From 2022-2024, co-authors Wan R. Smith and Kristin D. Phillips led an energy justice initiative to address governance issues and racial segregation within rural electric cooperatives, “support[ing] Black Georgians to reach the levers of power and to leverage change.”
In Against the Carceral Archive: The Art of Black Liberatory Practice, author Damien M. Sojoyner draws on the collections at the Southern California Library to examine “carcerality as an archival modality.”
In her timely article in our current issue, Melinda González offers an important critique of academia and call to action. Read the full article here: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
In Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football, Tracie Canada draws on rich ethnographic research to examine the lived experiences of Black college football players navigating an industry shaped by exploitation and racial inequality.
In our current issue, Christien Tompkins examines the landscape of education reform in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, with a specific focus on how Black professionals have engaged with reform movements and organizations.
Enrich your weekend with this stunning review of Christopher A. Loperena’s book, The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras (2022). Written by Paul Joseph López Oro!
In our current issue, Alexandria Casteel examines practices of Black ecological care in Baltimore, asserting a counter-institutional presence of black conservation practices that “remake conservation in the image of what Black communities have already been doing all along.”
Check out this book review in our new issue! Unseen Flesh, is an ethnographic account of Black lesbian experiences with health, well-being, and medical discrimination in Brazil.
Check out Daniel Ferman-Leon’s new article featured in our Spring 2026 TA issue. #TransformingAnthropology #BlackGeographies #AntiBlackness #Financialization
TA Vol. 34 No. 1 is now available! Read Christen A. Smith and Ryan Cecil Jobson’s full editorial by following the link in our bio!
Our Spring 2026 Issue is out now! With articles on Black geographies and ecological care, educational reform, institutional exclusion, and residential segregation, this issue moves across sites of US Empire while insisting on unsettling dominant spatial orders and conjuring geographies of our own.
Join us this Women’s History Month on March 23 (12-1 pm ET) for a lunch and learn honoring and engaging with the archives and scholarship of Black feminist anthropologists Zora Neale Hurston and Eslanda Goode Robeson! Register here: bit.ly/TABFAMarch23
In our current issue, we uplift and celebrate the legacy and scholarship of Marlene Cunha, a pathfinding Black Brazilian anthropologist and activist whose work has often been under-recognized in the Brazilian academy and in anglophone North American anthropology.
Only a few days after João Alípio Cunha’s birth, his mother, the pathfinding Black Brazilian anthropologist and activist Marlene Cunha, passed away. Marlene Cunha’s archive was safeguarded by Marlene’s mother in a closet until João was ready to share his mother’s legacy.
In “The Terreiro as an Ethnic Expression,” Black Brazilian anthropologist and activist Marlene Cunha examines the history and culture of African-Brazilian religious houses (also called terreiros do candomblé) in Brazil’s modern urban cities.
Our special issue honors Black intellectual elders whose work has shaped the field. Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1949-2012) was an anthropologist and historian that spent his life committed to the study of the Caribbean and its place in modernity.
Our current issue contains a brilliant reflection by Alyssa A.L James on Trouillot's line about the "strange sweetness about commodities." For James, the estranged commodity is not just historically produced but affectively and spatially "remade, negotiated, and contested."
Happy Sunday! Don't miss this thoughtful commentary by Alyssa Paredes, where she reflects on the divergent visions of an "anthropology of commodities" from Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Arjun Appadurai.
The team at Transforming Anthropology is devastated to learn of the passing of A. Lynn Bolles. Dr. Bolles was a groundbreaking anthropologist and Professor Emerita in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland.
For our special issue we are honored to feature Michel-Rolph Trouillot's previously unpublished manuscript "Banana Wars: The Sweetness of Commodities," edited by Ryan Cecil Jobson.
Dr. Prisca Gayles explores how Medeiros & Perry’s "Black Women in Latin America and the Caribbean" disrupts epistemic erasure and centers Black women as "bearers of knowledge." A must-read for anyone looking to globalize Black studies. 📚
Our special issue honors Black intellectual elders whose work has been under-recognized in anthropology. Ellen Irene Diggs (1906–1998) was a pioneering anthropologist, curator, and educator who challenged biological racism and advanced a global, diasporic framework.
In our current issue, Maya J. Berry highlights the legacy of Black US-American anthropologist Irene Diggs, exploring how her global perspective on Black history shaped her vision for the field.
As we open Black History Month, we honor Zora Neale Hurston—an anthropologist who refused to treat Black life as a problem, an absence, or an object to be explained.
Happy Friday! Head into the weekend with this wonderful review of Erin L. Durban's _The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti_ written by Nessette Falu. In this review, Falu details Durban's contributions to the fields of anthropology, Black queer studies and Caribbean studies.
In our current issue, Pyar Seth examines the ethnographic work of Zora Neale Hurston through the lens of Saidiya Hartman's "critical fabulation," arguing that Hurston's commitment to reframing Black sociality establishes her as a progenitor of this intellectual tradition.
The review essay by Gabrielle Mahabeer in our current issue brings together three recent works on Obeah and Orisa in Trinidad and Tobago. Mahabeer synthesizes the “distinct temporalities and traditions” in each text to “provide a syllabus of Africana-world-making technologies."
Our special issue offers readers an opportunity to honor our Black intellectual elders and ancestors, especially those who have been historically under-recognized in anthropology. Read about Eslanda Goode Robeson and her anthropological praxis in our current issue!
In our current issue, Nala K. Williams highlights the work of Black feminist anthropologist Eslanda Goode Robeson, showing how Robeson’s African Journey offered a critical counternarrative to notions of African inferiority and insisted on the unity of Black peoples globally.
Our special issue, “Archives of Black Anthropology,” invites our readers to engage in intergenerational dialogue with our intellectual elders and to reflect on a tradition of Black anthropologists “appropriat[ing] anthropological methods in pursuit of Black liberation.”
