Mobility, Migration, and Citizenship

Zachary Sheldon

I am a cultural and linguistic anthropologist studying the intersection of migration, conflict, and social reproduction. I am joining Pitt having completed a two-year Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship at the University of Chicago in 2022.  Over the past decade, I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork with Iraqi refugees in Jordan and North America. My scholarship analyzes displaced peoples' ordinary practices and moral tropes to illuminate emergent forms of care and exploitation in the wake of war. My current book project draws on Marxist, feminist, and Islamic epistemological frameworks to highlight the techniques and insights that Iraqi migrants use to establish refuge within Jordan’s illicit wartime economy. Studying migrant labor in Jordan also led me to consult for international humanitarian organizations. More recently, many nights spent playing cards and dominos in Iraqi teahouses have pointed me towards a second research project on games and play. I am also passionate about pedagogy and have published on my experiences teaching world systems and Marxist theory.

 

Degrees and Education

PhD, University of Chicago, 2020

Research Description

In general, my research examines the relationship between subjective insights and complex systems, asking how ordinary people illuminate and influence the obscure structures that govern their lives. My 2021 article in The Anthropology of Work Review showed how Iraqis' epistemological standpoints on bureaucratic timelines can provide a more inclusive and effective critique of humanitarian logics, and my current book project elaborates this approach to address Jordan's illicit economy of refuge. This project recasts the study of displacement from its margins through a critical perspective on the multiple social totalities in which refugee life is suspended. Today, about 80% of global refugees live outside of camps and beyond the reach of humanitarian intervention. Yet most anthropologists of displacement continue to operate within the ambit of humanitarian professionals. Meanwhile, Iraqis in Jordan must learn to navigate a shadow economy of undocumented labor and illicit finance if they hope to sustain their shared form of life. How might the ordinary practices and everyday talk of displaced Iraqis illuminate the otherwise unseen cultural, political, and economic forces that shape refugee life in the present? To find out, I conducted two years of ethnographic fieldwork in the kitchens, construction sites, and factories where displaced people find work in Jordan. There, I collected data on the technical know-how and persuasive tropes that Iraqis use to avoid detection, navigate conflict, and transverse borders. Drawing on Marxist-feminist theories of social reproduction and an Islamic ontology of emanation, I find that these ordinary practices illuminate refuge as an encompassing matrix from which individual and collective agency can emerge in the absence of legal rights or recognition. However, these zones of refuge are themselves encompassed within the exploitative structure of the wartime economy. Thus, contemporary refuge renders the ethical imperative of caring for one’s kin existentially dependent upon practices of deception that these same refugees recognized as morally corrupting. Yet from within the heart of this contradiction, Iraqis’ own moral claims to economic rights suggest ways to this troubling trend.

My recent experimental publication on war games in Roadsides presages a second project that will trace the cultural diffusion of military simulations from American imperial strategists to Iraqi youth video gamers. During the 2019 uprisings in Iraq, that country’s parliament banned popular online games for their purported negative influence on youth. Yet decades before gaming become an unavoidable feature of post-invasion Iraqi life, games were the characteristic tool of American military strategists and recruiters. My next project therefore traces the cultural diffusion of specific game forms, namely the mass multiplayer online battle game (like Player Unknown Battlegrounds and Fortnite) from their U.S. imperial genealogies to their controversial prominence among Iraqi youth. In preparation for this project, I am currently developing an original theoretical approach through a working paper about jaakaaroo, a popular boardgame in the Middle East, to analyze games as semiotic forms which use a syntactical logic of combination to generate experiential qualia of wholeness and presence.

 

Courses

Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
Language, Culture, and Society
Games: Theory, Practice, and Experience

 

Recent Publications

Peer Reviewed:

2022 “How to Play Logistics Command: An Archaeology of the Ludic Imagination.” In Roadsides 7:15-20, co-authored with Jack Mullee. [https://roadsides.net/sheldon-mullee-007/]

2021 “Managing the Humanitarian Workplace: Capitalist Social Time and Iraqi Refugees in the United States.” In The Anthropology of Work Review 42(1):35-46 [https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/awr.12217]

2017 “Refuge, Market, and Garden: Tropes of Jordanian Stability among Amman’s Iraqi Residents” in POMEPS Studies 25:66-69 [https://pomeps.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/POMEPS_Studies_25_Refugees_Web.pdf#page=67]

General Audience:

2022 “Teaching Time and Labor, from the Factory Act to Prop 22.” Exertions: The Web Publication of the Society for the Anthropology of Work (https://saw.americananthro.org/pub/f66368d3/release/1)

2018 “Nationality, Class, and Iraqi Migrants in Jordan.” The Blog of the American Center of Oriental Research (https://acorjordan.org/2018/01/02/nationality-class-iraqi-migrants-jordan/).

