Books and Edited Volumes by Dianna Shandy
When significant numbers of college-educated American women began, in the early twenty-first cent... more When significant numbers of college-educated American women began, in the early twenty-first century, to leave paid work to become stay-at-home mothers, an emotionally charged national debate erupted. Karine Moe and Dianna Shandy, a professional economist and an anthropologist, respectively, decided to step back from the sometimes overheated rhetoric around the so-called mommy wars. They wondered what really inspired women to opt out, and they wanted to gauge the phenomenon's genuine repercussions. Glass Ceilings and 100-Hour Couples is the fruit of their investigation-a rigorous, accessible, and sympathetic reckoning with this hot-button issue in contemporary life. Drawing on hundreds of interviews from around the country, original survey research, and national labor force data, Moe and Shandy refocus the discussion of women who opt out from one where they are the object of scrutiny to one where their aspirations and struggles tell us about the far broader swath of American women who continue to juggle paid work and family. Moe and Shandy examine the many pressures that influence a woman's decision to resign, reduce, or reorient her career. These include the mismatch between child-care options and workplace demands, the fact that these women married men with demanding careers, the professionalization of stay-at-home motherhood, and broad failures in public policy. But Moe and Shandy are equally attentive to the resilience of women in the face of life decisions that might otherwise threaten their sense of self-worth. Moe and Shandy find, for instance, that women who have downsized their careers stress the value of social networks-of "running with a pack of smart women" who've also chosen to emphasize motherhood over paid work
Traditionally a community of cattle farmers in Sudan, the Nuer are one of anthropology’s most cel... more Traditionally a community of cattle farmers in Sudan, the Nuer are one of anthropology’s most celebrated peoples. Half a century after social anthropologist Sir Edward E. Evans-Pritchard introduced the Nuer people to the global consciousness, they began arriving in the United States as refugees. Approximately 25,000 settled in such cities as Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Nashville, Tennessee, and Saint Paul, Minnesota. In this study of their migration from a war-torn society to North America, Shandy asks how the diaspora Nuer, especially Nuer-Americans, deal with changing kin obligations and privileges to maintain their Nuerness. What parts of a people’s culture are left behind when they move to another country? How much of the home culture and coping strategies continue to aid refugees trying to fit into a new society? These questions are not only crucial for understanding how best to view refugees, but all kinds of global migrants. Assumptions that refugees fleeing to Western countri...
Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology seeks to teach students the importance... more Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology seeks to teach students the importance of culture and its influence on human life. By including examples of Western, North American cultures, the text makes cultural understanding and comparison more relatable to student audiences. The inclusion of current information and articles allows students to connect with major anthropological concepts through relevant events.
The Fifteenth Edition reflects the changing nature of the discipline of anthropology by shifting its focusing to the more concerning issues of today. Useful features like a glossary of key terms help students understand basic concepts discussed in the readings.. Articles throughout the text touch on all major subfields, including environmental, global, and medical topics, giving students a comprehensive introduction to the field.
The Cultural Experience: Ethnography in Complex Society, 2nd Edition
The Cultural Experience has helped generations of undergraduates discover the excitement of ethno... more The Cultural Experience has helped generations of undergraduates discover the excitement of ethnographic research through participation in relatively familiar cultures in North American society. Grounded in the interviewing-based ethnographic technique known as ethnosemantics, the latest edition continues to treat ethnography as a discovery process. Students are taught how to set up an ethnographic field study, choose a microculture, and find and approach an informant, as well as how to ask ethnographic questions, record data, and organize and analyze what they have learned. Detailed instruction on how to write an ethnography is also provided. The guidelines are followed by ten short but substantive, well-written student ethnographies on such microcultures as exotic dancing, firefighting, pest extermination, and the work of midwives and police detectives. The Second Edition of this popular classroom volume has been expanded to include boxed inserts that offer suggestions to aid in t...
