Fugitive Anthropology

Embodying Activist Research

Shanya Cordis, Maya J. Berry, Claudia Chávez Argüelles, Sarah Ihmoud, R. Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN: 9781477332740, 9781477332733
• eBook ISBN: 9781477332757
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

A personal, provocative, and boundary-breaking volume on the power relations that racialized, gendered, and sexualized researchers grapple with while conducting activist research.

Fugitive Anthropology is a transnational, intergenerational engagement that extends feminist theory, activist research methodologies, and the discipline of anthropology in new directions. Contributors examine the tensions that arise from conducting politically engaged, collaborative research alongside communities in struggle, in particular theorizing from the experiences of racialized women, queer, trans, and gender nonconforming researchers across distinct geographies. Essays contend with the matrices of colonial, imperial, and patriarchal violence that afflict the researchers and communities with which they seek political alignment.

Articulating an ethnographic practice grounded in Black and Indigenous political struggles and committed to collective liberation, the volume reflects on what it means to navigate violent relations of power, systemic inequities, and current onslaughts shaping field research and US academia. Ultimately, Fugitive Anthropology argues that a feminist ethos—one that embraces embodied knowledges and fugitive sensibilities—forges liberatory spaces that break from dominant masculinist frames of the "political" and challenge colonial regimes within and beyond the neoliberal university.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgment
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Artist Statement, Soil (2016)
• 1. The Gendered, Racial, and Violent Politics of Fieldwork
• 2. Fugitive Archaeology for Engaged Futures
• 3. Embodying Sites of Memory
• 4. Sanctuaries in Transit
• 5. Fugitive Dreams from Fieldwork (Mis)Recognitions
• 6. Co-Sentipensar-Accionar
• 7. Fugitive Collaborative Research
• 8. Grief and an Indigenous Feminist’s Rage
• 9. Feminist Ethnography in Contexts of Multiple Forms of Violence
• 10. Feeling Grief in the Flesh
• 11. M’Shatateh Ethnography
• 12. “Sigamos Parceira”
• 13. Fugitive Anthropology, Higher Education Administration, and Interstitial Institutional Change
• 14. Accepting the Hatred
• 15. How the River, It Flows
• Afterword
• Editors’ Acknowledgments
• Index