2017 “The World in the City and the City in the World: Reading the Janet Abu-Lughod Library.” Jadaliyya (https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/34126).
 

Steven Goldstein

Steven Goldstein (PhD Washington University in Saint Louis, 2017) is an anthropological archaeologist who studies long-term relationships between food systems, mobility, climate change, and technology over the last 12,000 years in eastern and southeastern Africa. After completing his PhD he undertook a 2 year post-doctoral position at the Max Planck Institute for Human History in Jena, Germany followed by a 3 year position as a Research Group Leader at the same institute before coming to Pittsburgh.

He has been directing community-based field projects in Kenya since 2014 and Zambia since 2017 that assess questions related to the spread of mobile pastoralism, origins of agriculture, and hunter-gatherer responses to environmental stress. To address these questions, he applies expertise in lithic technological studies, landscape archaeology, GIS, and geoarchaeological methods. His current field research largely centers on assessing how conditions of food security were impacted by the expansion of African states and beginnings of European colonialism over the last few hundred years. He is also engaged in a book project examining the social and economic transformations in herder lifeways across the last 4000 years in eastern Africa.

Degrees and Education

Washington University in Saint Louis

Research Description

Kakapel Archaeological Project: This collaborative project between the Max Planck Institute and the National Museums of Kenya investigates a 12,000 year record of demographic, economic, and climatic change at Kakapel Rockshelter, western Kenya. Excavations directed by Dr. Goldstein have revealed the largest record of plant food use in the region, including the adoption of diverse crops that arrived during migrations into the Lake Victoria Basin from different parts of the African continent. Coupled with archaeogenetic and paleoclimatic analyses, this project is building a unique perspective on when and how agricultural strategies developed in eastern Africa.

Origins of Agriculture in Zambia: Working with partners at the University of Zambia and Livingstone Museum, this project has involved excavations at several Early and Late Iron Age sites across Central and southern Zambia.  The goals of the project are to establish a high-resolution chronology for the arrival, spread, and intensification of lifeways based on mobile herding and plant agriculture.

Small-scale responses to large-scale climate change at Lothagam-Lokam: This project co-led by Dr. Goldstein, Dr. Elizabeth  Hildebrand (SUNY-Stony Brook), and Dr. Elizabeth Sawchuk (Cleveland Museum of Natural History) investigates how small-scale fisher-hunter-gatherer communities along the Lake Turkana Basin of northern Kenya responded to Climate change between c. 12000-5000 years ago. Paleoclimatic data reveals a complex pattern of regional rainfall change and local environmental shifts impacted the livelihoods of people living in the area. Archaeological analysis suggests people responded to local stresses through changes in the organization of group mobility, and to lasting aridification through technological innovation and intensification. These perspectives are providing new insights into how small-scale communities in the past successfully managed climatic crises.

Prehistoric Eastern African Quarry Survey (PEAQS): The PEAQS project seeks to identify and document patterns of lithic raw material access across eastern Africa. It is particularly focused on the diversity in stone quarrying strategies, core preparation strategies, and lithic reduction techniques applied at quarries and mines. By identifying these central nodes in long-distance regional exchange and interaction networks, we hope to better understand the relationship between stone-tool using peoples, mobility and land-use, trade networks, and economic organization. So far, research has included examination of obsidian quarries on Mt. Eburru and the Lake Naivasha Basin in Central Kenya.  

