Recent Alumni Publications

In this article, we contend that the “strong Black woman” archetype constricts expressions of Black womanhood and girlhood and thus limits individual and collective liberation. We maintain that strength need not preclude tenderness, highlighting two forms: wounded tenderness—a raw and aching feeling pointing to the vulnerability of human beings—and liberated tenderness, a practice of meeting woundedness with embodied awareness and gentleness. We foreground the concept of poto mitan to illustrate how the “strong Black woman” archetype upholds virtues of strength at the expense of tenderness, thus taking up Faye Harrison's call to theorize from “ex-centric sites.” Translated as “center posts,” poto mitan describes the architecture of spaces for traditional ancestor worship and conventionally refers to Haitian women's central role as pillars of the family and community. We begin this article by discussing the limits of this discourse within feminist scholarship and activism. Second, we examine how this discourse both engenders and limits liberation for Haitian rural women. By concluding with “tenderness as method,” we argue that feminist anthropologists working with Black women must not only attune themselves to how discourses and performances of strength may occlude liberation but also call on our own vulnerability to allow space for liberated tenderness.

This book investigates the formation, configuration and consolidation of elites amongst Kenya’s Maasai.

The Maasai ethnic group is one of the world’s most anthropologized populations, but research tends to focus on what appears to be their dismal situation, analysing how their culture hinders or challenges modern ideas of economic and political development. This book instead focuses on the Maasai men and women who rise to the position of elites, overcoming the odds to take on positions as politicians, professors, CEOs, and high-end administrators. The twenty-first century has seen new opportunities for progression beyond the social reproduction of family wealth, with NGOs, missionaries, tourists and researchers providing new sources of global capital flows. The author, who is Maasai herself, demonstrates the diverse local, national, and global resources and opportunities which lead to social mobility and elite formation. The book also shows how female elites have been able to navigate a patriarchal society in their journey to attaining and maintaining elite status.

This book will be of interest to researchers across the fields of anthropology, political science, international development, sociology, and African studies.

You can order the book here.

Mashkiwenmi-daa Noojimowin: Let’s Have Strong Minds for the Healing is the first report of the First Nations Ontario Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect-2018 (FNOIS-2018).

The FNOIS-2018 is a study of child welfare investigations involving First Nations children which is embedded within a larger, cyclical provincial study: the Ontario Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect (OIS).

The OIS-2018 is the sixth provincial study to examine the incidence of reported child maltreatment and the characteristics of the children and families investigated by child protection services in Ontario. The OIS-2018 tracked 7,590 child maltreatment-related investigations (7,115 investigations involving children less than one to 15 years old and 475 investigations involving 16- and 17-year olds) conducted in a representative sample of 18 child welfare agencies (15 Children’s Aid Societies and three Indigenous Child and Family Well-Being Agencies) across Ontario in the fall of 2018.

Through an ethnographic case study of a community road-building initiative in a commune in Grand'Anse, Haiti, this article argues that konbit and protest, grounded in critical citizenship, can be used to (re)politicize people's participation in community development. While critical citizenship frameworks tend to center on the reciprocal or oppositional relationships between civil society and the state, this article considers how transnational actors alter such relationships. In Haiti, international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) are parastate actors that assume the state's responsibilities, shifting civil society's orientation away from an absent state and toward INGOs. But unlike the state, INGOs maintain an apolitical posture that upholds their bureaucratic dominance. Christian Vannier suggests, however, that development practitioners can leverage konbit to facilitate participatory development in Haiti. Yet participatory development tends to misappropriate such systems of collaborative labor and treat the "target population" as "objects of knowledge and management" rather than as citizens. This article concludes that, unlike INGO-funded participatory development projects, the road-building initiative explicitly transformed power relations. Not only did commune members take ownership of the project; they also used protest and other democratic means to realize a community project grounded in konbit as collective public action.

Sub-Saharan African immigrants are emerging as the “the new model minority” in the United States, excelling in education and social mobility. What are the socioeconomic and cultural mechanisms behind their high levels of academic success? This book examines the dynamics of Ghanaian transnational immigrants’ lives and portrays a complex relationship between class, context, beliefs and cultural practices as they inform immigrant children’s scholastic achievement. After migrating from a developing country, Ghanaian families often end up living in inner-city neighborhoods associated with educational challenges, such as crime, teen pregnancy, and high dropout rates. To challenge these forces, Ghanaian parents engage the “Network Village,” an asset and a privilege for Ghanaian transnational migrants as a space where they construct disciplined children who do well in US schools and, at the same time, fit into Ghanaian transnational culture. The transnationality of the Network Village makes it possible to utilize economic and sociocultural resources and institutions in both the United States and Ghana. Within the United States, parents employ the Network Village in multivariate ways to help their children succeed, educating them in churches, mosques, and cultural organizations. Thus, the Network Village is an advantage for Ghanaian immigrants not enjoyed by other minorities and natives, explaining how Ghanaian immigrants are among the “new model minority” from Sub-Saharan Africa. Socioeconomic status of immigrant parents and their levels of transnationality are important aspects to the education and social mobility of the immigrant children who continue to diversify American classrooms.

To purchase the book visit, coming in January 2019, visit here.