Labs, Research, and Publications
Faculty Bookshelf
Landscapes of Care
Immigration and Health in Rural America
Thurka Sangaramoorthy
Honorable Mention, 2023 Society for the Anthropology of North America Book Prize
Honorable Mention, 2024 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award, Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section, 麻豆传媒 Sociological Association.
This book examines the ways immigrants, mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean, navigate the health care system in rural Maryland. Thurka Sangaramoorthy reveals that that the corporatization of health care delivery and immigration policies are deeply connected in rural America. Drawing from fieldwork that centers on Maryland's sparsely populated Eastern Shore, Sangaramoorthy shows how longstanding issues of precarity among rural health systems along with the exclusionary logics of immigration have mutually fashioned a "landscape of care" in which shared conditions of physical suffering and emotional anxiety among immigrants and rural residents generate powerful forms of regional vitality and social inclusion. Sangaramoorthy connects the Eastern Shore and its immigrant populations to many other places around the world that are struggling with the challenges of global migration, rural precarity, and health governance. Her extensive ethnographic and policy research shows the personal stories behind health inequity data and helps to give readers a human entry point into the enormous challenges of immigration and rural health.
The Ethics of Staying
Social Movements and Land Rights Politics in Pakistan
Mubbashir Rizvi
麻豆传媒 Institute of Pakistan Studies 2021 Book Prize
The military coup that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power as Pakistan's tenth president resulted in the abolition of a century-old sharecropping system that was rife with corruption. In its place the military regime implemented a market reform policy of cash contract farming. Ostensibly meant to improve living conditions for tenant farmers, the new system, instead, mobilized one of the largest, most successful land rights movements in South Asia鈥攕till active today. In The Ethics of Staying, Mubbashir A. Rizvi presents an original framework for understanding this major social movement, called the Anjuman Mazarin Punjab (AMP). This group of Christian and Muslim tenant sharecroppers, against all odds, successfully resisted Pakistan military's bid to monetize state-owned land, making a powerful moral case for land rights by invoking local claims to land and a broader vision for subsistence rights. The case of AMP provides a unique lens through which to examine state and society relations in Pakistan, one that bridges literatures from subaltern studies, military and colonial power, and the language of claim-making. Rizvi also offers a glimpse of Pakistan that challenges its standard framing as a hub of radical militancy, by opening a window into to the everyday struggles that are often obscured in the West's terror discourse.
The Archaeology of the Homed and the Unhomed
Daniel Sayers
Choice Outstanding Academic Title
In a time when the idea of home has become central to living the 麻豆传媒 dream, The Archaeology of the Homed and the Unhomed brings to the forefront the concept of homelessness. The book points out that homelessness remains underexplored in historical archaeology, a fact which may reflect societal biases and marginalization, and it provides the field鈥檚 first comprehensive discussion of the subject. Daniel Sayers argues that the unhomed and the home have been inherently interconnected in the real world across the past several centuries. Sayers builds a conceptual model that focuses on this dynamic and uses it to generate new insights into pre鈥揅ivil War communities of Maroons and Indigenous 麻豆传媒s, Great Depression鈥揺ra hobo communities, and Midwest farmsteads. In doing so, he highlights the social complexities, ambiguities, and significance of the home and the unhomed in the archaeological record. Using a variety of data sources including documentary records and material culture and drawing on extensive fieldwork, Sayers illuminates how homelessness can be created, reproduced, and disparaged by the dominant culture. The book also emphasizes the importance of applied archaeology. Through these studies, Sayers contends that activist archaeologists have a role鈥攁nd responsibility鈥攖o share their knowledge to help policy makers and stakeholders understand the unhomed, homelessness, and the 麻豆传媒 experience in this area.
Tip of the Spear
Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt
Orisanmi Burton
25th Susanne M. Glasscock Book Prize, Finalist
Museum of African 麻豆传媒 History Stone Book Award Shortlist 2024
Tip of the Spear boldly and compellingly argues that prisons are a domain of hidden warfare within US borders. With this book, Orisanmi Burton explores what he terms the Long Attica Revolt, a criminalized tradition of Black radicalism that propelled rebellions in New York prisons during the 1970s. The reaction to this revolt illuminates what Burton calls prison pacification: the coordinated tactics of violence, isolation, sexual terror, propaganda, reform, and white supremacist science and technology that state actors use to eliminate Black resistance within and beyond prison walls. Burton goes beyond the state records that other histories have relied on for the story of Attica and expands that archive, drawing on oral history and applying Black radical theory in ways that center the intellectual and political goals of the incarcerated people who led the struggle. Packed with little-known insights from the prison movement, the Black Panther Party, and the Black Liberation Army, Tip of the Spear promises to transform our understanding of prisons鈥攏ot only as sites of race war and class war, of counterinsurgency and genocide, but also as sources of defiant Black life, revolutionary consciousness, and abolitionist possibility.