Anthropological Quarterly, 2008
The papers here examine the global circulation of both ideologies and practices that underlie the... more The papers here examine the global circulation of both ideologies and practices that underlie the notion of “childhood,” as well as the circulation or migration of children themselves. We ask what are the implications of the global circulation of constructions and practices of children and childhood, and how does the state involve itself in these processes? Specifically, the papers look at children and childhood in light of what Bock, Gaskins, and Lancy (2008:4) term “disruptive experiences.” Collectively, the papers examine the experiences of Romanian street children in Paris (Terrio), trafficked children in the U.S. (Uehling), the unborn and the recently born children of African asylum seekers in Ireland (Shandy), and the children of Mexican migrants on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border (Boehm). In these settings children have roles
as individual actors, but this agency is tempered by the notion that adult oversight of these youth is frequently a function of the state or a negotiated reality between parents and the state. The articles, social commentary and book reviews therefore provide fodder for recent debates within anthropology that emphasize the role of children as independent actors by highlighting the tension between “structure and agency,” and problematizing these terms and their interaction in important ways. [Keywords: migration, immigration, state, children, childhood, global childhood, youth]
Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 81, No. 4, pp. 765–776, ISSN 0003-549. © 2008 by the Institute for Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved. Kids at the Crossroads: Global Childhood and the State
Journal of Refugee Studies, 2002
Despite the diversity of religious and spiritual beliefs and practices that sustain many refugees... more Despite the diversity of religious and spiritual beliefs and practices that sustain many refugees and forced migrants in their processes of displacement, migration, and integration into the host society, contemporary considerations among both researchers and policy makers tend to neglect the role of religion and spirituality as a source of emotional and cognitive support, a form of social and political expression and mobilization, and a vehicle for community building and group identity. Despite the fact that religious persecution figures prominently in the UN definition of a refugee and faith-based organizations provide emergency relief to refugees, facilitate the settlement of refugees and
provide them with a wide range of social services, public debates about
migration and displacement on the international and national levels have
tended to ignore religious issues. This neglect can also be seen in scholarly treatments of religion and spirituality among refugee populations.
When we first issued a call for papers seeking submissions to this volume, we received numerous e-mails from researchers and policy-makers encouraging us to proceed with the planned volume, but expressing regret that they never pursued these topics in any systematic way and had only anecdotal information confirming the significance of religious beliefs and practices in refugees’ journeys. Most authors who did submit manuscripts for consideration, indicated a dearth of research on this issue and struggled to place their own studies in a broader analytical context. These experiences appear to reflect a more widespread state of affairs. For instance, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the International Center for Migration, Ethnicity, and
Citizenship (ICMEC) (see http://www.newschool.edu/icmec) at the New
School for Social Research, both in New York City, launched preliminary
efforts in recent years to encourage research among scholars to understand the myriad intersections between religion and migration. It is not yet clear whether these seed initiatives will develop into any sort of systematic or enduring inquiry.
The idea for this volume dates back to a session on the role of religion and
spirituality in refugee resettlement and adaptation that we organized for the 2000 Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology in San
Francisco, California. Our combined experiences working on special initiatives with Buddhist Khmer refugees in Long Beach, California, and Iraqi Shia Muslims and southern Sudanese Christians resettled throughout the United States, highlighted a paradox: religion, in both its socio-political and affective sense, crosscuts the experiences of refugees at every stage of the refugee journey, and yet there is relatively little attention to this subject in the forced migration literature.
Rethinking Refuge and Displacement, 2000
Peer reviewed articles on: detainment of Haitian refugees at the Guantanamo Naval Base; Somali in... more Peer reviewed articles on: detainment of Haitian refugees at the Guantanamo Naval Base; Somali integration and diasporic consciousness in Finland; Tibetan immigration to the United States; nationality and citizenship among Mexicans in the United States; environmentally forced migrants in rural Bangladesh; Operation Provide Refuge; Asylum Seeker Centers in the Netherlands; forced migration and return of Kosovar Albanians; transnational research; anthropology and the representations of recent migrations from Afghanistan; anthropology of mobility; and gender and wartime migration in Mozambique.
