specifically Senegal; archaeology of gender and education, domestic archaeology, religion & conversion, food studies, missionization, practice theory, historical ecology, humna/plant relationships, archaeobotany. "Cultivating Catholicism: Practice, Gender, and the 'Civilizing Mission' in Colonial Senegal (ca 1860-1939)."
South Asia - Pakistan (Karachi). Legal anthropology, national law and its relation to marginalization and criminalization of ethnic identities; migrant experiences of the state and law in both rural and urban spaces; Karachi Central Prison, criminalizing rural migrants, socializing migrants into citizens.
East Asia - China/Korea. Economic anthropology, global capitalism, transnational connections/translations (supply chain, commodity circulation), anthropology of food. "'Korean' Qualities, 'Chinese' Value: Translation and Brokerage in the Made-in-China Kimchi Trade."
(joint w/ CHSS) US/Mexico. Environmental biology, philosophy, STS, impacts of climate change and human infrastructure on the ecosystem of the borderlands (US-Mexico), knowledge-making, public consciousness.
Europe - France/UK. Affect theory, migration, infrastructural citizenship, temporality, cities, globalization, media ethnography; (temporary) housing infrastructure; Calais encampments near the Tunnel: embedded precarity and dispossession; lives beyond the state, bricolage; documentary film.
urban China (Beijing); material culture; secondhand and used commodity exchange; consumption; aesthetics; oldness and usedness; popular religion; popular culture
USA. Technology studies; legal and political anthropology; privacy, freedom, and security; the political economy of personal information. "The Techno-Politics of American Privacy: An Ethnography of Privacy Engineering in U.S. Web Browser Development."
Middle East - Israel. Political anthropology, critical geography, urban anthropology, refugee studies, post-conflict studies. "Blueprints of the Nation: Planning Space, Rights, and Refugee Return in Palestine-Israel."
West Africa, Mexico, Central America. Postcolonial archaeology, community-based research, activist research methods.
Europe - Germany; USA. Body movement, body techniques and somatic culture in Germany, skills, expertise, habits, embodiment; anthropology of movement, anthropology of dance, anthroplogy of art; feminist STS, history and philosophy of science.
Middle East - Egypt. Identity/subjectivity, gender and sexuality, refugees and migrants, ethnography of queer subjectivities and marginalization in Egypt.
Southeast Asia - Singapore. The Port of Singapore; logistics, security, surveillance, visual art, visual anthropology. Port facilities, terminals, management science and the practice of logistics, networked flows, emphasis on flows vs border and encounters.
Europe - Germany/Austria/Czech Republic. Language and technology, semiotics, politics of the Internet, Pirate Parties, "Anonymous" and anonymity, "trolls" and trolling. "Engineering Contemporary Politics: Pirate Parties and Technical Work in the Czech Republic."
(MD/PhD) Horn of Africa/Indian Ocean. Landscape, borders, mobility.
South Asia - South India (Kerala). Intinerant lifestyles, socialization, professionalization and transmission; similarities between inter-generational and inter-species interactions; entertainment, its production and stigmatization across classes and castes; laws and ethics; oral history. "Disappearance in the Ring: The Nostalgia for Childhood and Animality in Present-day Circuses of South India."
Anglophone Caribbean (Bahamas); US. Anthropology of museums; animal studies; post-colonialism; exchange; political ecology; zoological instituions. "Moving Animals: Multi-species Curation and Environmental Stewardship in Bahamian Contexts."
US/Europe/Latin America/Africa. Dementia/senility, medical anthropology, personhood, illness narratives, psychiatric anthropology, experimental ethnography, disability studies, communication with people with profound dementia, narrative medicine.
Latin America, the Caribbean, Dominican Republic. Anarchism, Afro-latinidad and the politics of Afro-latinx identity; immigration, diaspora, and the politics of mobility; intersubjectivity, solidarity; representation in media and popular culture; independent media production; documentary film and ethnographic filmmaking; Performance Studies, Ethnic Studies, Black Studies, Critical Race Theory.
(Arch) West Africa, Caribbean, Indian Ocean coast. Colonialism, maritime nautical archaeology, GIS, Atlantic slave trade.
Latin America - Colombia. Resource extraction; renewable energy; political ecology, capitalism and value; indigeneity. "Life Worlds of Extraction: Renewable Energy and Indigeneity in the Guajira."
Middle East - United Arab Emirates. Political legitimacy and authority; exchange relations; citizenship.
