Rice University Anthropology, PO Box 1892, Houston, TX (2026)

10/27/2026

JOIN US for a Brown Bag Talk “Suicide, Climate, and the Loss of Homes” with Julie Livingston, Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University.

🕤 Oct. 30 (Friday), 12 pm
📍 Sewall 570 & Zoom
🔗 Zoom registration: https://riceuniversity.zoom.us/meeting/register/67SUseayRNmVio3UQdyUxw?_x_zm_rtaid=BXUPlDp7Tp6_EsgZl6n9yA.1793113913057.3e50e64e6bee0f4a069f09df6db1b1f6&_x_zm_rhtaid=715 #/registration

This talk considers political feelings about climate change. It does this by examining the problem of su***de as it correlates to environmental conditions. I argue that environmental degradation creates life conditions that challenge people's ability or willingness to endure. But also that environmental change is manifest within the body at the molecular level, where it also shapes capacities of endurance. I show how these two registers of feeling combine in practice by tracing two examples of feedback loops in the United States: the first around housing and the second around pharmaceuticals. These feedback loops help illustrate the counter-intuitive ways that su***de and climate are entangled in the capitalist system. In each one the biochemical accumulates with the socioeconomic and political to necessitate endurance and prod existential threat.

Julie Livingston is the Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. A cross-disciplinary scholar with training in history, anthropology, and public health, she is the author of four books Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality (co-authored with Andrew Ross); Self-devouring Growth: a Planetary Parable told from Southern Africa; Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic; and Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana, and is co-editor of several volumes as well as two special issues of Social Text: Collateral Afterworlds (coedited with Zoe Wool) and Interspecies (coedited with Jasbir Puar). A 2013 MacArthur Fellow, she is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes. She is currently at work on a new book of essays about the relationship between climate change and su***de.

10/27/2026

Scenes from Rice Civic Forum: Gulf Coast Futures-Galena Park, held on October 24 at the Galena Park Resources & Training Center.

Organized by Rice University faculty Gökçe Günel (Anthropology), Amna Ansari, and Albert Pope (Architecture), the Rice Civic Forum brought together Galena Park residents, community leaders, students, and faculty to share research and imagine futures for Gulf Coast communities. Our PhD student Nabiya Khan, contributes as a research assistant on the grant.

As part of Rice’s participation in the National Academies Gulf Futures Program, students from City/Culture, offered by the Department of Anthropology, and Civic Workshop, offered by the School of Architecture, collaborated on research exploring Galena Park through mapping, observation, and engagement with residents and community organizations. The research and exhibits presented at the forum grew out of this collective work.

Through research exhibits and community conversations, the forum explored the intersections of industry, environmental conditions, infrastructure, mobility, public space, and community identity, centering the question: What future do you imagine for Galena Park?

10/25/2026

Congratulations to PhD student Zara Bakshi on winning the prestigious Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant. She received a grant for her project "The Making of Recoverable Subjects: Opioid Dependence and Gendered Care in Kashmir."

Zara Bakshi’s research asks what it means to become a recoverable subject in Kashmir, examining this question amid expanding institutional and community responses to opioid dependence. It explores the ways in which recovery comes to be defined, measured, and moralized, tracing the movement of clinical categories across archival, medical, religious, and everyday registers. The project considers the relationship between institutional expectations of recovery and the experiences of those seeking treatment, asking how ideas of health, responsibility, and well-being are negotiated in everyday life.

Following care across clinical settings, households, and community programs, the research examines the relationships through which treatment is organized and sustained. Central to this inquiry are the gendered dimensions of treatment and recovery, particularly women’s access to care. The project also examines the labor of attendant kin, most often women, who sustain therapeutic processes beyond formal institutions. This dimension of caregiving opens up questions about the boundaries of clinical responsibility and the relationship between formal treatment and the everyday labor of sustaining care.

Reading therapeutic settings as infrastructures, the research also traces the everyday work of waiting, maintenance, and repair through which institutions shape moral and affective life. Bringing together medical anthropology, feminist science and technology studies, and the anthropology of infrastructure, this research aims to contribute to broader conversations about addiction and recovery, gendered care, and global health.

10/20/2026

JOIN US for the Rice Civic Forum: Gulf Coast Futures in Galena Park with Gökçe Günel (Anthropology), Amna Ansari, and Albert Pope (Architecture).

🗓️ Saturday, Oct. 24
🕤 1:00 3:30 PM
📍Galena Park Resource & Training Center, 1721 16th St., Galena Park, TX 77547

As part of Rice University’s participation in the National Academies Gulf Futures Program, students conducted research on Galena Park and the Gulf Coast through mapping, observation, archival research, and direct engagement with residents and community organizations. The Rice Civic Forum brings together students, residents, community leaders, faculty, and the broader Houston community. Through research exhibits, conversations, and prompts, participants will consider a central question: What future do you imagine for Galena Park?

Free and outdoors. Families and community members of all ages are welcome.

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

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