The School for Advanced Research is pleased to announce that the 2021 J. I. Staley Prize will go to Laurence Ralph, professor of anthropology at Princeton University and director of the Center on Transnational Policing, for his 2014 book, Renegade Dreams: Living through Injury in Gangland Chicago (University of Chicago Press).
Every year SAR publishes its Annual Report, which describes accomplishments and acknowledges supporters over the previous fiscal year. Our 2019–2020 report is no different, and yet so much has changed, as President Michael F. Brown explains.
In addition to canceling, postponing, or livestreaming our in-person public programs until April 30, we have reluctantly decided to close the SAR campus to the public until further notice.
We understand that your mailboxes are flooded with messages about responses to Covid-19 and it can seem overwhelming. But now is a good time to reflect and find new ways to engage with one another. So we can’t engage in-person? Let’s connect from home. Here are several ways you can continue to be part of the SAR community from afar.
Lisa Stevenson’s Life Beside Itself examines two historical moments among the Inuit of northern Canada: a tuberculosis epidemic in the mid-twentieth century and an epidemic of suicides among Inuit youth today. Through richly textured analysis, Stevenson shows how suicide prevention programs disregard what makes life worthwhile to Inuit people. Life Beside Itself deftly weaves together ethnography, archival voice recordings, and images to raise new questions about life, death, and care.
With his family and community, SAR mourns the passing of William Y. Adams, who died on August 22, 2019, in Lexington, Kentucky, at the age of ninety-two.
Cities are shaped as much by paper and rubber stamps as they are by bricks and mortar, argues Matthew Hull in Government of Paper. By tracing the unexpected ways in which documents travel, he exposes the secret life of paper that profoundly shapes the built landscape of the planned city of Islamabad, and more broadly, gives us new ways of understanding bureaucracy on a global scale.
Earlier this month, the American Anthropological Association hosted the 117th annual meeting in San Jose, California. For many, the gathering is a five-day whirlwind of presentations, panels, committee meetings, awards, and social gatherings. Among the 6,000 anthropologists and related professionals in attendance, there were hundreds of SAR alumni.