Middle East - Iran/Central Asia. Urban anthropology, pilgrimage and tourism, construction of religious identity, gender studies.
South Asia - India. History of labour and the left in South Asia: transnational borrowings, Marxisms; political economy; Dalit politics, theorizing caste, capital and state, ideology and performance.
Middle East - Jordan/Iraq; USA. Political anthropology of the Middle East; nation-states, nationality and nationalism; migration and mobility; urban life; genealogical and segmentary systems; labor and capital; American imperialism. "Guests in a 'Garden': An Ethnography of the National Present among Iraqi Residents of Amman, Jordan."
(joint w/ Cinema Media Studies) South Asia - India. Linguistic anthropology & film studies. The Bhojpuri-speaking region of North India, the film industry, semiotics of film.
Native North America - Arizona/New Mexico. Sovereignty and settler Colonialism; decolonial thought: technoscience & STS; affective/psychosocial worlds. "Exuberant Energies: Settler Colonialism and the Element of Whiteness."
Asia - South Korea, Singapore. Linguistic anthropology; politics of culture & performativity; fandom and crowd theory; digital technology and gaming. South Korean idol branding.
Southeast Asia - Thailand, Burma. Migration and mobility, politics of language and semiotics, identity and personhood, education and childhood, expertise, bureaucrats. "The Anticipatory Childhood: Language Socialization of Burmese Migrant Children and Imaginings of a Thai National Future."
USA/Mexico border region. Borders, national security, infrastructure, (neo)liberalism, global capital, commodity flows, migration, private security companies, policing, violence, mediation, virtuality, invasive species. Homeland Security; infrastructure/industry/enforcement, US-Mexico border.
(joint w/ Comparative Human Development) Southern Africa - Zimbabwe. Gender and sexuality, religion and spirituality, subjectivity, ancestors, politics of tradition, Christianity, land and landscape. “Intimate Rites: Localizing Queerness through Ancestral Spiritualities in Contemporary Zimbabwe.”
North America. Art activism and social movement cultural production, material and visual culture studies, aesthetic and social theory; political economy and creative labor. "'Be the Change You Want to See': New York City Art Activism and the Prefiguration of a Post-Capitalist World."
(Arch) South Asia - North India. Identity, urbanization, paleoenvironmental research, ceramic technology and trade, geoarchaeology, lithics. "Tradition, Conversion and Place: The Khanzada of Mewat 1200-1950."
(Arch) Britain: Middle Ages/Early Modern. Circulation of affect through material form (especially architecture/small churces in the English countryside) repetition and replication of interaction and experience, aesthetics, sensory experience of space/spatial layout.
(Arch) Latin America - Chile. Archaeology of the South Central Andes; Atacama Desert (Chile); social landscapes; space and place; materiality, architecture; post humanism; technologies. "Transformative Architectures: An Archaeology of Building Practices in the Guatacondo Valley, Atacama Desert (ca 1000 BCE - 500 CE)."
(Arch) Roman archaeology, economic anthropology, materiality, maritime archaeology, the Balkans.
Central and North America. Linguistic anthropology, semiotics, American ethnology and linguistics. "Mayan in Cunén, El Quiché, Guatemala."
USA Urban - Youngstown, OH. The Rustbelt; impoverishment and underclass traditions, waste-markets (scrap, junk, post-occupancy real estate), housing, infrastructural decay, post-waged work, sociality in the sagging city. "Feral Houses, Junk-Work, and Scrap Sociality: An Anthropology of Rustbelt Afterlife."
China. Cultural and linguistic anthropology, translation, semiotic technology, media, nationalism and the state.
China/US. Register, risk, migration, metapragmatics, language ideology, anthropology of Christianity. "Politics of Confession, Migration, and Mobilized Christianities in Late Socialist China."
Western Europe - Switzerland. Migrant integration policy, language ideologies, the semiotic construction of difference/civilization, ordinary ethics, hospitality, transnational/undocumented mobility, citizenship. "The Will to Welcome: The practice and policy of migrant integration in Geneva, Switzerland."
East Asia - China. Linguistic anthropology, reading/literacy/textuality; value, ethics, cultivation; education, tradition, post-socialism. "The 'Dujing' (reading the Classics out loud) Movement in China: Value, Temporality and Textuality."
Qinghai/Tibet, China. Multi-species ecology, body and landscape, mobilities, animal ethics, semiotic anthropology, Tibetan Buddhism. Production of scientific knowledge through multi-species investigation in China's first national park in Qinghai.