Officers
President, 2022-2024
Eleana Kim
University of California, Irvine | [email protected]
Eleana Kim is the author of Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging and Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters along the Korean DMZ. She is an associate professor of anthropology and Asian American Studies at UC Irvine. Her research and writing focus on kinship, ecologies, and value.
Treasurer, 2022-2026
Margot Weiss
Wesleyan University | [email protected]
Margot Weiss is associate professor of American studies and anthropology at Wesleyan University, where she directs the cluster in queer studies. She is the author of the award-winning Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Duke, 2011) and editor of two forthcoming volumes: Queer Then and Now (The Feminist Press) and Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures (Duke). She is currently working on a book about the politics of institutional knowledge production among queer/left activists and academics.
Secretary, 2022-2025
Gökçe Günel
Rice University | [email protected]
Gökçe Günel is Associate Professor in Anthropology at Rice University. Her book Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (Duke University Press, 2019) focuses on the construction of renewable energy and clean technology infrastructures in the United Arab Emirates, more specifically concentrating on the Masdar City project. Dr. Günel co-authored "A Manifesto for Patchwork Ethnography" (2020), and co-leads Patchwork Ethnography.
Editor, Cultural Anthropology, 2022-2025
Matilde Córdoba Azcárate
University of California, San Diego | [email protected]
Matilde Córdoba Azcárate is the author of Stuck with Tourism: Space, Power and Labor in Contemporary Yucatán. She works across the fields of socio-cultural anthropology and critical geography in the understanding of the relations between tourism, space production and capitalism. She is currently working on a book on the generative nature of infrastructural refusals in contexts of climate crisis and new age heritage revival.
Editor, Cultural Anthropology, 2022-2025
Alberto Corsín Jiménez
Spanish National Research Council | [email protected]
Alberto Corsín Jiménez is an anthropologist working on the arts of entrapment, captivating counterurbanisms, and undercommons designs at the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid.
Editor, Cultural Anthropology, 2022-2025
Julia Elyachar
Princeton University | [email protected]
Julia Elyachar is Associate Professor of Anthropology and the Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies at Princeton University, where she is also a Faculty Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. Elyachar is the author of Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State (Duke, 2005; translations forthcoming in Arabic and Turkish); the co-editor of Thinking Infrastructures (Emerald, 2019); and the author of numerous articles in academic journals and public facing venues. She is a member of the editorial collective of Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (CSSAAME).
Editor, Cultural Anthropology, 2022-2025
Joanne Randa Nucho
Pomona College | [email protected]
Joanne Randa Nucho is the author of Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services and Power and co-editor of Thinking Infrastructures. She is also a filmmaker whose work has screened in various contexts, including the London International Documentary Film Festival in 2008 and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in 2017. She has written on the relationship between infrastructure and notions of the public, the politics of electricity and energy transition.
Editor, Cultural Anthropology, 2022-2025
AbdouMaliq Simone
University of Sheffield | [email protected]
AbdouMaliq Simone is Senior Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, Honorary Professor of Urban Studies at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, and co-director of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab, Polytechnic University of Turin. Key publications include, For the City Yet to Come: Urban Change in Four African Cities (Duke University Press, 2004), City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads (Routledge, 2009), Jakarta: Drawing the City Near (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times (with Edgar Pieterse; Polity, 2017), Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance for an Urban South (Polity, 2018), and The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture (Duke University Press, 2022).
Editor, Cultural Anthropology, 2022-2025
Manuel Tironi
Universidad Católica de Chile | [email protected]
Manuel Tironi is associate professor at the Institute for Sustainable Development and the Department of Sociology, both at Universidad Católica de Chile. He is co-editor of Disasters and Politics: Materials, Experiments, Preparedness (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014, winner of the 2015 Amsterdamska Award by the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology) and Thinking with Soils: Material Politics and Social Theory (Bloomsbury, 2020). His current project examines how ecological reparation is thought and done at the margins of liberal politics.
Editor, Cultural Anthropology, 2022-2025
Ather Zia
University of Northern Colorado Greeley | [email protected]
Ather Zia, Ph.D., is a political anthropologist, poet, short fiction writer, and columnist. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Gender Studies program at the University of Northern Colorado Greeley. Ather is the author of Resisting Disappearances: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir (University of Washington Press, 2019), which won the 2020 Gloria Anzaldua Honorable Mention award, the 2021 Public Anthropologist Award, and the 2021 Advocate of the Year Award. She has been featured in the Femilist 2021, a list of 100 women from the Global South working on critical issues. She is the co-editor of Can You Hear Kashmiri Women Speak (Women Unlimited, 2020), Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (University of Pennsylvania, 2018), and A Desolation called Peace (Harper Collins, 2019). She has published a poetry collection “The Frame” and another collection is forthcoming. Ather’s ethnographic poetry on Kashmir has won an award from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. She is the founder-editor of Kashmir Lit and is the co-founder of Critical Kashmir Studies Collective, an interdisciplinary network of scholars working on the Kashmir region.
Elected Members
2023 Cultural Horizons Prize Chair, 2020-2025
Andrea Ballestero
University of Southern California | [email protected]
Andrea Ballestero is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Ethnography Studio. Her research examines the places where law, economy, and science are so fused that they appear as one another. Her current project examines the re-invention of subterranean worlds as fluid formations in Costa Rica.
2023 AAA Program Chair, 2022-2027
Yukiko Koga
Yale University | [email protected]
Yukiko Koga is the author of Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption after Empire. Her researchexplores emerging moral landscapes for belated imperial reckoning in East Asia as contemporary generations wrestle with the history of settler colonialism, forced migration, and slavery, decades after the formal end of Japanese imperial violence. She is currently working on a book entitled Post-imperial Reckoning: Law, Redress, Reconciliation.
2023 Gregory Bateson Book Prize Chair, 2021–2025
Radhika Govindrajan
University of Washington | [email protected]
Radhika Govindrajan is the author of Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas, which explores how human relationships with nonhuman animals are drawn into and shaped by broader social and political projects. She is currently working on a book about sex scandals in rural India.
2023 AAA Program Chair-Elect, 2021–2025
Ramah McKay
University of Pennsylvania | [email protected]
Ramah McKay is the author of Medicine in the Meantime: The Work of Care in Mozambique, which examines the relationship between everyday practices of social production and reproduction and circulating forms of scientific and medical expertise. Her research interests include labor, care, mobility, and knowledge-making, especially in relation to health and place. She is an associate professor in the Department of History & Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
2023 [email protected] Chair, 2022-2027
Miriam Ticktin
CUNY Graduate Center | [email protected]
Miriam Ticktin is Professor of Anthropology in the PhD Program in Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She publishes widely on topics such as migration, borders, humanitarianism, and racial and gendered inequalities, and most recently, she has written about the idea of a decolonial feminist commons. She is the author of Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France (University of California Press, 2012), and co-editor of In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care (Duke University Press, 2010). She is currently finishing a book on, and against, innocence.
Student Representative
Student Representative and Contributing Editor
Alexandria Petit-Thorne
York University | [email protected]
Alexandria is a doctoral candidate at York University. Their research examines the digital performance practices of queer artists during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their research interests include digital ethnography, anthropology of media, queerness and sexuality studies, performance studies, community and care, and the politics of belonging. Other Research Interests: Performance; homonationalism; creative methodologies; teaching; pedagogy; research creation
Lead Contributing Editor
Kristin Gupta
Rice University | [email protected]
Kristin is a doctoral candidate at Rice University, where her dissertation follows the emergence of death doulas in the United States. Other Research Interests: care, capitalism, queer theory, STS, and medical anthropology.