School of Humanities and Sciences
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Angela Garcia
Associate Professor of Anthropology
BioProfessor Garcia’s work engages historical and institutional processes through which violence and suffering is produced and lived. A central theme is the disproportionate burden of addiction, depression and incarceration among poor families and communities. Her research is oriented toward understanding how attachments, affect, and practices of intimacy are important registers of politics and economy.
Garcia’s book, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along The Rio Grande (University of California Press, 2010) received awards in anthropology and writing. The Pastoral Clinic explores the relationship between intergenerational heroin use, poverty and colonial history in northern New Mexico. It argues that heroin addiction among Hispanos is a contemporary expression of an enduring history of dispossession, social and intimate fragmentation, and the existential desire for a release from these. Ongoing work in the U.S. explores processes of legal “re-entry” and intimate repair that incarcerated and paroled drug users undertake, particularly within kin networks.
Professor Garcia is currently engaged in research in Mexico City that examines emerging social and discursive worlds related to the dynamics of extreme urban poverty, mental illness and drug addiction in Mexico City, particularly within its peripheral zones. A book manuscript for this work is under contract with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. -
M. Elizabeth Grávalos
Postdoctoral Scholar, Anthropology
BioDr. Grávalos is an anthropological archaeologist with over a decade of fieldwork and lab experience. Located at the intersection of materiality, landscape, and craft production, her research centers on the politics and sociality of making and using ceramic and textile objects. Dr. Grávalos is interested in how artisans embody, share, and contest technological and landscape knowledge across generations and between communities. Most recently, her work has focused on Casma potters on Peru's north coast (ca. 700-1440 CE) and Recuay artisans (100-700 CE) in Peru's north highlands.
Since 2014, Dr. Grávalos has applied material science methods to the analysis of archaeological materials, including ceramic, glass, and stone. She is a specialist in laser ablation – inductively coupled plasma – mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) and thin section petrography.
In addition, Dr. Grávalos directs community-based archaeological fieldwork (mapping and excavations) in Peru. Between 2016-2018, she directed the Proyecto de Investigación Arqueológica de Jecosh (PIAJ; Jecosh Archaeological Research Project) in highland Ancash, Peru, with colleagues Denisse Herrera Rondan and Emily A. Sharp. Learn more here: https://www.facebook.com/PIAJecosh
