School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 21-40 of 97 Results
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Ayana Omilade Flewellen
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
BioAyana Omilade Flewellen (they/she) is a Black Feminist, an archaeologist, an artist scholar, and a storyteller. As a scholar of anthropology and African and African Diaspora Studies, Flewellen's intellectual genealogy is shaped by critical theory rooted in Black feminist epistemology and pedagogy. This epistemological backdrop not only constructs the way they design, conduct, and produce their scholarship but acts as foundational to how she advocates for greater diversity within the field of archaeology and within the broader scope of academia. Flewellen is the co-founder and current Board Chair of the Society of Black Archaeologists and sits on the Board of Diving With A Purpose. In July 2022, they joined the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University as an Assistant Professor. Her research and teaching interests address Black Feminist Theory, historical archaeology, memory, maritime heritage conservation, public and community-engaged archaeology, processes of identity formations, and representations of slavery and its afterlives. Flewellen has been featured in National Geographic, Science Magazine, PBS, and CNN; and regularly presents her work at institutions including The National Museum for Women in the Arts.
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Duana Fullwiley
Professor of Anthropology
BioI am an anthropologist of science, medicine and well-being interested in how social identities, health outcomes and scientific narratives intersect. In my first book, The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa (Princeton, 2011), I draw on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in the US, France and Senegal. By bringing the lives of people with sickle cell anemia together with how the science about them has been made, The Enculturated Gene weaves together postcolonial genetic science, the effects of structural adjustment on health resources, and patient activism between Senegal and France to show how African sickle cell has been ordered in ethnic-national terms at the level of the gene. The Enculturated Gene won the Royal Anthropological Institute’s 2011 Amaury Talbot Prize for the most valuable work of African Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association’s 2014 Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology.
Beginning in 2003, I conducted multi-sited field research in the United States on emergent technologies that measure human genetic diversity among populations and between individuals. As an outgrowth of this research, I became particularly interested in how scientists engage ideas of genetic "inclusion" in how they enlist participant involvement in specific disease research problems, and how they also grapple with social movements, historical reckoning, data privacy and racial capital. My second book, Tabula Raza: Mapping Race and Human Diversity in American Genome Science (UC Press, 2024), explores these issues in light of how U.S. political concepts of “race” function in genetic recruitment protocols and study designs on complex disease, “tailored medicine,” ancestry tracing, and personal genomics. Tabula Raza won the 2024 Diana Forsythe Prize granted by the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology & Computing of the American Anthropological Association. It also won the 2024 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
As of 2019, I have begun to interrogate inequities in human migration and mobility--focusing on the forces that push people to leave West Africa for the complicated pull of Europe. I am concerned with people's personal narratives of risk and success at all costs in light of state sponsored surveillance, the simultaneous rigidity and fluidity of borders (land and sea) marked by new technologies, as well as how people draw from and create various forms of science and knowledge to forge relational trajectories that come to constitute home. This work also considers how human-made environmental resource scarcity figures into decisions to migrate (or, rather, to simply move) in their quests for viable futures, stability, and health. The project furthermore investigates new forms of racialization engendered by contemporary iterations of technologically-assisted and animated border patrolling, while the ocean itself is being reconceptualized as a new frontier for salvatory tech options and economic growth in Africa and elsewhere.
My research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Andrew and Florence White Fellows program in Medicine and the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. I have also been an invited scholar at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation in Paris (1997-1998, 2000 and 2002), a USIA Fulbright Scholar to Senegal, a fellow at the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2004-2005), and a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the Harvard School of Public Health (2005-2007). My work was also selected for a Scholars Award by NSF's Science & Society Program, co-sponsored by the Directorate of Biology, from 2008-2012. -
Angela Garcia
Professor of Anthropology
BioProfessor Garcia’s work engages historical and institutional processes through which violence and suffering are 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 most recent book is The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024). Set in Mexico City, it examines how violence precedes and functions in the ways families seek to care for and protect each other. Central to this work are anexos (annexes), informal and coercive rehabilitation clinics for the treatment of drug addiction that are run and utilized by the working poor, and which incorporate violence into their therapeutic practices. Anexos are widespread across Mexico (and increasingly in the United States) and are widely condemned as abusive, illegal, ineffective, and unethical. By situating anexos within a larger social and historical frame, and closely attending to life within and beyond these spaces, Garcia shows that anexos provide refuge from the catastrophic and everyday violence associated with the drug war. The book also demonstrates that anexos are the leading resource for the treatment of drug addiction among Mexico’s poor, and are an essential space of protection for individuals at risk of the intensifying violence in Mexico.
Garcia's first 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.