2000 Rethinking Refuge and Displacement In Rethinking Refuge and Displacement Committee on Refugees and Immigrants Selected Papers, Volume VIII. Pp. 1-10. Elzbieta Gozdziak and Dianna Shandy, eds. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association.(with Elzbieta M. Gozdziak.)
Papers (Gender, Work, Sexual Violence) by Dianna Shandy
SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. , 2021
This article describes and analyzes the American Anthropological Association’s adoption of a sexu... more This article describes and analyzes the American Anthropological Association’s adoption of a sexual harassment and sexual assault policy as a part of the groundswell of recognition that sexual violence detrimentally shapes scientific inquiry, a recognition catalyzed by the #MeToo cultural moment. This is a case study of what Marcel Mauss terms “policy as total social phenomena,” which narrates a significant historical pivot in the story of feminism that evidences feminist theorizing in praxis, per a framework developed by bell hooks. We critically situate this transformation within what Marshall Sahlins calls “contingent circumstance,” which enables institutional transformation. We argue that professional associations can set normative expectations and best practice standards to mold cultural change. The article outlines the reframing of sexual violence as professional misconduct to emphasize the element of community while not denying that there are interpersonal harms. The policy recognizes the foundational impact of gender oppression on a discipline’s methods, training practices, and the expected entitlements of professional success. Building on the scholarship and activism that have documented anthropology’s all-too-typical history with sexual violence, we offer a rare insider’s understanding into the unfolding process of designing and adopting norms intended to compel behavioral change. The article concludes with the questions that remain in the exercise of community responsibility for sexual harassment and sexual assault. We suggest that while the intentional reorganization of institutional practices, policies, and training processes can facilitate cultural change that curtails sexual violence, long-term transformations require community action in terms of intentional investments in policy review and educational programming.
Teaching and Learning Anthropology, 2019
This article calls for revisiting how we teach anthropology in light of three mutual... more This article calls for revisiting how we teach anthropology in light of three mutually reinforcing “moments”–the #MeToo Movement, the development of the American Anthropological Association’s first Sexual Harassment and Sexual Assault Policy, and shifting student expectations regarding personal safety and wellbeing. By thinking anthropologically about anthropology, against a backdrop of larger questions for the discipline as a whole, we single outthe consequences of the “lone anthropologist”trope as it reproduces idealized notions of fieldwork in ways that limit access to the discipline. We suggest ten practical strategies for changing normative pedagogies as a way to increase benefits and reduce harms as we work to minimize risk for sexual violence while preserving the benefits of immersive fieldwork. We conclude by exploring how the classroom itself is feeding back into transforming cultures and institutional structures
Taking Leadership and Remaking Academic Communities
Educated women's relationship with work today is located at the crosscurrents of some significant... more Educated women's relationship with work today is located at the crosscurrents of some significant demographic and societal shifts. Perhaps the most important of these changes, the stunning educational achievements of women during the past 50 years, opened doors to a wide variety of interesting and wellpaid careers, including academe. Women, and married women in particular, increasingly entered fields that had long been considered male bastions. Given the opportunity to prove themselves academically and professionally, educated women marched headlong into the workforce. After a century of increasing female labor force participation, then, many were surprised when at the turn of the 21st century increases in the labor force participation of women stalled --and in some cases, such as college-educated mothers of infants, declined dramatically.
Practicing Anthropology, 2008
Smart Women, Different Choices: College-Educated Women with Children Negotiating Work and Family. IN Elizabeth Reid Boyd and Gayle Letherby, Stay-at-Home Mothers: Dialogues and Debates. Canada: Demeter Press
Stay-at-home mothers and the ‘mommy wars’ are a continuing phenomenon worldwide. This book is the... more Stay-at-home mothers and the ‘mommy wars’ are a continuing phenomenon worldwide. This book is the first international edited collection exploring debates and issues surrounding mothers returning to/staying at home from a variety of countries and perspectives. Stay-at-home mothering remains a significant social and gender trend in the 21st century. Over the last decades, there have been many books exploring questions, issues and policies surrounding working mothers, but few about stay-at-home mothers. This volume explores the flip side to enable a new discussion: Why are mothers still staying at home? Chapters include: the ‘mommy wars’ between working moms and stay-at-home moms; the idealisation and persistence of mothering at home and what it means; maternity payments and childcare policy; state enabling of mothers staying at home; eco-mommas, radical parenthood, the return of the domestic goddess and the green angel in the house; the mother at home assisted by a nanny; stay at home...
