Rice University Anthropology

10/15/2026

Please join Rice Anthropology for a Brown Bag Talk “Metal and/as Memory: Rethinking Metallurgy from the Caribbean” with Kimberley McKinson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University.

🕤 Oct. 16 (Friday), 12 pm
📍 Sewall 570 & Zoom
🔗 To register for Zoom, click the link: https://riceuniversity.zoom.us/meeting/register/ept994iwQcugalacjYK1cQ #/registration

This event is sponsored by the Center for African and African American Studies (CAAAS).

In Kingston, Jamaica, metal is a key marker of shifts in security and insecurity in the city’s high crime urban environment. Metal bars, grilles, and gates made of mild steel are used to fortify middle- and upper-class homes and many are aesthetically stylized to feature two common West African adinkra motifs. In this talk, I ask: How does the metal in Kingston function as an artifact of Black history and memory, illuminating both the afro-diasporic impulse to remember and forget? In attempting to answer this question, I interrogate metal across three meditations: speculative, ethnographic, and visual. In so doing, I explore metal as a conductor of memory and as an archive of afro-diasporic creativity, continuity, and change. Through attention to the historical and on-going relationship between metal and the black body as well as the aliveness of metal matter, this talk suggests the importance of taking the Caribbean metropolis as an effort at memory, one materially constituted in and through metal infrastructures.

Kimberley McKinson is a humanistic anthropologist and an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. A Mellon Foundation Dean’s Faculty Fellow in the Humanities, Kimberley is also affiliated with the Department of African American and Diaspora Studies and the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies at Vanderbilt. Kimberley’s research is situated at the intersections of crime, postcolonial insecurity, memory, and storytelling in Jamaica. Her writing has been published in venues including Surveillance and Society, the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, City and Society, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, Small Axe, Public Books, and Sapiens. Kimberley’s book manuscript, In the Monster’s Shadow: Searching for Security in Jamaica, weaves traditional ethnography with personal/family memoir and takes seriously the mythology surrounding Jamaica’s so-called “crime monster.” The project interrogates the ways in which Jamaica’s crime monster portends entangled precarities and possibilities of security and insecurity in the country’s high-crime postcolonial landscape.

10/13/2026

Dr. Alessandro Angelini will give a book talk, "Modelo Favela: Miniature Life in Rio de Janeiro," followed by a discussion.

🗓️ Oct. 14, 6 - 7 pm
📍 Chao College Magister House (Rice University)

Since 1997, a group of Afro-Brazilian working-class youths in Rio de Janeiro has been building Morrinho: a sprawling city of painted bricks and found scraps that doubles as the board for a boisterous, long-running role-playing game.

Angelini follows them through that miniature world and through their everyday lives to ask what it means to play in a place shaped by deep inequality and racialized violence. Their neighborhood serves at once as a training ground for military police operations and as a pilot site for municipal upgrading, and their game argues constantly over what counts as the real city — a prism onto the porous line between the imagined and the lived.

Dr. Angelini is an assistant professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. He studies how newness enters the world, and the contours of possibility for marginalized groups under conditions of apparent constraint. He holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center and was a postdoctoral researcher at the London School of Economics.

Check the poster for more information.

10/08/2026

New publication!

Our assistant professor, Huatse Gyal, published a new article, "The political production of human inferiority: A personal tale and a human condition," in Anthropology and Humanism 51(2), 2026.

This autobiographical article argues that the human propensity to construct narratives of inferiority is a key element in sustaining systems of domination and exploitation. It also emphasizes the importance of crafting narrative remedies that empower and elevate the dignity and vibrancy of cultures, literatures, and lifestyles that have been consistently devalued.

Read the full article here: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/anhu.70126

10/06/2026

JOIN US for an Anthropology Grad Admission Information Session via Zoom. Prospective students can meet with department faculty and ask questions.

📌 Archaeology Info Session with Dr. Khadene Harris, Dr. Molly Morgan, and Dr. Mary Prendergast
🗓️ Wednesday, Oct 28, 11 am - 12 pm
Zoom link: https://riceuniversity.zoom.us/meeting/register/gSZ7TUBvRN29TgK99kbgvg #/registration

📌Socio-Cultural Info Session with Dr. Amarilys Astrella, Dr. Eugenia Georges, and Dr. Vivian Lu
🗓️ Friday, Nov 6, 2 pm - 3 pm
Zoom link: https://riceuniversity.zoom.us/meeting/register/cq82A9S_TqqQYOMRLL15oQ #/registration

09/29/2026

JOIN US and the Program in Science and Technology Studies for a Brown Bag Talk “Taking Dinosaurs Off The Pedestal: An Anthropologist Explores Vertebrate Paleontology in the United States Today” with Elana Shever, Professor of Anthropology, Colgate University.

