Catherine L. Besteman

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Catherine Lowe Besteman is an Italian American abolitionist educator at Colby College, where she holds the Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Chair in Anthropology. Her research and practice engage the public humanities to explore abolitionist possibilities in Maine. She has taught at that institution since 1994. [1]

Contents

Her research has focused on security, militarism, displacement, and community-based activism and transformation, primarily based in Somalia, South Africa, and the U.S. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Arts, Wenner-Gren, and with a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has held other fellowships at the Institute of Advanced Study in Durham, UK, the Institute of Advanced Study at Stellenbosch University, Bellagio, and the School for Advanced Research, among others.

She also curates art exhibitions and public humanities initiatives, including Freedom & Captivity, a statewide collaborative public humanities initiative to envision and foster abolitionist visioning in Maine, and Making Migration Visible, a statewide arts-based initiative to change the narratives around migration in Maine.

Her work has been acknowledged with the 2021 Public Anthropologist Award (for Militarized Global Apartheid), the 2019 SANA (Society for the Anthropology of North America) Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America, and a Leeds Honor Book Award (for Transforming Cape Town).

She has published four monographs and eight edited or co-edited volumes. She taught previously at Queens College, City University of New York.

Early life and education

Besteman received her BA from Amherst College, and her MA and PhD from the University of Arizona. [1]

Career

Besteman’s areas of expertise include refugees, southern Somalia, South Africa, and, more generally, insecurity and violence, [2] and inequality and racism. She also specializes in studying humanitarianism and activism. She writes in support of an engaged approach to anthropology, which involves advocacy, teaching, and collaboration with the people who are the focus of study. [3] Besteman has studied Southern Somalia extensively, and has written a number of books and papers about this area. [4] She has criticized traditional anthropological and media portrayals of Somalis and of the Somalian civil war since it began in the early 1990s,. [5]

Research and work

Besteman began working in southern Somalia in the late eighties before the outbreak of civil war in 1991. [6] [7] Many refugees from the communities where she had worked in Somalia have resettled in Lewiston, Maine. [8] Under her direction, members of the local Bantu community and Colby College students have produced a wiki-type website about the Somali Bantus of Lewiston. A museum exhibition: "Rivers of Immigration: Peoples of the Androscoggin" was mounted at the Museum L-A, in conjunction with the wiki project, from 2009 to 2010. [9]

During the 2000s, Besteman studied Cape Town, South Africa, focusing on the work of grassroots organizations in the city after the end of apartheid. Her book Transforming Cape Town (2008) describes several of these organizations and contrasts incidents of traditionalism with those of innovation. [10]

Besteman received a Guggenheim Foundation grant and an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship in 2012 to work on a book project. [11] [12] In late 2013, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded her a residency for spring 2014. [13]

Besteman has co-edited three books for general readership with Hugh Gusterson: Why America’s Top Pundits are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back (2005), The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It (2009), and Life By Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World (2019).

Selected publications

Books

Papers

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References

  1. 1 2 "Catherine L. Besteman · College Directory". Colby College.
  2. ↑ Martin Shaw (19 September 2013). Genocide and International Relations: Changing Patterns in the Transitions of the Late Modern World. Cambridge University Press. pp. 176–. ISBN   978-1-107-46910-5.
  3. ↑ Low, S. M., & Merry, S. E. (2010). Engaged anthropology: diversity and dilemmas. Current Anthropology, 51(S2), S203-S226.
  4. ↑ Mohamed Haji Mukhtar (25 February 2003). Historical Dictionary of Somalia. Scarecrow Press. pp. 332–. ISBN   978-0-8108-6604-1.
  5. ↑ Abdi Kusow (2004). Putting the cart before the horse: contested nationalism and the crisis of the nation-state in Somalia. Red Sea Press. p. 159. ISBN   978-1-56902-202-3.
  6. ↑ "Catherine Besteman". Global Experts.
  7. ↑ Aline Gubrium; Krista Harper (30 April 2013). Participatory Visual and Digital Methods. Left Coast Press. pp. 137–. ISBN   978-1-61132-711-3.
  8. ↑ William Haviland; Harald Prins; Dana Walrath; Bunny McBride (21 February 2013). Anthropology: The Human Challenge. Cengage Learning. pp. 398–. ISBN   978-1-133-94132-3.
  9. ↑ Androscoggin Bank. "Rivers of Immigration: Peoples of the Androscoggin" Archived 2013-10-29 at the Wayback Machine . museumla.org.
  10. ↑ Denis-Constant Martin (June 2013). Sounding the Cape Music, Identity and Politics in South Africa. African Minds. pp. 368–. ISBN   978-1-920489-82-3.
  11. ↑ "Catherine Besteman" Archived 2013-09-21 at the Wayback Machine . gf.org.
  12. ↑ "Catherine Besteman F'12". acls.org. Retrieved 2018-05-18.
  13. ↑ "Besteman receives Rockefeller Foundation grant" Archived 2016-01-05 at the Wayback Machine . thecolbyecho.com.
  14. ↑ Hannah Whittaker (13 October 2014). Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Kenya: A Social History of the Shifta Conflict, C. 1963-1968. BRILL. pp. 70–. ISBN   978-90-04-28308-4.
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