Papers (Migration) by Dianna Shandy
Africa Has Moved!: New African Diasporas and the Anthropology of Transnationalizing Africa
A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa, 2019
This chapter briefly traces the emergence of “new African Diasporas” as an object of scholarly an... more This chapter briefly traces the emergence of “new African Diasporas” as an object of scholarly analysis over roughly the last quarter century, and reviews anthropological engagement with this phenomenon. It begins by examining the definitional distinctions referenced through this term, and how these serve to index this relatively recent body of work at the intersection of several other fields of scholarship.
Macalester International, 2012
Globalization is characterized by crosscutting flows and networks across the globe of people, goo... more Globalization is characterized by crosscutting flows and networks across the globe of people, goods, ideas, and capital. These processes are facilitated and constrained by yet emerging infrastructures and institutions. Within this shifting context, it has been observed that while we live in a global village, there is no rule of law. Here, I reflect upon this observation in relation to the unfolding development of the International Criminal Court (ICC), with particular consideration of African contexts.
This reflective essay is situated at the crosscurrents of recent developments in theoretical and empirical approaches to the study of the anthropology of crime, the anthropology of international law, and the anthropology of Africa. The ideas and questions advanced here build on work by anthropologists Kamari Maxine Clarke and Mahmood Mamdani in contributing to a critical approach to the intertwined growth of the rule of law and the human rights movements, particularly as applied to Africa.1 With respect to the topic at hand, anthropologist Sally Engle Merry observes, “Law’s internationalization is a product of transnational movements such as colonialism, contemporary transnational activism, the creation of a new world order of negotiated contracts and agreements linking together diverse states, the expansion of human rights activism and institutions, and the transplanting of legal institutions themselves.”2 She goes on to point out, “Given the ambiguity and novelty of these developments, anthropological research plays a critical role in examining how international law works in practice, mapping the circulation of ideas and procedures as well as examining the array of small sites in which international law operates, whether in Geneva, a local office of a human rights NGO, or the International Criminal Court” (111).
Social Thought
Most U.S. migration research compares very distinct groups, such as Mexicans and Asians, and virt... more Most U.S. migration research compares very distinct groups, such as Mexicans and Asians, and virtually ignores the small, but growing number of African immigrants. In contrast, this study describes and compares the integration experiences of two Black, East African refugee populations in a small town in the Midwestern United States. We demonstrate that Muslim Somalis and Christians from southern Sudan encounter similar structural obstacles to social and economic integration, but that their religious affiliations lead to sharply different opportunities and cultural strategies. This paper ends with a discussion of the implications of these findings for social work practice and the potential role of social workers as cultural brokers between new immigrant groups and the general public.
Journal of Refugee Studies, 2002
Nuer Christians in America, 2015
This paper interrogates the socio‐political role of Christianity in the forced migration experien... more This paper interrogates the socio‐political role of Christianity in the forced migration experiences of southern Sudanese refugees living in the United States. Religion is implicated in the conflict in Sudan; faith‐based organizations broker these refugees' resettlement in the United States; and engagement with US Christian Churches eases the transition to a new society. Based on ethnographic research with Sudanese refugees and American service providers, this paper probes the ways in which cultural constructions of Christians influence the incorporation of these newcomers into US congregations. In addition, the paper highlights the need for more scholarly attention to the study of Nuer Christianity as an indigenized belief system that enables this population to cope with radical change in their lives.