 

Courses

TBA

 

Publications

2022 Goldstein, S.T., Shipton, C., Miller, J., Ndiema, E., Boivin, N., Petraglia, M.  “Technological organization through the terminal Pleistocene and Holocene in eastern Africa’s coastal forests: Implications for understanding human-environment interactions.” Quaternary Science Reviews 280:107390. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2022.107390

2022 Goldstein, S.T., Farr, J., Kayuni, M., Katongo, M., Fernandes, R., Janzen, A., Markham, B., Crowther, A., & Boivin, N. “Excavations at the Iron Age village site of Fibobe II, Central Zambia.” Journal of African Archaeology. https://doi.org/10.1163/21915784-bja10012

2021 Mueller, N.G., Goldstein, S.T., Odeny, D., & Boivin, N. “Variability and preservation biases in the archaeobotanical record of Eleusine coracana (finger millet): Evidence from Iron Age Kenya.” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-021-00853-y

2021 Goldstein, S.T., Crowther, A., Henry, E.R., Katongo, M., Janzen, A., Farr, J., Picin, A., Le Moyne, C., Boivin, N. “Revisiting Kalundu Mound, Zambia: Implications for the timing of social and subsistence transitions in Iron Age southern Africa.” African Archaeological Review 38(4): 625-655. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10437-021-09440-y

2021 Storozum, M., Goldstein, S.T., Conterras, D.A., Gidna, A., Mabulla, A., Grillo, K., & Prendergast, M.E. “Legacies of ancient herder settlement: soil development and landscape evolution on the Mbulu Plateau, Tanzania.” Catena 204:105376.

2021 Janzen, A., Richter, K.K., Brown, S., Mwebi, O., Gatwiri, F., Katongo, M., Goldstein, S.T., Douka, K., Bovin, N. “Distinguishing African bovids using Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS).” PLoS1 16 (5), e0251061.

2021 Goldstein, S.T. “Lithic technological organization of the “Elmenteitan” in southern Kenya: Implications for mobility and climatic resilience.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 61: 101259. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2020.101259.

2021 Bleasdale, M., Richter, K., Janzen, A., Brown, S., Scott, A., Zech, J., Wilkin, S., Wang, K., Schiffels, S., Desideri, J., Besse, M., Ndiema, E., Ogola, C., Manthi, F., Zahir, M., Petraglia, M., Trachsel, C., Nanni, P., Grossman, J., Hendy, J., Crowther, A., Roberts, P., Goldstein, S., Boivin, N. “Ancient proteins provide direct evidence of dairy consumption in eastern Africa.” Nature Communications 12(632).  https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-20682-3.

2020 Scerri, E., Kuhnert, D., Blinkhorn, J., Groucutt, H., Roberts, P., Zerboni, A., Orijemie, A., Barton, H., Candy, I., Goldstein, S., Hawks, J., N’Dah, D., Niang, K., Nicoll, K., Petraglia, M., & Vella, N. “Field based sciences must transform in response to COVID-19.” Nature Ecology & Evolution.

2020 Wang, K.*, Goldstein, S.T.*., Bleasdale, M.,  Clist, B., Bostoen, K.,  Bakwa-Lufu, P., Buck, L. T., Crowther, A.,  Dème, A., McIntosh,  R., Mercador Florin, J., Ogola, C., Power, R., Sawchuk, E., Willmsen, E., Petraglia, M., Ndiema, E., Manthi, F. K.., Krause, J., Roberts, P.,  Boivin, N., Schiffels, S. “Ancient genomes reveal complex patterns of population movement, interaction and integration in sub-Saharan Africa.” Science Advances 6(24). *Co-Corresponding authors

2020 D’errico, F., Shipton, C., Pitarch, A., Le Vraux, E., Goldstein, S., Boivin, N., Ndiema, E., Petraglia, M. “Trajectories of Middle to Later Stone Age cultural innovation in eastern Africa: the case of Panga ya Saidi, Kenya.” Journal of Human Evolution 141: 102737.

2019 Goldstein, S.T. “Lithic technology of the earliest herders at Lake Turkana, northern Kenya.” Antiquity 93 (372): 1495-1514

2019 Stephens, L., Fuller, D., Boivin, N., Rick, T….Goldstein, S (54th of 120)….Ellis, E.C. “Archaeological assessment reveals Earth’s early transformation through land use.” Science 365(6456): 897-902.