🕤 Oct. 2 (Friday), 12 pm
📍 Sewall 570 & Zoom
🔗 Register for Zoom here: https://riceuniversity.zoom.us/meeting/register/vFVn8QpaRlK5Nu4DfyNLrA?_x_zm_rtaid=VRIfip1rR2iJ2mp_LrumIQ.1790695914494.c253de5e6d5ec3b88d77cecd6fe4d2b6&_x_zm_rhtaid=934 #/registration

Cultural Anthropologist Elana Shever will share insights into the role that vertebrate paleontology plays in the contemporary United States, and the meanings we attach to dinosaur fossils, which she gained from 5 years of shadowing paleontologists at work, joining museum tours, exploring paleontology parks, and trying her hand at fossil excavation and preparation, including pedestalling a dinosaur femur. This talk re-thinks the popular conception of dinosaurs as vicious beasts and explores other ways of relating to prehistoric animals.

Elana Shever is a cultural anthropologist with interests in natural resources and materiality; science, technology and corporations in society; neoliberalism; globalization; and capitalism. She has conducted research in Argentina, Colombia, and the United States.

Dr. Shever's first book, Resources for Reform: Oil and Neoliberalism in Argentina (Stanford University Press, 2012) explores how people’s lives intersect with the increasingly globalized and concentrated oil industry through a close look at Argentina’s experiment with privatizing its national oil company in the name of neoliberal reform. Examining Argentina’s conversion of its state-controlled oil market to a private market, the book reveals interconnections between large-scale transformations in society and small-scale shifts in everyday practice, intimate relationships, and identity. It offers a window into the experiences of middle-class oil workers and their families, impoverished residents of shanty settlements bordering refineries, and affluent employees of transnational corporations as they struggle with rapid changes in the global economy, their country, and their lives. Resources for Reform reverberates far beyond the Argentine oil fields and offers a fresh approach to the critical study of neoliberalism, kinship, citizenship, and corporations.
This study has led to Dr. Shever's continued involvement in developing the critical anthropology of corporations. She wrote a review of the scholarship on transnational and multinational corporations for the International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. She is also the author of the chapter "Corporations" in The Anthropology of Resource Extraction.
Dr. Shever's latest book is Making Our Beasts: Paleontology in the United States (University of California Press, forthcoming December 2025). It is an ethnography of science-in-action that uses a familiar topic—dinosaurs—to lead readers to understand science and its objects in new ways. Through fieldwork and interviews conducted at laboratories, dig sites, museums, and entertainment sites, Elana Shever explores vertebrate paleontology in the United States, showing how the practices of scientists and the materiality of fossils together shape the social world and also are shaped by it. The book foregrounds elements of scientific inquiry that have been sidelined: affect, touch, material agency, and the labor of volunteers, technicians, and other nonscientists. It also reveals how paleontology continues to be structured by race, gender, and colonialism.
Dr. Shever's scholarship has been published in American Ethnologist, Anthropological Quarterly, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, among other venues.

09/28/2026

New publication!
Our professor, Cymene Howe, published a new article, "Elements in place: More-than-human resistance and other forces of the earth," in Critique of Anthropology 46(3), 2026.

Professor Howe's commentary extends interspecies intersectionality by elaborating how the elements, in place, shape cases of more-than-human resistance.

Open access. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0308275X261469717

09/17/2026

📢 Talkin' About My Generation: The Affordances of Taxonomic Stereotypes

Professor Ilana Gershon will discuss her co-authored article with Bonnie Urciuoli.

🕤 12pm, September 21
📍 HUMA 327

Dr. Gershon is the Herbert S. Autrey Chair, Director of the Graduate Studies in Anthropology, and Co-Director of the Program in Science and Technology Studies.

We hope to see you there!

09/15/2026

JOIN US for a Brown Bag Talk “Feminist and Pan-African Resistance at UNFCCC Climate Negotiations” with Frances Roberts-Gregory, Feminist Political Ecologist, HBCU Green Fund.

