In Dark Times: The Power and Promise of Engaged Scholarship
Public Lecture at Ilia State University
June 6 2018
In Dark Times: The Power and Promise of Engaged Scholarship
Alisse Waterston
Presidential Scholar and Professor of Anthropology
City University of New York, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
In this talk, anthropologist and gender studies scholar Alisse Waterston situates the promises and possibilities of contemporary, critical scholarship in context of today’s politically fraught times. Offering a view from the United States, Professor Waterston considers the movements towards critically applied and publically engaged scholarship to confront and transform the condition of ubiquitous violence in the contemporary world.
Professor Waterston has been awarded an honorary doctorate by Ilia State University. The talk will be concluded by a ceremony of honorary doctorate award.
Alisse Waterston is a cultural anthropologist and gender studies scholar who studies the human consequences of structural and systemic violence and inequality. Her areas of specialty include urban poverty and policy issues in the U.S. related to destitution, homelessness and substance abuse, health, welfare and migration, and applied policy-related research and writing. Her most recent cross-cultural work focuses on the processes and aftermaths of political violence, ethnic and religious conflict, displacement and transnationalism, remembering, diaspora, cultural trauma and identity formation.
Professor Waterston was International Scholar of the Open Society Institute (2012-2015), and co-editor with Maia Barkaia of Gender in Georgia: Feminist Perspectives on Culture, Nation and History in the South Caucasus (Berghahn Books: 2017). She is author of six books, including the award winningMy Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory and the Violence of a Century an intimate ethnography in the Routledge Series on Innovative Ethnographies, and Love, Sorrow and Rage, a study of women and homelessness in New York City.
Professor Waterston is a Trustee of the John Jay College Foundation Board, and co-Director of the John Jay College Vera Fellows Program, for which she also serves as faculty.
Alisse Waterston served as President of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) 2015-2017. She was editor of North American Dialogue, and founding editor of Open Anthropology, AAA’s public journal. She is currently working with artist-anthropologist Charlotte Hollands in developing a graphic nonfiction book based on her 2017 Presidential Address, Four Stories, A Lament, and an Affirmation.
Dr. Waterston received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the City University of New York Graduate Center and her M.A. in Anthropology from Columbia University.