John Hartigan Jr., author of an article on race in the upcoming September issue of Anthropology Now, also writes a blog on race and for publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Statesman. Check out the links below to read his articles and for more about Prof. Hartigan’s research.
Prof. Hartigan’s blog:
Race Talk
“What Does Race Have to Do With It? : Making sense of our ‘national conversation'” in The Chronicle of Higher Education
“Op-Ed >> Hartigan: Is the Tea Party Racist?” in The Statesman
“Op-Ed >> Hartigan: In the debate on affirmative action, calculate policies’ impact on whites” in The Statesman
Prof. Hartigan’s University of Texas at Austin and Project Past webpage:
http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/anthropology/faculty/hartigan
http://http://www.projectpast.org/hartigan/
John Hartigan is a professor of anthropology and the director of the Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies at the University of Texas, Austin.
John Hartigan’s first book, Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit (Princeton, 1999), is an ethnography of whites in Detroit, primarily focusing on poor whites from Appalachia living in the inner city. Hartigan found that the way whites think about race is keenly tied to their class identity and their location within in the city. His subsequent book, Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People (Duke, 2005), is a study of “white trash,” tracing the cultural history of this charged epithet and examining the ways some whites today identify with this term while others still use it as a degrading insult. His recent book, Race in the 21st Century (Oxford, 2010) surveys the efforts of sociologists and anthropologists to study racial dynamics in everyday life. Hartigan describes the emerging view in such research that see race as a performed identity. His most current work, What Can You Say? America’s National Conversation on Race (Stanford, 2010), takes a year’s worth of race stories in the news (from MLK Day 2007 to the subsequent one in 2008) to show the active ways Americans make sense of race. Currently, Hartigan is examining genetics research in Mexico, particularly focusing on recent efforts by Instituto Nacional de Medicina Genómica to establish that a “Mexican genome” exists.