🕤 Sept. 18 (Friday), 12 pm
📍 Sewall 570 & Zoom
🔗 Zoom registration: https://riceuniversity.zoom.us/meeting/register/HXrtDE3sSauByG-iJXJC7g?_x_zm_rtaid=kOrGpYLtSeOOMLhZQr5dmw.1789485190809.00b487ec3a72ff6c1f3db6688f77bc8d&_x_zm_rhtaid=873

Environmental governance shapes resource distribution and subjection to premature death, playing out a necropolitics of who lives and who dies. Critical environmental, energy, and climate justice scholars moreover inquire into how women, q***r communities, and people of African descent resist this precarity, the logical result of state-corporate crime. Feminist political ecologists likewise expose the lack of attention to gender in environmental studies and highlight the links between gendered vulnerability to climate change and the androcentricity of extractive economies in anthropology. Despite these intellectual advancements, pan-African and feminist organizations continue to be vastly underrepresented in climate policy debates and imaginings of climate solutions. I methodologically employ Black feminist autoethnography, conversational interviews, policy analysis, and archival creation to investigate how Black and Indigenous women navigate contradictory relationships with energy and petrochemical industries, build transnational solidarity, and advance feminist advocacy. I will focus on work at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COPs) including the recent COP 30 in Belém, Brazil along with insights from 10+ years of feminist political ecology research.

Dr. Frances Roberts-Gregory is a Feminist Political Ecologist, Ecowomanist Storyteller, and Performance Artist (dancer and cosplayer). She leads environmental education, climate advocacy, and youth engagement projects for BIPOC, q***r, abolitionist, and feminist organizations committed to grassroots community solutions, translocal philanthropic organizing, and intersectional environmental, energy, and climate justice.

Trained as an environmental scientist, climate anthropologist, and community geographer, Dr. Roberts-Gregory researches the role and political priorities of U.S. Afrodiasporic communities, BIPOC youth, and women’s organizations at United Nations climate negotiations as well as Black and Indigenous women’s everyday strategies of resistance to environmental violence and state-corporate crime. Her postdoctoral feminist activist research likewise supports capacity-building for ecofeminist and pan-African transnational coalitions through the Feminist Agenda for a Green New Deal, the UNFCCC Women and Gender Constituency, and the Global Afro-Descendants Climate Justice Collaborative. She formerly taught as a Visiting Faculty at Tulane University, Bard Early College New Orleans, the UN-affiliated University for Peace in Costa Rica, and the School for International Training (SIT) International Honors Program across Ecuador, Morocco, and Nepal.

Dr. Roberts-Gregory earned a BA in Environmental Science, Sociology, and Anthropology from Spelman College and a PhD in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management from the University of California, Berkeley. She later completed postdoctoral fellowships at Northeastern University and the Harvard University Center for the Environment (HUCE) at the Salata Institute for Climate & Sustainability. Dr. Roberts-Gregory additionally served as a Climate Justice Program Officer at the Foundation for Louisiana and as a Program Director of Leadership Development at the Northeastern University Initiative for Energy Justice. Past and current partners include the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (DSCEJ), Black in Environment, The Green Leadership Trust, The Chisholm Legacy Project, and the Environmental Grantmakers Association. She formerly served on the board of the Hive Fund for Climate & Gender Justice and currently serves on the boards of One Square World, Climate Critical, and the HBCU Green Fund.

09/14/2026

Anthropology in the age of AI?

What does anthropology have to offer in an AI-driven world? A recent WSJ article explores why understanding people, culture, and context may be more important than ever.

Link:

College students and workers alike are finding a new set of skills is needed for a rapidly changing workplace.

09/05/2026

Our assistant professor, Huatse Gyal, has been elected to the Board of the American Ethnological Society (AES) as a Councillor, with a four-year term beginning in November 2026 at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA).

“I am honored and excited to join the Board of the American Ethnological Society as a Councillor, and to give back to a community that has shaped my anthropological training for many years. Over the four-year term, being a Councillor involves taking on a variety of leadership roles, including organizing AES's program at the AAA meeting, leading a book prize selection committee, and organizing a spring conference. I look forward to contributing to all of these efforts, and, as someone whose education has been made possible largely through the generosity and kindness of amazing mentors, I'm especially glad for the chance to support graduate student research in this capacity.”