Courtney T. Wittekind
Assistant Professor
// Anthropology
Faculty
Assistant Professor
// Cornerstone
Faculty
Office and Contact
Courses
ANTH 60500: Ethnographic Research Methods
SCLA 102: Transformative Texts (The City)
Courtney Wittekind received her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice from Harvard University in 2022. From 2022-2024, she was a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University with the Program in Agrarian Studies and Council on Southeast Asia Studies. She joined the Purdue University faculty in 2023.
Specialization
Dr. Wittekind’s scholarship addresses three global transformations: uneven urban development, the growth of speculative investment, and the rapid expansion of digital technologies. Emblematic of these interests is the topic of her first book: Myanmar’s New Yangon City Project, an ambitious, state-led proposal to build a 20,000-acre "new city" in the peri-urban margins of Yangon, the country’s largest city and former capital. A key node in China's Belt and Road Initiative, this new city was branded as a "people's city," fit for Myanmar’s highly anticipated, if ultimately short-lived, democratic era. Her book shows how small-scale farmers in the area slated for redevelopment tried—and often failed—to harness new city plans for their own purposes.
A second stream of research funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Dangers and Opportunities of Technology program extends Wittekind’s focus on speculation to explore digital fundraising in support of Myanmar’s Spring Revolution.
Her work on speculation, risk, and new media has been published in leading anthropology and geography journals, including Cultural Anthropology, Antipode, and Environment and Planning D.
Wittekind has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Blakemore Foundation, among others. She received an interdisciplinary undergraduate degree from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.Phil in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.
Notable Publications
Wittekind, Courtney T. 2024. “TAKE OUR LAND: Fronts, Fraud, and Fake Farmers in a City-to-Come.” Cultural Anthropology 39 (1): 91–117.
Faxon, Hilary Oliva, and Courtney T. Wittekind. 2023. “Livestreamed Land: Scams and Certainty in Myanmar’s Digital Land Market.” Environment and Planning. D, Society & Space.
Wittekind, Courtney T., and Hilary Oliva Faxon. 2023. “Networks of Speculation: Making Land Markets on Myanmar Facebook.” Antipode 55 (2): 643–65.
Wittekind, Courtney T. 2021. “Yangon’s ‘New City.’” China Made Brief, no. 9 (February).