2019 Goldstein, S.T. “Infrastructures of pre-colonial food-security in eastern Africa,” In A. Logan & M. Shoeman (Eds) Useable Pasts Forum: Critically Engaging Food Security, African Archaeological Review. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10437-019-09347-9

2019 Goldstein, S.T. “The lithic assemblage from Sugenya: A Pastoral Neolithic site of the Elmenteitan    group in southwestern Kenya.”  Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 54: 4-32.

2019 Goldstein, S.T. “Knowledge transmission through the lens of lithic production: A case study from the Pastoral Neolithic of southern Kenya.”  Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 26: 679-713.

2019 Capriles, J., Albarracin-Jordan, J., Lombardo, U.,Osorio, D., Maley, B., Goldstein, S.T., Herrera, K.A., Glascock, M.D., Domic, A., Veit, H., & Santoro, C.M. “Adaptation to High Altitude Ecosystems, and the Late Pleistocene Hunter-Gatherers of the Bolivian Andes.” Revista Textos Anthopológicos 20(9) :9-32.

2018  Marshall, F.B., Reid, R.E.B., Goldstein, S.T., Storozum, M., Wreschnig, A., Hu, L., Kiura, P., Shahack-Gross, R., & S.H. Ambrose.  “Ancient herders enriched and restructured African grasslands.” Nature 561: 387-390.

2018 Goldstein, S., Hildebrand, E., Storozum, M., Sawchuk, E., Lewis, J., Ngugi, C. & L. Robbins. “New archaeological investigations at the Lothagam harpoon site at Lake Turkana, Kenya.” Antiquity 91(360).

2018  Hildebrand, E., Grillo, K., E. Sawchuk, E., Pfeiffer, S., Conyers, L., Goldstein, S.,Hill, A.C., Janzen, A., Klehm, C., Helper, M., Kiura, P., Ndiema, E., Ngugi, C., Shea, J.J., and H. Wang.  “A monumental cemetery built by eastern Africa’s earliest herders near Lake Turkana, Kenya.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 115 (36): 8942-8947.

2018 Sawchuk, E., Goldstein, S., Grillo, K., & E. Hildebrand. “Cemetery construction and the spread of pastoralism in eastern Africa.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 51: 187-205.

2018 Goldstein, S.T. “Picking up the pieces: Reconstructing lithic production strategies at a Late Holocene obsidian quarry in southern Kenya.” Journal of Field Archaeology 43(2): 85-101.

2018 Capriles, J., Albarracin-Jordan, J., Bird, D., Goldstein, S., Jarpa, G., Maldonado, C. & C. Santoro.  “Mobility, subsistence, and technological strategies of early Holocene hunter-gatherers in the Bolivian Altiplano.” Quaternary International 473b: 190-205.

2018 Grillo, K., Prendergast, M., Contreras, D., Fitton, T., Gidna, A., Goldstein, S., Knisley, M., Langley, M. & A. Mabulla. “Pastoral Neolithic Settlement at Luxmanda, Tanzania.”  Journal of Field Archaeology 32(2): 102-120.

2017 Goldstein, S.T. and J.M. Munyiri. The Elmenteitan Obsidian Quarry (GsJj50): “New perspectives on obsidian access and exchange during the Pastoral Neolithic of southern Kenya.” African Archaeological Review 34(1): 43-73.

2017 Frahm, E., Goldstein, S.T., & C.A. Tryon. „Forager-fisher and pastoralist interactions along the Lake Victoria shores, Kenya: Perspectives from portable XRF of obsidian artifacts from Kansyore rock shelters.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 11: 717-742.

2016 Goldstein, S.T. and C.M. Shaffer. “Experimental and archaeological investigations of geometric microlith function among Mid-to-Late Holocene herders in southwestern Kenya.” Journal of Archaeological and Anthropological Science 9(8): 1767-1788.

2016 Capriles J., Jordan, J., Lombardo, U., Osorio, D., Herrera, K., Maley, B., Goldstein, S.T., Domic, A. I., Glascock, M.D., Veit, H. & C. Santoro. “High-altitude adaptation and late Pleistocene foraging in the Bolivian Andes.” Journal of Archaeological Sciences: Reports 6: 46-474.

