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Featured Biographies
Christa CravenChrista Craven is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies (Chair from 2012-2017) at the College of Wooster. She received her B.A. New College of Florida (1997), M.A. (2000) and Ph.D. (2003) from American University. Craven’s research interests include women’s health & reproductive justice, lesbian/gay/bi/trans/queer reproduction, midwifery activism, feminist ethnography & activist scholarship, and feminist pedagogy. She is the author of Reproductive Losses: Challenges to LGBTQ Family-Making (Routledge, 2019), Pushing for Midwives: Homebirth Mothers and the Reproductive Rights Movement (Temple University Press, 2010), and a textbook with Dána-Ain Davis, Feminist Ethnography: Thinking Through Methodologies, Challenges & Possibilities (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Craven and Davis also published an edited collection entitled Feminist Activist Ethnography: Counterpoints to Neoliberalism in North America (Lexington Books, 2013). She has served on the American Anthropological Association’s Governance Commission (2005-2007), is the past co-chair of the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists (2004-2005; now the Association for Queer Anthropology), and currently serves as the Co-Chair of the Program Administrators and Directors (PA&D) for the National Women’s Studies Association. She teaches Introduction to WGSS, Transnational Feminisms, Queer Lives, Doing Feminist Research: Theory & Practice, Feminist Pedagogy in Action, Introduction to Anthropology, Ethnographic Research, Global Politics of Reproduction, and Globalizing Health (with Dr. Tom Tierney in Sociology). Her professional website is: http://discover.wooster.edu/ccraven/
Lorna ButlerProfessor Emeritus, Iowa State University (Wallace Chair for Sustainable Agriculture 2000-2007); co-editor (with Della E. McMillan) of Tapping Philanthropy for Development. Lessons Learned from a Public-private Partnership in Rural Uganda. Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2015.
Fadwa El GuindiFour-field sociocultural anthropologist, Retiree at UCLA, who writes widely and lectures internationally. She is elected Trustee at the World Academy of Art & Science, a think tank for generating ideas and insights about global affairs. For a partial record of her awards and publications see https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6365-101X. She has 7 books and more than 130 research articles, with works translated into 5 languages. Research articles published in high impact journals
Dmitry BondarenkoI graduated with the M.A. degree cum laude in 1990 from the Moscow State University, Department of Ethnography, School of History. I completed my Ph.D. in 1993 and D.Sc. in 2000 at the Russian Academy of Sciences. At present, I am Vice-Director for Research of the Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Director of the Inrternational Center of Anthropology of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, and Full Professor with the Center of Social Anthropology of the Russian State University for the Humanities. In the past, I was a visiting scholar with the Program of African Studies of Northwestern University (Evanston, USA), Institut fuer Geschichte (Goettingen, Germany), and Maison des sciences de l'homme (Paris, France). I have lectured at universities of Russia, the USA, Egypt, Tanzania, Slovenia, and Angola. I have conducted field research in a number of African countries (Tanzania, Nigeria, Benin, Rwanda, Zambia, Uganda) and among Black people in Russia and the USA.
Walter LittleWalter E. Little is the author of nine books and edited volumes and has published over 90 articles and reviews. His monograph, Mayas in the Marketplace: Tourism, Globalization, and Cultural Identity (Texas, 2004), won Best Book of 2005 from the New England Council for Latin American Studies and his co-edited volume, Street Economies in the Urban Global South (SAR, 2013) won the Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Prize in 2014.
Dr. Little was raised on a farm near Logansport, Indiana. Upon getting a BA in journalism at Roosevelt University in Chicago in 1987, he spent the following two years working in Central America and traveling over land to Lake Titicaca, after which he returned to Chicago where he earned an MA in anthropology at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He completed his PhD in cultural anthropology at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
He is a cultural anthropologist at the University at Albany, SUNY, who studies the socio-economic and political lives of Mesoamericans. His multi-sited ethnographic research in Guatemala and Mexico aims to understand heritage and tourism practices in urban places with attention to identity politics and handicrafts sales to tourists. His research explores Kaqchikel and K'iche' Mayas' livelihoods as artisans and vendors in urban heritage sites, as a way to learn how about socio-economic mobility and the creative ways in which Mayas have made do and, even, thrived in a political system that has long discriminated against them.
Michael BurtonBorn Long Beach CA, where my father worked during the war as a petroleum chemist. Grew up in Pasadena area, where my family had been since 1890. Father was a chemist. Mother majored in History and taught elementary school. Graduated from a recently integrated High School (white, black, Japanese American, and others). Went to MIT to become a social scientist. That meant being an economics major (and math minor) because they had no other socials science options. At MIT I had the privilege to take courses from three economists who later won the Nobel in economics, to take most of the first-year graduate curriculum in economics, and to work for three years as a research assistant at the graduate level for a Japanese-born economist. From him I learned about a new alternative to positivist statistics (Bayesian) and a new challenge to rational choice theory (Herbert Simon's work). From MIT I followed my friend Bill Geoghegan to the Stanford Anthropology PhD program, where I intended to combine psychological and economic anthropology. My mentors there were Roy D'Andrade, Kim Romney, Frank Cancian, Bill Skinner, Joe Greenberg, and Chuck Frake. A family health problem kept me from the field until after I got my PhD, completed a Post-Doc at Harvard with the Whitings, and began as an Assistant at UCI, where I have been since 1969. My first field work, in Yucatan was made possible by UCI. My second field experience, in Ireland, was funded by Lilyan Brudner's grant. My third, in Kenya, was funded by a Carnegie Foundation to the Bureau of Educational Research at the University of Nairobi. There Lorraine Kirk and I did research with Gikuyu and Maasai people. Next came assistance to Mark Schoepfle and Phil Reno on an ethnographically-based social impact assessment of relocation for energy development. Finally, I have been engaged since 1997 first with field and survey research, and now with writing of a study of changing food practices in four Micronesian societies (Pala