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Books and Edited Volumes by Dianna Shandy
The Fifteenth Edition reflects the changing nature of the discipline of anthropology by shifting its focusing to the more concerning issues of today. Useful features like a glossary of key terms help students understand basic concepts discussed in the readings.. Articles throughout the text touch on all major subfields, including environmental, global, and medical topics, giving students a comprehensive introduction to the field.
as individual actors, but this agency is tempered by the notion that adult oversight of these youth is frequently a function of the state or a negotiated reality between parents and the state. The articles, social commentary and book reviews therefore provide fodder for recent debates within anthropology that emphasize the role of children as independent actors by highlighting the tension between “structure and agency,” and problematizing these terms and their interaction in important ways. [Keywords: migration, immigration, state, children, childhood, global childhood, youth]
Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 81, No. 4, pp. 765–776, ISSN 0003-549. © 2008 by the Institute for Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved. Kids at the Crossroads: Global Childhood and the State
provide them with a wide range of social services, public debates about
migration and displacement on the international and national levels have
tended to ignore religious issues. This neglect can also be seen in scholarly treatments of religion and spirituality among refugee populations.
When we first issued a call for papers seeking submissions to this volume, we received numerous e-mails from researchers and policy-makers encouraging us to proceed with the planned volume, but expressing regret that they never pursued these topics in any systematic way and had only anecdotal information confirming the significance of religious beliefs and practices in refugees’ journeys. Most authors who did submit manuscripts for consideration, indicated a dearth of research on this issue and struggled to place their own studies in a broader analytical context. These experiences appear to reflect a more widespread state of affairs. For instance, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the International Center for Migration, Ethnicity, and
Citizenship (ICMEC) (see http://www.newschool.edu/icmec) at the New
School for Social Research, both in New York City, launched preliminary
efforts in recent years to encourage research among scholars to understand the myriad intersections between religion and migration. It is not yet clear whether these seed initiatives will develop into any sort of systematic or enduring inquiry.
The idea for this volume dates back to a session on the role of religion and
spirituality in refugee resettlement and adaptation that we organized for the 2000 Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology in San
Francisco, California. Our combined experiences working on special initiatives with Buddhist Khmer refugees in Long Beach, California, and Iraqi Shia Muslims and southern Sudanese Christians resettled throughout the United States, highlighted a paradox: religion, in both its socio-political and affective sense, crosscuts the experiences of refugees at every stage of the refugee journey, and yet there is relatively little attention to this subject in the forced migration literature.
2000 Rethinking Refuge and Displacement In Rethinking Refuge and Displacement Committee on Refugees and Immigrants Selected Papers, Volume VIII. Pp. 1-10. Elzbieta Gozdziak and Dianna Shandy, eds. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association.(with Elzbieta M. Gozdziak.)
Papers (Gender, Work, Sexual Violence) by Dianna Shandy
http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2018/05/10/taking-leadership-and-remaking-academic-communities/
Papers (Migration) by Dianna Shandy
This reflective essay is situated at the crosscurrents of recent developments in theoretical and empirical approaches to the study of the anthropology of crime, the anthropology of international law, and the anthropology of Africa. The ideas and questions advanced here build on work by anthropologists Kamari Maxine Clarke and Mahmood Mamdani in contributing to a critical approach to the intertwined growth of the rule of law and the human rights movements, particularly as applied to Africa.1 With respect to the topic at hand, anthropologist Sally Engle Merry observes, “Law’s internationalization is a product of transnational movements such as colonialism, contemporary transnational activism, the creation of a new world order of negotiated contracts and agreements linking together diverse states, the expansion of human rights activism and institutions, and the transplanting of legal institutions themselves.”2 She goes on to point out, “Given the ambiguity and novelty of these developments, anthropological research plays a critical role in examining how international law works in practice, mapping the circulation of ideas and procedures as well as examining the array of small sites in which international law operates, whether in Geneva, a local office of a human rights NGO, or the International Criminal Court” (111).