Participants
Roundtable Panelists
Mark Auslander
is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in African Art and Aesthetics and
Lecturer in African & Afro-American Studies, Anthropology, and Fine
Arts. His academic writings explore a wide range of topics, including
south-central African witchfinding movements, popular contests over
South African nature reserves, Zulu iconography in global contexts, the
social meanings of lynching photography, popular narratives of slavery
in the rural American South, and African American family reunions. He
has strong practical and analytic interests in museums and ethnographic
display, has consulted at the Smithsonian on the "African Voices"
exhibition project, and has worked on "Without Sanctuary: Lynching
Photography in America" at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic
Site in Atlanta. With his students in Georgia he has undertaken various
"service learning" projects in collaboration with local African
American communities, including restoring and documenting African
American cemeteries; oral history projects on Jim Crow, lynching and
racial violence; and developing community museum exhibitions on slavery
and its legacies.
website
Ann Bookman
is Executive Director of the Workplace Center at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, which combines research on work and family
with the development of experimental models for change in selected
workplaces. She is a social anthropologist who has authored a number of
publications in the areas of women’s work, work and family issues,
unionization, and child and family policy. Her new book, Starting in
Our Own Backyards: How Working Families Can Build Community and Survive
the New Economy (Routledge 2004), extends the discourse on work-family
integration to include issues of community involvement and civil
society. Bookman has held a variety of teaching, research, and
administrative positions in the academy and has also worked in
government, as a presidential appointee during the first term of the
Clinton administration, as Policy and Research Director of the Women's
Bureau at the U.S. Department of Labor, and as Executive Director of
the bipartisan Commission on Family and Medical Leave.
website
David Guss
is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University, where he
has taught since 1991. His fieldwork focuses on issues of performance,
place, and narrative. His most recent book is The Festive State: Race,
Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance (University of
California Press 2000). His recent exhibition at the Somerville Museum
focused on the history of Somerville's fourteen movie theatres. Part of
this project, which engaged Tufts students along with various members
of the community, was the creation of an oral history archive on the
movie-going experience. For more information on this Public
Anthropology project see www.LostTheatres.org. While continuing to work
in La Paz, Bolivia where he is studying the Fiesta del Gran Poder, Guss
is also beginning a new Public Anthropology project on the Architecture
of Utopia: The American University in the Boston Area.
website
Deborah Pacini Hernandez
is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University. She is
co-editor of Rockin' Las Americas: The Global Politics of Rock in
Latin/o America (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004) and author of
Bachata: A Social History of a Dominican Popular Music (Temple
University Press, 1995), as well as numerous articles on Spanish
Caribbean and US Latino popular music and culture. At Tufts she teaches
a public anthropology class entitled Urban Borderlands, a
community-based research course in which students are engaged in
collaborative learning by conducting original research, documenting the
history and incorporation of the Latino communities in Cambridge and
Somerville. Tufts students working in teams are paired up with Latino/a
high school students who are participants in either the Cambridge-based
Ahora youth leadership program, or the Somerville-based Welcome
Project. In addition to written final reports (which are posted on a
web site at the Tufts Digital Collections and Archives), students have
experimented with other ways to disseminate their findings, including
“digital stories” and web pages.
website
Nina (Cornelia) Kammerer
is a cultural anthropologist and public health researcher. She has
conducted fieldwork among the Akha minority of highland Thailand, and
has published articles and book chapters on marriage systems, Christian
conversion, ethnic identity, and Thai government policies and practices
towards highland minorities. Dr. Kammerer has taught at MIT, Vassar,
Smith, Hampshire College, and Brandeis University, where she is
currently a Lecturer. She is co-editor (with Nicola Tannenbaum) of
Merit and Blessing in Mainland Southeast Asia in Comparative
Perspective (1996) and Founders' Cults in Southeast Asia: Ancestors,
Polity, and Identity (2002), both in the Yale University Southeast
Asian Studies monograph series. In 1993, she served as Principal
Investigator on a study of sociocultural risk and protective factors
for HIV/AIDS among four highland minorities in Thailand. From
1998-2004, while a Senior Researcher at a Boston-based behavioral
health research firm, she participated in a cross-site study of the
effectiveness of integrated, trauma-informed services for women with
co-occurring mental health and substance abuse disorders and a history
of physical and/or sexual abuse; a sub-study of age-appropriate,
skill-building interventions for these women's children; and an
evaluation of family-focused and trauma-informed case management for
women who are parenting and homeless. In addition to publications on
HIV/AIDS in Thailand, she is co-author of two book chapters on HIV/AIDS
risk, prevention, and care among transgenders in the United States.
Currently, her writing focuses on the study design, implementation, and
findings of the cross-site study of the effectiveness of
trauma-informed services for women.
Sally Engle Merry
is Marion Butler McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and Professor
of Anthropology at Wellesley College. She is also co-director of the
Peace and Justice Studies Program. Her recent book, Colonizing Hawai’i:
The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton University Press, 2000), received
the 2001 J. Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association.
She has published four other books: Law and Empire in the Pacific:
Hawai’i and Fiji (co-edited with Donald Brenneis, School of American
Research Press, 2004), The Possibility of Popular Justice: A Case Study
of American Community Mediation (co-edited with Neal Milner, University
of Michigan Press, 1993), Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal
Consciousness among Working Class Americans (University of Chicago
Press, 1990), and Urban Danger: Life in a Neighborhood of Strangers
(Temple University Press, 1981). She is the author of over one hundred
articles and reviews on law, anthropology, race and class, conflict
resolution, and gender violence. She is past-president of the Law and
Society Association and the Association for Political and Legal
Anthropology. She is currently completing a book on international human
rights and localization processes.
Roundtable Organizer
Rosalind Shaw
is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University. She has
carried out extensive ethnographic field research in Sierra Leone since
1977, and has published widely on religion, social memories of
violence, and post-war recovery. She is the author and editor of
several books, most recently Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and
the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone (University of Chicago
Press, 2002), which was a finalist for the 2003 Herskovits Prize for
the best scholarly work on Africa. With the support of a John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing Grant, she is
currently writing a book manuscript on grassroots reintegration
practices and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Sierra Leone
as a Fellow at Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. At Tufts,
she has taught several Medford-based Public Anthropology classes. In
2002, she collaborated with Jay Griffin of the Medford Historical
Society and the Royall House Association in creating a student exhibit
on slavery and the slave trade in Medford ("From Africa to Medford: The
Untold Story of the Royall House Slaves"). She is currently preparing a
new Public Anthropology seminar in collaboration with a community
initiative called the West Medford Afro-American Remembrance Project,
the aim of which is to document the lives of pioneers in this community
before and during the Civil Rights era.
websites: 1, 2