Amidst growing policy interest in global citizenship education, this ethnographic study examines one school's mission to foster global citizens amongst elite youth in Guatemala. Despite educators' efforts to raise awareness about local inequities and instill national identity and attachment to Guatemala, students constructed a neoliberal vision of citizenship that allowed them to disregard national politics of diversity and instead focus on efforts to become globally competitive, often at the expense of reproducing inequality and division.
O ver the last two decades, black feminist social scientists and others have made important interventions into feminist theory through their analysis of race, class and gender. They have described the ways in which race, class and gender are not additive but rather interlocking, interactive, and relational categories, "multiplicative" (King 1988:42), "simultaneous" (Andersen and Collins 1995:ii), characterized by "the articulation of multiple oppressions" (Brewer 1993:13). The work that emerged from these efforts significantly deepened feminist perspectives on gender, in particular our understanding of the ways in which the intersectionality of race, class and gender condition the experience of impoverished women.Those of us who work in this area continue to be challenged to operationalize these insights to produce scholarly work that can better the lives of women. Although highlighting the matrix of interaction is a necessary theoretical intervention, it is not sufficient (Mullings 1997). How do we go beyond an analytic description of intersectionality to understand the manner in which these hierarchies interact to have profound consequences in the daily lives of real women? I had the opportunity to think further about the life and death meaning of race, class and gender when I became involved in an initiative sponsored by the Division of Reproductive Health of the Centers for Disease Control. Impelled by studies demonstrating that regardless of their socioeconomic position, African American women fare worse in birth outcomes than white women at every economic and education level, (e.g., Schoendorf et al. 1992), the CDC circulated a Request for Proposals for a research paradigm that would use qualitative ethnographic approaches to assess infant mortality and risk within a social context. For the CDC, this was a departure from traditional ways of thinking about racial disparities in heath and illness: the fact that African American women and men die younger, and have higher rates of morbidity and mortality for most diseases, than whites.Despite important recent critiques in the field (e.g., Kreiger 1999), mainstream interpretive frameworks for explaining racial disparities in health 32
The following is the text of the presidential address, slightly revised and with references added, presented on November 23, 2013, at the 113th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago, Illinois. I begin by contextualizing the development of anthropological theory in some of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, with particular reference to Chicago. After exploring contemporary challenges to the academy and to the discipline of anthropology, I close with a discussion of relevant research projects, new publics, and the future of anthropology. The original address, which included a PowerPoint presentation illustrating some of the ideas, is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb8yLzXPH5M.
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