Currently, Garcia is studying the environmental, social, and bodily effects resulting from Mexico City’s ongoing desagüe, the massive drainage project initiated by Spanish colonists in the seventeenth century in the Valley of Mexico. Mexico City’s desagüe speaks to some of the most pressing concerns of our time: water scarcity, humans’ relationship to changing ecologies, and chronic disease. This project examines how the desagüe remakes bodies, neighborhoods, and social worlds. -
M. Elizabeth Grávalos
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
BioDr. Grávalos is an anthropological archaeologist that studies Indigenous Andean communities in the deep past, for whom we have no written records. She looks at Andean ways of making things—like ceramics, textiles, and cordage—to understand the sociopolitics that undergirded these making practices, including engagements with specific substances and landscapes. With theoretical foci on materiality, ontology, and social practice, this research asks: what are the political affordances of specific materials? How did materials bridge possibilities for political action? How did people’s engagements with specific landscapes and materials impact power dynamics, economies, and social identities? To think through these questions, her work bridges humanities and science perspectives, blending insights from anthropological theory and cultural geography with material science techniques.
Dr. Grávalos’s research is based in the Ancash Region of northern Peru, where her ongoing investigation into political geologies considers how geologic resources are culturally made and valued, and how categorizations and use of these geomaterials foment political dynamics among pre-Hispanic and present-day Andean communities.
Dr. Grávalos is trained as a field archaeologist and materials analysis specialist. Since 2009, she has participated in and directed research projects in Peru, the Bahamas, and the city of Chicago (USA). She is committed to collaboration with descendant communities and centers community-based methodologies in her research. Dr. Grávalos is also an expert in ceramic compositional analysis (LA-ICP-MS and thin section petrography) as well as textile analysis. -
Thomas Hansen
Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsAnthropology of political life, ethno-religious identities, violence and urban life in South Asia and Southern Africa. Multiple theoretical and disciplinary interests from political theory and continental philosophy to psychoanalysis, comparative religion and contemporary urbanism
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Rachael Healy
Ph.D. Student in Anthropology, admitted Autumn 2021
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsResearch interests: youth, working-class life, colonialism, urban landscapes, intergenerational trauma, (contentious) commemoration, collective memory, time and space/place-making, narrative and storytelling, borderlands, post-conflict space, Northern Ireland/Ireland, political identity, precarity, hope(lessness).
Broadly, my PhD research focuses on youth culture and teenage life in post-conflict Belfast. I am interested in discourses of intergenerational trauma and community spaces and how these are seen as points of relation in a larger communal making-sense of a growing youth mental health crisis in a West Belfast neighbourhood. My research contributed to new understandings about how vernaculars of political violence shift according to new and ever-expanding pressures and priorities in community life and cultural cultivation.
Prior to joining Stanford, I received a first-class honors degree in Global Health and Social Medicine from King’s College London. I also received a Master of Arts in Anthropology and Sociology from the Graduate Institute Geneva. Before attending university, I worked for four years in various health advocacy and youth work roles, including in South Africa and Scotland. -
Ian Hodder
Dunlevie Family Professor, Emeritus
BioIan Hodder joined the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology in September of 1999. Among his publications are: Symbols in Action (Cambridge 1982), Reading the Past (Cambridge 1986), The Domestication of Europe (Oxford 1990), The Archaeological Process (Oxford 1999). Catalhoyuk: The Leopard's Tale (Thames and Hudson 2006), and Entangled. An archaeology of the relationships between humans and things (Wiley and Blackwell, 2012). Professor Hodder has been conducting the excavation of the 9,000 year-old Neolithic site of Catalhoyuk in central Turkey since 1993. The 25-year project has three aims - to place the art from the site in its full environmental, economic and social context, to conserve the paintings, plasters and mud walls, and to present the site to the public. The project is also associated with attempts to develop reflexive methods in archaeology. Dr. Hodder is currently the Dunlevie Family Professor Emeritus.
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Miyako Inoue
Associate Professor of Anthropology and, by courtesy, of Linguistics
BioMiyako Inoue teaches linguistic anthropology and the anthropology of Japan. She also has a courtesy appointment with the Department of Linguistics.
Her first book, titled, Vicarious Language: the Political Economy of Gender and Speech in Japan (University of California Press), examines a phenomenon commonly called "women's language" in Japanese modern society, and offers a genealogy showing its critical linkage with Japan's national and capitalist modernity. Professor Inoue is currently working on a book-length project on a social history of “verbatim” in Japanese. She traces the historical development of the Japanese shorthand technique used in the Diet for its proceedings since the late 19th century, and of the stenographic typewriter introduced to the Japanese court for the trial record after WWII. She is interested in learning what it means to be faithful to others by coping their speech, and how the politico-semiotic rationality of such stenographic modes of fidelity can be understood as a technology of a particular form of governance, namely, liberal governance. Publication that has come out of her current project includes, "Stenography and Ventriloquism in Late Nineteenth Century Japan." Language & Communication 31.3 (2011).
Professor Inoue's research interest: linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, semiotics, linguistic modernity, anthropology of writing, inscription devices, materialities of language, social organizations of documents (filing systems, index cards, copies, archives, paperwork), voice/sound/noise, soundscape, technologies of liberalism, gender, urban studies, Japan, East Asia.
