Jennifer Johnson
Please join me in congratulating Jennifer Johnson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, for being awarded the 2017 Junior Scholar Award at the American Anthropological Association meeting.
Johnson was recognized by the Anthropology and Environment Society for her article, “Eating and Existence on an Island in Southern Uganda” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 31(1): 2-23. This article, based on Johnson's long-term ethnographic fieldwork in fishing sites, homes, markets, management meetings, and family and community-oriented places of healing, engages ontology as methodology to challenge received wisdoms about gender, development, Lake Victoria’s species extinction crisis, and the assumed universality of the categories of food and fish.
In the Spring of 2018, Johnson will complete a Carson Writing Fellowship with the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. While at the Carson Center, Johnson will work to complete her first book, which examines how stories about the past shape and are shaped by contemporary environmental policy debates, and how alternative – but no less accurate – accounts of linked transformations in social and ecological life may inspire more livable futures.
Johnson’s other published works have appeared in the journals: Aquatic Ecosystem Health and Management and the African Journal of Hydrobiology and Fisheries; in the edited volumes: The Handbook of Sustainability and Social Science Research (Springer, 2018), Subsistence under Capitalism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Mc-Gill-Queen’s, 2016), and Landscape, Environment and Technology in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (Routledge, 2012); and online with Somatosphere.
Congratulations, Dr. Johnson!
David A. Reingold
Justin S. Morrill Dean
College of Liberal Arts