Joanna Davidson
Faculty Profiles
Joanna Davidson
Assistant Professor
Office: 232 Bay State Road, Suite 410
Office Phone: 617-353-5024
E-Mail: jhdavid@bu.edu
Spring Office Hours:
Dr. Davidson is on leave Spring 2013
Joanna Davidson is a cultural anthropologist focusing on rural West Africans’ responses to environmental and economic change. She has conducted long-term ethnographic research in Guinea-Bissau among Diola rice cultivators, and is currently writing a book manuscript on the changing notion of “sacred rice” among Diola. She has also explored the regional dynamics of social fragility through a case study of inter-ethnic conflict across the Guinea-Bissau/Senegal border, and she returned to West Africa from January-June 2010 to explore the ways in which new international development initiatives directed at agricultural transformation are playing themselves out in the sub-region.
Dr. Davidson has presented testimony and prepared policy briefings based on her research for the UN, served on the Executive Board of the American Ethnological Society, and served as a reviewer of research proposals for the Wenner-Gren Foundation. She has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from various organizations including the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
Throughout her career Dr. Davidson has tacked back and forth—and attempted to translate across—academic and practitioner/policy spheres. Her current research and teaching interests in political ecology, the anthropology of development, and social and religious transformation emerged both through the empirical context of her fieldwork engagement in West Africa, and as ongoing concerns to connect anthropological scholarship with development thinking and practice. Prior to graduate studies in anthropology, Dr. Davidson worked for several years with a range of progressive non-governmental international development organizations in Africa and Latin America on issues such as refugee resettlement, indigenous rights, women’s and rural development, and social entrepreneurship.
Dr. Davidson will start teaching at BU in the fall of 2011. She is currently completing a postdoctoral fellowship in the States at Regional Risk program at Emory University.
Recent publications
2010. “Cultivating Knowledge: Development, Dissemblance, and Discursive Contradictions among the Diola of Guinea-Bissau.” American Ethnologist, Volume 37(2): 212-226.
2009. “‘We Work Hard’: Customary Imperatives of the Diola Work Regime in the Context of Environmental and Economic Change.” African Studies Review Volume 52(2): 119-141.
2006. “Rotten Fish: Polarization, Pluralism and Migrant-Host Relations in Guinea-Bissau.” In D. L. Donham and E. Bay (Eds) States of Violence: Contemporary Conflicts in the African Subcontinent. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Pp. 58-93.
Courses
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Education
BA Stanford University
MA Emory University
PhD Emory University