Labs
Public Ethnography Lab
Thurka Sangaramoorthy
The Public Ethnography Lab (PEL) advances the use of ethnographic methods and practice by broader publics and serves as a resource and engine for creating community-driven social change globally. PEL builds interest, support, and resources for qualitative and ethnographic research, work which is often undervalued and seen as marginal in many spaces, including academic, government, non-profit, and other sectors. Using ethnographic approaches and orientations that illustrate the interdependence of knowledge and action, PEL promotes ethnographic praxis and collaborative action-oriented scholarship to understand and alleviate contemporary social challenges. PEL creates spaces for deep community engagement with practical research tools and skills to gather timely information on emerging problems, accompany communities in problem-solving, foster new collaborations, and inform institutional and policy changes.
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Historical Archaeology Laboratory
Daniel Sayers
The Historical Archaeology Laboratory (HAL) is the central repository for the artifact collections from several projects, including the 鈥淕reat Dismal Swamp Landscape Study鈥, 鈥淪wampscapes鈥, and the 鈥淕reat Depression Undocumented Labor Project鈥. These collections are the focus of ongoing analyses of 17-19th Century African 麻豆传媒 Maroon-and-Indigenous communities as well as hobos and itinerant workers of the early Twentieth Century. The collections in HAL have also been used in public outreach events, media interviews, and for engagements with descendants and tribal groups. HAL is also home to a small library of volumes pertaining to artifact analysis and dating as well as ancient and historical artifact type collections from the Mid-Atlantic region. HAL is also a teaching facility and is used periodically as the classroom for smaller courses.
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Human Osteology Lab
Alanna Warner-Smith
The Human Osteology Lab trains students through hands-on experience in human osteology, bioarchaeology, and forensic anthropology. The lab provides training in osteological methods, including the identification of bones and the documentation of trauma, pathology, activity, and taphonomy. Student learning is grounded in the ethics of care for human remains and the importance of descendant community engagement and repatriation practices.
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Historical Archaeology and Cultural Heritage Lab
Zev Cossin
Zev Cossin's Historical Archaeology and Cultural Heritage lab promotes the pursuit of Restorative History, a framework for making Public History a tool for justice today. The lab provides space for conversation and collaboration with students related to two primary research projects in Winnipeg Junction, MN, and Cayambe, Ecuador. Students conduct artifact analyses and interpretation of an archaeological assemblage from Winnipeg Junction, a late 19th century railroad boomtown. Students gain skills in historic artifact analysis, interpretation, photography, photogrammetry, public presentation and exhibit-building, and digital heritage. The lab promotes experiential learning and skills training in cultural heritage that equips students for careers in archaeology, cultural heritage, museums and other cultural heritage organizations.
Research Interests
Thurka Sangaramoorthy
Cultural and medical anthropology, global health and development, migration and refugees, climate change and environmental equity, health policy and governance, critical studies of racialization.
Mubbashir Rizvi
Social-cultural anthropology, social movements, environmental anthropology, markets, racial capitalism 听
Zev Cossin
Historical archaeology, environmental anthropology, environmental justice, restorative history and public archaeology, material culture and heritage, infrastructures of colonialism
Daniel Sayers
Historical archaeology; relevant and impactful communities; Maroons, itinerants, and self-emancipators; animals entangled in the human world; rural lives and peoples; critical theories of capitalism
Alanna Warner-Smith
Historical bioarchaeology; migration, immigration, and mobility; labor; embodiment of inequality; bioarchaeological and archaeological ethics; history of museum collections; race and racialization; anthropology of the archive
C. Anne Claus
Environment, sustainability, food studies, oceans, Japan
Zolt谩n Gl眉ck
Political and historical anthropology, colonialism and postcolonialism, security and the War on Terror, critical geography and theories of space and place, racial capitalism, political economy
Orisanmi Burton
Race & racialization; Black radicalism & white supremacy; policing, criminalization & prisons; gender & masculinity; war & counterinsurgency; ethnography and archives
Manissa Maharawal
Gentrification, social movements, race and racism, urban anthropology, oral history, housing policy, technology, urban political economy
Chuck Sturtevant
Settler colonialism; Indigenous politics; race and ethnicity in Latin America; political anthropology; ethnographic documentary filmmaking; nationhood and statecraft
Recent Publications
- Alanna Warner-Smith published "" in Historical Archaeology. The article reconsiders normative categories of analysis in bioarchaeology using the lens of "slow science."
