Area of Interest:

Identity and Agency, Activism, Social Movements, Cultural Studies, Environmental Studies, Schooling and Work, Gender, US

Education:

Ph.D., California, Irvine, 1974.

Research & Activities:

Research Background: Field Research: Trinidad, West Indies, Shango (1967--research for MA); Tutuila, American Samoa, Samoan ethnopsychology (1973, doctoral research); National Institute of Education funded ethnographic studies of school desegregation (1975-1977) and of women and schooling (1979-1981), both carried out in the southeastern United States; NSF funded study of women's critical commentary in Nepal (1991, 1986, 1990); NSF-funded study of computer programmers. NSF-funded research, "Estrangement from the Public Sphere: Economic Change, Democracy and Social Division in North Carolina" (1996-present) and Identity and Environmental Action: The U.S. Environmental Movement as a Context of Behavioral Change" (1996-present), both carried out in North Carolina.

Present Research: My theoretical interests revolve around identity, agency and social change, particularly that brought about by social movements. Several colleagues and I recently published Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds (1998, Harvard), a book, which along with a co-edited volume, History in Person: Enduring Struggles, Contentious Practice, Intimate Identities (2001, School of American Research Press), articulates a social practice theory of identity. Two previous co-edited volumes, The Cultural Production of the Educated Person (1996, SUNY) and Selves in Time and Place: Identities, Experience and History in Nepal (1998, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers) pursued similar issues in educational research and Nepalese studies. More recent publications in this theoretical vein include a co-edited special issue of Ethos, entitled, Ethnographic Studies of Positioning and Subjectivity: Narcotaffikers, Taiwanese Brides, Angry Loggers, School Troublemakers and several book chapters, “Self and Power in the World of Romance: Extending Sociogenic Theories” (2004) and "Vygotsky, Mead and the New Sociocultural Studies of Identity" (2007).

The two projects mentioned above, "Estrangement from the Public Sphere," and the study of the U.S. environmental movement, are large, collaborative ventures. Both projects investigate the new conditions for political and cultural activism and the importance of environmental issues in the public sphere. They also ask how social movements inhabit people's lives, becoming not only viable communities of practice but enduring cultural forms of desire.

The results of the first project have been summarized in a new book, Local Democracy under Siege:  Activism, Public Interests and Private Politics (2007, NYU Press).  Several new articles from the environmental movement study have been published in the last few years:  "Becoming and Environmental Justice Activist" (2007), "Identity and Sustained Environmental Practice" (2003) and "Multiple Identities in Practice:  On the Dilemmas of Being a Hunter and an Environmentalist in the USA" (2003 in the E-journal, Focaal).

Links to a complete listing of publications, papers and other activities relevant to these research interests are given below.

Identity and agency

Identity and environmental action

Local democracy, activism and the public sphere (NC project)

Center for Integrating Research and Action (CIRA) http://www.cira-unc.org/

This project was created to bring my and others’ research on social change into dialogue and collaboration with community organizers and activists in North Carolina, the U.S. and abroad.  The partnerships that CIRA “houses” may be initiated by either academic or public actors and are predicated on the idea that both groups are interested in joining forces to address a particular problem and that both stand to learn from the exchange.  New knowledge and new practices—that would not otherwise have been reached—are expected to grow from these collaborations.  Academic participants span any number of disciplines, as the problem addressed dictates.  Community participants will also likely be drawn from coalitions of groups and individuals working in different areas of a state or region to resolve a perceived social problem.  CIRA is intended to provide an infrastructure and a forum to support a number of such collaborations.  It is a “horizontal” instrument of its participants, not a “vertical” institution intended to control the course of the work involved.

The CIRA Collaboration on Local Food Systems will serve to illustrate the model of “engaged scholarship” / “research-based activism” that the Center embodies.  It engages an interdisciplinary group of faculty and graduate students in the University of North Carolina system with three, regionally based, North Carolina community associations.  The goal, broadly stated, is to foster the revitalization of local agricultural production and marketing, which in turn supports (rather than exports) regional and community development and affords food security for people of all socioeconomic levels, but especially those of lower wealth. The Collaboration, now in its second year of work, recently held a successful conference and planning meeting in Durham, N.C. attended by over 70 participants and guests.  New linkages to food/farm activists in Kentucky were forged and plans for “community (that is, participatory) food assessments” are in the process of design and implementation across the three N.C. regions.  The assessments will draw not only on the expertise and place-based knowledge of activists, but also on social-scientific methods adapted to these contexts.  They are not only steps toward the overall objective, but also contributions to knowledge in various disciplines.  This doubled and interdependent achievement exemplifies CIRA’s desired outcome.

Links to activities relevant to CIRA are given here

The Social Movements Working Group (SMWG)
This collective project started in the Fall of 2003, encompassing faculty and graduate students in anthropology, sociology and geography primarily, with a few participants from other disciplines. The aim of the group is to infuse the field of social movements theory and research with new ideas arising from interdisciplinary conversations in the academy and intellectual-political conversations within and among social movements themselves.  Hence the group has moved to engage seriously with social movement activists as knowledge producers in their own right, instead of "theorizing" about movements from academic positions. Over the past two years, the group has had collective discussions about established and emergent notions in the field (knowledge, networks, identities, space and place, ethnography, etc.), some of which has taken place in dialogue with activists from various parts of the world. The anthropologists in the group are of course interested in anthropological contributions to the field, which have remained largely invisible or secondary in the field as a whole.  They are also drawn to dialogues across disciplines and epistemologies with sociologists, political scientists, geographers, and others.  The group is currently working on a series of papers for publication (under review by the Anthropological Quarterly). Current faculty facilitators are: Dorothy Holland and Arturo Escobar (Anthropology) and Charles Kurzman (Sociology). For more information on this project (including the project's background paper), see Society for International Development

Links to activities relevant to research on social movements