Stanford University
Showing 1-10 of 30 Results
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Andrew Bauer
Professor of Anthropology
BioAndrew Bauer is an anthropological archaeologist whose research and teaching interests broadly focus on archaeological method and theory, geoarchaeology, and environmental anthropology, including the socio-politics of land use and both symbolic and material aspects of producing spaces, places, and landscapes. Bauer's primary research is based in South India, where he co-directs fieldwork investigating the relationships between landscape history, cultural practices, and institutionalized forms of social inequalities and difference during the region’s Neolithic, Iron Age, Early Historic, and Medieval periods. As an extension of his archaeological work he is also interested in the intersections of landscape histories and modern framings of nature that relate to conservation politics and climate change. He has published broadly on these topics.
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Emma Shaw Crane
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
BioEmma Shaw Crane is an urban and environmental anthropologist. Her research and teaching focus on war, environment, and racialization in the urban Americas.
Her current book project, Counterinsurgent Suburb, is a study of the environmental and spatial arrangements that sustain U.S. empire on the peripheries of Miami, Florida. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork across a military base, a detention camp for migrant children, a nuclear power plant, and industrial plantations sustained by Indigenous Maya migrant workers. The project engages war as a transnational racial project that is routinized and reproduced in the American suburb.
A second project examines aftermaths of war in Bogotá and draws on long-term fieldwork with former guerrilla combatants in Colombia’s civil war. It examines how peripheral neighborhoods become the targets of municipal, humanitarian, and insurgent efforts to repair past atrocity, often in ways that seek to remake urban built environments.
Crane’s work is grounded in the principles and practices of research justice. She currently co-directs a project investigating a county jail and federal migrant detention center in Glades County, Florida. -
Paulla Ebron
Associate Professor of Anthropology
BioPaulla Ebron joined the department in 1992. Ebron is the author of Performing Africa, a work based on her research in The Gambia that traces the significance of West African praise-singers in transnational encounters. A second project focuses on tropicality and regionalism as it ties West Africa and the U.S. Georgia Sea Islands in a dialogue about landscape, memory and political uplift. This project is entitled, "Making Tropical Africa in the Georgia Sea Islands."
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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.
A second research project concerns the growth and destruction of a New Mexican mining community. Its focus is Santa Rita del Cobre, near Silver City, New Mexico, an area scarred by Conquest, capitalism, and ecological destruction. Using ethnographic and historical methods, this project examines the labors and losses of those who lived in Santa Rita del Cobre. It moves from present to past, from surface to subsurface, unearthing new ways of thinking about environmental and social history. It also reveals the difficult necessity of maintaining our capacities to be resilient when faced with environmental and existential catastrophe.