Joanna Davidson

Joanna Davidson is a cultural anthropologist whose research interests include cultural conceptions of knowledge, anthropological engagements with development, and the politics of storytelling. She currently the Associate Director of the Kilachand Honors College at Boston University. 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. Her current book project focuses on widowhood, women’s songs, and naming practices among rural Jola in Guinea-Bissau.

Prior to becoming an academic anthropologist, Joanna 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.