Public Anthropology Conference: Featured Speakers | American University, Washington, DC

Keynote: Max Forte

Max Forte is an associate professor in anthropology in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Concordia University, in Montreal. Max's areas of teaching focus on political anthropology, the new imperialism, indigenous resurgence, and media and visual ethnographies. His research has ranged from the study of colonialism, nationalism, and globalization in the Caribbean, with a focus on indigeneity, to more contemporary phenomena of imperialism and militarism at home. Max likes to call himself a Zero Anthropologist in part because of his ongoing work in imagining and building an anti-imperial anthropology, that is just as much about empire as it is about anthropology as we have known it, with the aim of arriving at a post-imperial anthropology (that may also be post-anthropological). Max's work in the area that some call public anthropology has broadly consisted of activist writing and filmography, mostly online, and in engagement with the media.

Barbara Rose Johnston

Barbara Rose Johnston is the senior research fellow at the Center for Political Ecology in Santa Cruz, Michigan State adjunct Professor of Anthropology, and UCSC lecturer. Her action-oriented anthropology explores the linkages between environmental crisis and human rights abuse, seeking acknowledgment and implementation of the right to a healthy environment, environmental equity, and the right to reparation and remedy. Since 1999 she has served as a scientific advisor and expert witness for the Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims Tribunal on the biomedical, psychosocial, cultural, and environmental impacts of the U.S. nuclear weapons testing program, and the history and consequences of the US classified human radiation experimentation program. Her work on the consequential damages of hydrodevelopment, forced displacement, and related impoverishment informed the World Commission on Dams and led to an appointment as UNESCO advisor on water and cultural diversity. A prolific writer, recently published works include the edited or coauthored books Half-lives and Half-truths: Confronting the Radioactive Legacies of the Cold War (SAR Press 2007); Consequential Damages of Nuclear War—The Rongelap Report (with H. Barker, Left Coast 2008); Waging War, Making Peace—Reparations and Human Rights (with S. Slymovics, Left Coast Press 2009); Life & Death Matters: Human Rights, Environment and Social Justice (Left Coast 2011); and Water, Cultural Diversity and Environmental Change (Springer 2011).