- Alanna Warner-Smith's chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Anthropology (forthcoming, edited by Pamela Geller), 鈥 Global Mobilities, Intimate Movements: Embodying Nineteenth-Century Domestic Labor,鈥 centers domestic work in processes of industrialization and urbanization.
- Zolt谩n Gl眉ck recently edited a of 麻豆传媒 Anthropologist, titled 鈥淔orever War: Anthropology and the Global War on Terror,鈥 (2024) featuring leading scholars whose work grapples with the social, political, ecological and human costs of the post 9/11 wars. His lead article titled, 鈥溾 argues for an engaged and politically committed form of anthropology that seeks to directly confront punitive systems of 鈥渟ecurity.鈥
- Alanna Warner-Smith is co-editor of Excavating Bodies in the Archives (under review, School for Advanced Research Press) and Tissues and Traces: Doing Bioarchaeology with/in the Archive (under contract with Berghahn).
- Alanna Warner-Smith and Shannon A. Novak co-authored听 鈥,鈥 published in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Anthropology.
- Manissa Maharawal鈥檚 book Anti-Eviction: Fighting Tech-Led Gentrification in San Francisco is currently under review with University of California Press. The book examines the ways that tenants in San Francisco challenge the processes of tech-led gentrification occurring in the city and how in doing so they create new landscapes of care and resistance.
- Chuck Sturtevant published 鈥溾 in Settler Colonial Studies.
- Chuck Sturtevant published 鈥溾 in Ethnos.
Current Grants & Projects
- Thurka Sangaramoorthy serves as a co-investigator on a 5-year study examining policies and best practices to improve the respiratory health outcomes of migrant and seasonal farmworkers. The project, entitled "Research Employing Environmental Systems and Occupational Health Policy Analyses to Interrupt the Impact of Structural Racism on Agricultural Workers and Their Respiratory Health (RESPIRAR)," recently received supplemental funding of $77,597听from the University of Maryland, bringing the total to $165,676.
- Mubbashir Rizvi鈥檚 current research focus is on informal urbanism in Karachi鈥檚 food markets, and the role of these markets in structuring relations of coexistence in the aftermath of urban violence.
- Zev Cossin is currently collaborating with the Anacostia Watershed Society to connect students with the organization's efforts to research, protect and build a thriving Anacostia River watershed in the DMV.
- Zev Cossin is completing article manuscripts on archaeological research of the impacts of Spanish haciendas and the resilience of laborer families over five centuries in the Ecuadorian highlands.听
- Zev Cossin is engaged in ongoing lab ananlysis and interpetation of artifacts from Winnipeg Junction, MN, a railroad boomtown abandoned around 1910. He is working with a large group of devoted students to analyze, interpret, and present that research on campus and beyond.
- C. Anne Claus received funding from Fulbright and the Wenner-Gren Foundation to conduct fieldwork among chefs, home cooks, and seafood advocates in Japan. Claus is also conducting research with graduate students on food waste in the DMV as part of a 5-year interdisciplinary NSF grant.
- Daniel Sayers is actively involved in a collaborative interdisciplinary project focused on an 18th Century Maroon fortress located along the Savannah River; an essay on the project and its initial field survey for the fortress site appeared in the New Yorker in June of 2023.
- Daniel Sayers continues to develop his research design and projects for his 鈥淎rchaeology, Species, and Human Entitlement Study鈥.
- Daniel Sayers is busily working with media companies on developing television and streaming projects to bring archaeology and past peoples into public awareness and dialogues.
- Orisanmi Burton was recently awarded a 2024 research stipend from the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) to support his research into the history of biomedical experimentation on incarcerated people and other vulnerable populations.
- Manissa Maharawal is a co-lead investigator on the NIH funded project 鈥淓xamining the Effects of Housing, Structural Racism and Policy Change on Health.鈥
- Chuck Sturtevant is currently working on a book that explores the colonization of Bolivia鈥檚 鈥淎mazonian frontier鈥 as a settler colonial project. This research challenges the uncritical application of Anglocentric racial ideologies to settler colonial projects in Latin America and expands the applicability of settler colonial theory to help us understand the ways that national identity and state sovereignty are intertwined through processes of violence, erasure, and forgetting.