2014 Goldstein, S.T. “Quantifying endscraper reduction in the context of obsidian exchange among early pastoralists in southwestern Kenya.” Lithic Technology 39: 3-19.

Heath Cabot

 

Professor Heath Cabot will be on leave from September 1, 2022- April 30, 2023.  

Heath Cabot  (PhD, University of California, Santa Cruz 2010) is a political and legal anthropologist whose research examines citizenship, ethics, and rights in Europe, with a focus on Greece.

Research interests and areas of expertise: political and legal anthropology; anthropology of ethics and morality; migration, citizenship, and asylum; human and social rights; care and humanitarian governance; economies of redistribution; cultures of neoliberalism; ethnography of the state; Europe, Italy, Greece; epistemology and aesthetics. 

Graduate Recruitment

I am currently interested in receiving applications from prospective students with a recent track record of hard work and success in relevant fields (academic or professional), and who demonstrate intellectual humility and generosity. Prospective applicants should be familiar with my research and intellectual approach. Research interests do not need to be (indeed, should not be!) exactly in the “niche” of what I have done, but should overlap in productive ways with aspects of my own approach—topically, thematically, area-wise, or ethico-politically. Applicants should also articulate how the department as a whole, as well as other relevant resources on Pitt campus, could fit with their proposed intellectual trajectory.

 

Research Description

Asylum and Refugees in Greece

My first research project, which formed the basis for my book (On the Doorstep of Europe: Asylum and Citizenship in Greece, UPenn Press 2014), examined political asylum on the EU’s most porous external border. Between 2005 and 2013, I conducted twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork on asylum adjudication in Greece, social and legal support in the NGO sector, EU policy-making, and migrant and refugee political mobilizations. I show that while asylum law and humanitarian aid enact exclusion, they also speak to emergent configurations of Greek, European, and more global citizenship, often transforming knowledge, ethics, and judgment. 

Rights in Crisis: Humanitarian Governance on Europe’s Mediterranean Margins

I am currently working on a second book manuscript on the precaritization of human and social rights in austerity-ridden Greece through the prism of community-based healthcare. This project emerged directly from my earlier research, as I observed Greek citizens increasingly seeking services necessary for the sustenance of bodily health in extra-state venues, often alongside asylum seekers and refugees. This project is focused on “social pharmacies and clinics,” grassroots initiatives that provide care and medicines based on political-economic and social “solidarity.” Since 2011, these clinics have emerged throughout Greece, operating on horizontally-organized forms of voluntarism and redistribution. Pensioners, unemployed persons, and migrants and refugees work alongside each other to assist diverse groups of beneficiaries (some of whom are volunteers themselves) through the redistribution of medicines and care. I show how citizens and non-citizens alike in Greece are increasingly dependent on both formal and informal modes of humanitarian governance, which, I argue, throws into question the capacity of state and supranational governments to safeguard access to right on the margins of the global North.

Emily Wanderer

Emily Wanderer earned her PhD from MIT’s program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society. She is an anthropologist of science whose research focuses on the intersection of medical and environmental anthropology and addresses how ideas of identity and place in the world are implicated in the practice of life scientists, as well as the ways human and non-human lives intersect and are transformed in scientific practice.

Her research and teaching interests include the anthropology of science and technology, medical anthropology, environmental anthropology, multispecies ethnography, Latin America, and Pittsburgh.

 

Research Description

Professor Wanderer’s first book, The Life of a Pest (2020), is a study of the politics of nature in Mexico, examining why and how different species are variously protected or exterminated to improve life as a whole. Through multispecies ethnographic research in labs, fields, and offices, it analyzes how scientists moved biopolitics and biosecurity beyond the human to include animal, plant, and microbial worlds. In improving life, scientists were called upon to determine what it meant to be a native or invasive species and to address the migration, mobility, and security of a wide array of life forms. They became arbiters who established which life forms were included in or excluded from group membership. In Mexico, where nature has never been conceptualized as pristine or separate from culture and human life, biopolitics and biosecurity have looked different than in Euro-American places. Scientists produced biopolitical apparatuses that incorporated multiple species and sorted bodies according to categories of difference that were informed by Mexican history and culture. Through case studies of infectious disease, invasive species, and agricultural and ecological research, this book considers how better living is a multispecies project, one which moves past anthropocentric conceptions of a good life to incorporate a more biocentric view.

