We have growing list of contributors at this stop on the anthropology/sociology trail. Our current authors are:
Dr. Tony Waters is chief editor of Ethnography.com. He came to us from the Sociology department at California State University at Chico where he was a professor from 1996-2021. In 2016-2022 he found himself with a new gig at Payap University in northern Thailand where he is also on the faculty of the Peace Studies Department. Most recently, he moved to Germany were he is a faculty member in the Culture Studies Program. He has also been a guest professor in Tanzania. His main interests have been international development and refugees in Thailand, Tanzania, and California. This reflects a former career in the Peace Corps (Thailand), and refugee camps (Thailand and Tanzania). His books include: Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan (2001), The Persistence of Subsistence Agriculture: Life Beneath of the Marketplace (2007), When Killing is a Crime (2007), Schooling, Bureaucracy, and Childhood: Bureaucratizing the Child (2012), etc. Most recently he is the editor and translator of The Man from Bangkok: San Francisco Culture in the 60s by Rong Wongsavun (2022). Many of his PhD students in Thailand were from Myanmar, which is perhaps why he posts about that country. His hobby is trying to learn strange languages–and the mistakes that that implies.You can read more of his work at academia.edu.or purchase one (or more!) of his books from Amazon.com.
Christina Lauren Quigley is a vlogger at Laurelin the Other and review editor and web developer of Ethnography.com. Christina is a 2019-2020 Fulbright Research Alumna and Ethnography.com’s latest author. She began working and writing as an ethnographer–anthropologist in the mountains of northern California as an activist alongside Native American Mountain Maidu communities. Christina has also been known to work for minimum wage in America, selling booze to ordinary Americans at a neighborhood liquor store to further study cultural transmission of Americans’ methods of coping and wellness through alcohol and illegal drugs.
Christina has since fallen under the influence of Congolese rumba music, and lives at the shores of Lake Tanganyika in East Africa to research the ways that music and song traditions diffuse from eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo to Tanzania. As modern Congolese music traditions move across the Tanzania-Congo border, refugees and migrants from DR Congo are charismatic masters of their own musical heritage within the African continent. In-country and abroad, Congolese rely on nightlife music transfigured into religious settings. Christina is a Swahili speaker and postgraduate (MA) in music and anthropology at the University of Dar es Salaam.
Marianne Paiva, recovering paramedic and adrenaline junky who comes to Ethnography.com after 4 years driving ambulances very, very fast. When she gave up life in the fast lane, she decided to study paramedics instead, and wrote the book, Breathe: Essays from a Recovering Paramedic, which every trauma junky and ambulance chaser should buy multiple copies of from Amazon.com.
A professor told her after she finished her B.A. at Chico State in 1999 that she could study paramedics as a vocation, if not a living. This she has done off and on for ten years or so, while also teaching Introduction to Sociology, First Year Experience, Sociology of Stress, Population, Ethnicity and Nationalism, and other courses for California State University, Chico. On slow days in class, she wakes students up with stories about ambulances, and funny stories about freshmen. In her spare time, she gardens, tends to her children, and writes creative Facebook postings, and Ethnography.com blogs. You can connect with Marianne at her website www.mariannepaiva.com and also purchase her collection of essays here from Amazon.com. Currently an inactive author, awaiting a poke with a sharp stick.
Julie Garza-Withers, former award-winning community college Sociology instructor who’s currently using Sociology to organize and research for racial justice in rural northern California. She was a facilitator in the film “If These Halls Could Talk” with Director Lee Mun Wah, and has published at Working Class Studies, and elsewhere.
Julie has a particular interest in class and classism as a form of social stratification, and the role of cussing and anti-intellectualism in stratifying society. A fan of cussing herself, she says she only “Cusses when necessary,” which is often. She considers herself a working class academic because she is a first generation college grad who grew up in rural southern California where her options post-high school included getting married or working at Del Taco and selling tacos to fast food customers until she got married.
Julie has an M.A. from California State University, Chico, where she studied how social class and gender impact work-place conflict between women. She lives in rural northern California with her husband Larry where they enjoy the forest, their dogs, and gardening.
You can follow Julie on twitter where she posts as WorkingClassTeacher, and also check out Julie’s anti-racism work at Rural SURJ of NorCal-Showing Up for Racial Justice. Currently an inactive author, awaiting a poke with a sharp stick.
Bloggers Emeriti
Mark Dawson is founder and editor emeritus of Ethnography.com. Currently working as a consultant and procrastinating continuing on The Ordinary People Project, he was formerly a senior strategist with Jump Associates, a new opportunity and strategy development firm in San Mateo, California. He has an MA and MS in Anthropology and Instructional Systems Design respectively, the majority of his work since graduate school has been focused on using ethnographic methods for product design and development, design strategy and new opportunity development. He worked with a number of product development firms, helping them bring ethnography methods into the process. Just prior to Jump, was Sr. Anthropologist with Eastman Kodak Corporation in Rochester, NY. Given his role as a corporate shill, the other bloggers believe that Mark goes home at night and secretly bathes in Spanish doubloons. Currently an inactive author.
Michael Scroggins, PhD student at Teachers College, Columbia and a researcher at the Center for Everyday Education. He is currently in Silicon Valley conducting research for the project: “Education into Technological Frontiers: Hackerspaces as Educational Institutions.” In the past he has worked on a number of applied projects including the Library Study at Fresno State. Currently an inactive author.
Cynthia Van Gilderis, emeritus editor of ethnography.com. Currently an associate professor, Cindy is the former Chair of the Department of Anthropology at St. Mary’s College of California in Moraga, California. She is a strong believer in the power of four-field anthropology to illuminate the human condition, although her area of expertise is archaeology. Although she has worked at sites from the Palaeolithic to the 19th Century, and from Europe to the American Midwest, her true love is Polynesia, where she has been lucky enough to use household archaeology to study gender and family organization. Currently an inactive author.
Donna Lanclos lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. While she is a cultural anthropologist and folklorist by graduate training, she claims to be part archaeologist by marriage. Donna received her PhD in 2000 and is the author of the book At Play in Belfast: Children’s Folklore and Identities in Northern Ireland (2003 Rutgers University Press). Currently an inactive author.
James Mullooly, The AnthroGeek, is an Applied Cultural Anthropologist with a great deal of interest in improving the quality of life in Fresno by focusing of key issues such as education, commerce and industry. He is currently an assistant professor of anthropology at California State University Fresno. He has lived in Jamaica, Mali and Egypt and has conducted fieldwork in Egypt and the United States (in inner cities in New York and the Midwest). He works in the fields of Ethnography, Applied Anthropology and Ethnomethodology. He Also blogs at The AnthroGuys with Hank Delcore. Currently an inactive author.
Jennifer Jones, student at California State University, Fresno, finishing up BA degrees in both history and Anthropology (cultural focus). After reading the Epic 2006 conference proceedings, she became interested in applied business anthropology. Currently she is involved in multiple projects including a study on downtown Fresno revitalization efforts, an entrepreneur mentorship program, and Engineering for Peoples and Markets, an inter-disciplinary team that includes students from anthropology, business, and engineering. In addition to this, she works as an office manager for a non-profit program focused on American Indian health access, education, and advocacy. Her educational goals include completing an M.B.A. and then a Ph.D. in anthropology. While her social life has become limited with all of these various projects, she enjoys discovering new music and reading about places she’d like to travel to in the future. She is the recipient of the first Ethnography.com grant to assist her to attend the EPIC 2008 conference in Denmark. Currently an inactive author.