Susan Seizer (promoted to full professor in 2018) is experimenting with a form of writing she calls Ethnographic Memoir, and is delighted to be teaching a new course of the same name this semester. In 2019 she received a College of Arts and Humanities Institute (CAHI) grant to convene a Symposium titled “Love, Money, and Incommensurability: Reciprocity in Long Term Ethnographic Relationships.”
Originally scheduled for May 2020 and postponed due to the pandemic, the Symposium will take place at IU in October 2021. Her own long term ethnographic relationship is with a south Indian family of musical theater artists with whom she has been working for over thirty years, and her ethnographic memoir of this relationship is a multi-media work in progress.
Since her promotion, Ilana Gershon (promoted to full professor in 2018) has been tracing a new theoretical movement in anthropology, outlined first in her 2019 American Ethnologist article, “Porous Social Orders.” She will develop the implications of this theoretical movement and its potential paths for future ethnographic explorations with the intellectual community at the University of Helsinki's anthropology department, where she is a visiting professor.
During the pandemic, she has been conducting fieldwork for her new book examining what the pandemic reveals about the tacit assumptions underlying Americans' experiences of contractual sociality in the workplace. Based on over 200 interviews, Gershon is addressing how workplaces, not civic associations, have become a foundational site for Americans to forge their political imaginations almost 200 hundred years after Tocqueville's seminal insight that Americans' experiences in civil society enable them to become democratic citizens.
Sarah Osterhoudt (received tenure in 2020) is an environmental anthropologist who studies the cultural, economic, and ecological dimensions of agriculture and trade in Madagascar. Her first book, Vanilla Landscapes: Meaning, Memory and the Cultivation of Place, was published with the New York Botanical Garden Press in 2017.
Her work has also appeared in academic and popular publications, including American Ethnologist, The Journal of Peasant Studies, and Sapiens. She is currently working on a project, funded by the National Science Foundation, on the affective dimensions of violence and justice in Madagascar’s vanilla boom. In addition to her academic research, Sarah has co-founded an organization that facilitates direct trade relationships with Malagasy farmers and has helped establish community libraries in Madagascar. Currently, she is beginning a new collaboration with Malagasy journalists, musicians, and filmmakers to document the stories of women vanilla growers in Madagascar.
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