Her current research project examines the convergence of tech and wildlife in the Anthropocene in the science of wildlife tracking and the production of the "datafied animal." Over the past twenty years, scientists have developed an ever expanding "internet of animals," a collection of tools and research practices that include machine learning, AI, cyberinfrastructure, GPS-telemetry, and minaturized tags. These have transformed the way animal life is tracked, quantified, and understood. Through ethnographic fieldwork on the development and use of technology for wildlife research, this project analyzes the ideas, cultural categories, and histories that shape machine learning and AI about wildlife and the consequences they have for wildlife management. 

Professor Wanderer also has research interests in the Pittsburgh environment, particularly air quality, its relationship with health, and the development of related citizen science projects. 

Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).

 

Courses

Anthropology of Science: Global Perspectives

Science and technology are integral to contemporary societies. Understanding how science is produced and how it shapes daily life is a crucial challenge for anthropologists, who have studied the production of scientific knowledge in labs, hospitals, field sites, and elsewhere. While early studies of science as a cultural practice focused primarily on the U.S. and Europe, science and technology are produced and consumed globally. Through analyses of case studies of biotechnology, medicine, genetics, conservation, agriculture, energy, climate science, and computing around the world, this class will investigate the global dynamics of science and technology. Juxtaposing readings on different scientific fields from around the globe, we will look for recurring themes that connect these studies. What happens when science and technology travel, and how do new places emerge as centers of knowledge production? How are culture, identity, technology, and science linked?

Health and the Environment in Pittsburgh

This course examines the relationship between environment and health, with a special focus on the city of Pittsburgh and the surrounding environs as a case study. We will use medical anthropology to systematically investigate the effect of the environment on health and the interplay of natural and human systems. Drawing on research in political ecology, this class will consider the social, political, and economic systems that shaped Pittsburgh and its inhabitants. We will pay particular attention to the way changing industrial and environmental conditions changed incidence of disease, and how exposure to risk and disease are shaped by race, gender, and class. We will examine issues like the histories of air pollution and resource extraction including coal mining, oil and gas drilling and their impacts on the environment and health. The course will examine how knowledge about health is produced and the development of new forms of citizen science that enlist local residents in projects to monitor issues like air quality.

Global Pharmaceuticals

This course examines pharmaceuticals as cultural and social phenomena, following their development, production, marketing, and use around the globe. We will investigate a number of issues, including the growing number of drugs prescribed to Americans each year, the lack of access some populations have to essential medicines, the increasingly global nature of clinical trials, and the role of pharmaceutical companies in the opioid crisis. We will use the study of drugs and medicines to analyze the production of medical knowledge, changing perceptions of health and illness, and the role of the state and the market in the development and distribution of therapeutics. Pharmaceuticals bring together science, clinical practice, marketing, and consumerism, and this course will draw on anthropological research to trace the role they play in global flows of knowledge, capital, commodities, and people.

People and other Animals

What can anthropology tell us about nonhuman life forms? This class examines the interconnections between humans and other life forms, looking at how human cultural, political, and economic activities are shaped by the animal, plant, and microbial forms that surround us and likewise how these life forms are shaped by human activities. Topics addressed will include the interactions of humans and other beings in agriculture, domestication, hunting, scientific research, medicine, pet-keeping, and conservation. We will consider the subjectivity and agency of the nonhuman, our moral and ethical obligations to other life forms, and critically examine divisions between culture and nature.

Medical Anthropology II

This course is a seminar in medical anthropology, focusing on the key theoretical perspectives and methodological problems that have characterized the subfield. We begin with an overview of the emergence of the field of medical anthropology from early studies of rationality and belief, moving on to analyze diverse medical traditions and understandings and experiences of the body, health, and disease. We will discuss contemporary theory in medical anthropology as well as the construction of research problems from different theoretical perspectives in medical anthropology. The course will address approaches within medical anthropology to the social construction of illness and healing, sex, gender, race, markets and bioeconomies, and global health and humanitarianism. The goal of the course is to prepare students to conduct their own research and to engage in contemporary scholarly debates within the subfield of medical anthropology.

