Joanna Davidson

Joanna Davidson is an Associate Professor of Anthropology in the College of Arts & Sciences and an Associate Director of the Kilachand Honors College at Boston University. She is a cultural anthropologist whose research interests include cultural conceptions of knowledge, anthropological engagements with development, and the politics of storytelling. Dr. Davidson has conducted ethnographic research in Guinea-Bissau since 1999, where she has focused on rural West Africans’ responses to environmental and economic change. She is the author of Sacred Rice: An Ethnography of Identity, Environment, and Development in Rural West Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). She is also the co-editor of Narrating Illness: Prospects and Constraints (Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, 2017). Her current research explores storytelling as a form of knowledge and practice increasingly taken up by professions – such as medicine and law – not otherwise known for their attention to narrative. She is also continuing several lines of inquiry in rural Guinea-Bissau that pertain to shifts in gender relations, and especially reconfigurations of women’s power.

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