De Ann Pendry, Senior Lecturer, Department of Anthropology
De Ann Pendry has continued to work with the Southeast Immigrant Rights Network, the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, the Comité Popular de Knoxville, and the Allies of Knoxville’s Immigrant Neighbors. Ongoing campaigns include countering anti-immigrant discourse by meeting with local groups, lobbying for in-state college tuition for undocumented students, and campaigning against 287(g), a program designed to train county jail officials to work as immigration enforcement agents.
Recently, Pendry presented at the meetings for the Latin American Studies Association, the Society for Applied Anthropology, and the Sixth Conference on Immigration to the United States South. In spring 2016, she gave invited talks in Mexico City at the Universidad Iberoamericana and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and worked with the McClung Museum on activities related to their exhibit, “Mayas: Lords of Time.” Her article, “Urgent Need to Address Punitive Immigration Policies,” was published in Practicing Anthropology (Winter 2016) as part of a conversation between Mexican and United States scholars about how we talk and write about migration. For the last two years, she has been participating in the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Humanities faculty seminar and plans to participate in that again in 2017-2018.
Derek Alderman, Professor, Department of Geography
Professor Alderman and Josh Inwood (now at Penn State) were successful in getting an NSF grant for a project titled: “The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Geospatial Intelligence, and Civil Rights.” Read the project abstract.
Rebecca Klenk, Lecturer, Department of Anthropology
Rebecca Klenk continued her research on right to education in India and prepared new courses on poverty and development and on anthropology of gender in the past year. Stay tuned for her new course on the anthropology of South Asia in the spring! She has just completed her final year as a faculty senator and as co-chair of the Research Council’s Centers Review Committee. Klenk served on faculty interview committees for Haslam Scholars Program admissions and the UT Fulbright review process and as graduate examiner for a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology and Development at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Last March at the Knox County Public Library’s Books Sandwiched In, she discussed Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay for the Diversity Miniseries sponsored by UT and the Knox County Public Library.
Michelle Brown, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology
Professor Brown continues to be involved in a new wave of critical carceral work that crosses the humanities and social sciences and employs abolitionist frameworks to illuminate and, thus, alter the social relationships that produce the carceral state. Her recent article in the journal Punishment & Society with criminologist Judah Schept, titled “New Abolition, Criminology and a Critical Carceral Studies,” seeks to lay the foundations for this kind of transformative discussion within criminology as does a chapter on abolition and carceral tourism for The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism. She and her colleague, Eamonn Carrabine, recently completed work on The Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology, the first anthology and primer on visual criminology. Brown also serves as senior editor for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia on Crime, Media, and Popular Culture, an unprecedented digital publishing effort, the project is comprised of over 125 long-form overview articles written and edited by leading researchers, addressing both foundational and cutting-edge topics, all available free online. These volumes take up a wide range of topics, including documentary criminology; race, crime, and visuality; representations of genocide; representations of torture; policing, state violence, and the visual; dark tourism; optics of the carceral state; spatialization and carceral geographies; colonialism and state violence; indigenous images of justice; aerial, satellite, and drone technology; corpses, popular culture and forensic science, to name only a few.
Rosalind I.J. Hackett, Professor, Department of Religious Studies
Professor Hackett serves as program coordinator for the African Consortium on Law and Religion Studies (ACLARS). She has helped plan conferences in Ethiopia (2016), Rabat (2017), and is working on Abuja (2018). She recently co-edited one of their volumes, Religious Pluralism, Heritage, and Social Development in Africa (M. Christian Green, Rosalind I.J. Hackett, Len Hansen, and Francois Venter) Stellenbosch, SA: African Sun Media. In May/June 2017, she returned to northern Uganda to assist with the Gulu Peace Garden Project and the Lwo Folktales Project.