Gabby M. H. Yearwood

Gabby M.H. Yearwood is a Teaching Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Managing Faculty Director for the Center for Civil Rights and Racial Justice in the Law School at the University Pittsburgh. He is a socio-cultural anthropologist earning his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in Anthropology focusing in Black Diaspora Studies and Masculinity. His research interests include the social constructions of race and racism, masculinity, gender, sex, Black Feminist and Black Queer theory, anthropology of sport and Black Diaspora. Dr. Yearwood holds a secondary appointment with the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Program at Pitt.  Dr. Yearwood is also a teaching member of the Pitt Prison Education Project. Dr. Yearwood has served as a consultant and qualitative researcher on projects for the Association of Bone Mineral Research Task Force, SARS-COV2-Prevelance Study, R24 Group for Public Health and Adolescent Medicine, and the Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health (REACH) Project.

https://www.civilrights.pitt.edu/

https://www.ppep.pitt.edu/

 

 

Research Description

Dr. Yearwood has conducted research with high profile college athletes gaining insight into the ways in which young men create and sustain masculinity and race in relation to their social lives as athletes at institutions of higher education.  He is most interested in examining the structures of race, gender and sexuality as they are informed by institutions of sporting life. 

Courses

Activist Anthropology

Following the work of activist anthropology this course will teach students that “critical engagement brought about by activist research is both necessary and productive. Such research can contribute to transforming the discipline by addressing knowledge production and working to decolonize our research process. Rather than seeking to avoid or resolve the tensions inherent in anthropological research on human rights, activist research draws them to the fore, making them a productive part of the process. Finally, activist research allows us to merge cultural critique with political action to produce knowledge that is empirically grounded, theoretically valuable, and ethically viable.” (Speed 2006). This course will teach students both the importance and value of conducting research that moves outside of the “ivory tower” of academia. “[A]ctivist scholars work in dialogue, collaboration, alliance with people who are struggling to better their lives; activist scholarship embodies a responsibility for results that these “allies” can recognize as their own, value in their own terms, and use as they see fit.” (Hale 2008) This course will explore major conceptual work on the role and ethical responsibility of anthropological research and social justice issues. Students will be required to participate in methodological exercises that will require engagement in the Pittsburgh community.

Anthropology of Race and Science 

This course takes a critical look at the narratives and discourses in and around race and its relationship to scientific thought that both essentializes and naturalizes bodies and their capabilities. We will explore narratives which use the tool and authoritative voice of science, scientific method and genetics. In addition, we will look at some of the historical and contemporary narratives of the biological underpinnings of racist discourse and its incorporation into everyday imaginings of social identities. We will look at blogs, internet posts, media, and academic literature to view and critique the ways in which science logic becomes racialized logic.

Politics of Black Masculinity 

This course explores the role and significance of Black Males and black masculinity in American society. Examining the varied social roles Black males have occupied in both literal and symbolic systems students will gain an understanding of the interrelatedness of race, gender and masculinity in American culture and its impact on social, political and legal institutions in America.

Anthropology of Sport 

Sport captures the minds and money of billions of people everyday, the Olympics, World Cup Soccer, American College Football, and Little League World Series. Yet despite its overwhelming significance in everyday life it goes largely ignored in Anthropological discussions. This course serves to introduce students to the significance and centrality of sport in understanding and interpreting social life. Sport will be critically examined through major anthropological categories of race, class, ethnicity, gender and power.

Human Sexuality in Crosscultural Perspective 

This course will explore the expression of human sexuality across a diversity of cultural and social settings.  It will include discussions of how human groups manage sexuality and human reproduction; theories concerning the development of different marriage, family and household systems as they relate to human sexuality; differences in values and expectations related to sexuality in different cultures; the development of sexual expression across the life span in different cultures; and approaches to understanding heterosexual and homosexual relationships and sexual violence. 

Introduction to Cultural Anthropology 

This course is designed to introduce students to cultural anthropological methods and concepts that are useful for gaining a better understanding of human diversity. We will examine such topics as family systems, economic and political change, religion and ritual in order to encourage students to question commonly held assumptions about what is "normal" and "natural" in human experience.