Jen K. AlVarez Hughes | anthropologist + filmmaker

Jen K. AlVarez Hughes (she/they) is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. Jen defended her Ph.D. dissertation in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in May 2022. In 2020-2021, Jen served as Research Assistant and Program Coordinator for the Race, Indigeneity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (RIGS) Initiative at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities playing a significant role in transforming the initiative into a university center with increased recognition of the role of disability scholars in studies in ethnic, race, gender, sexuality, and native and indigenous studies (now the Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender, & Sexuality Studies).

At Bates, Jen is focused on editing and post-production her documentary film and book project, Viking Futures: An Ethnography of Storytelling and Economic Enchantment in Crisis Iceland, and teaching cross-listed courses in anthropology, economics, environmental studies, Classical and Medieval studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Her current courses include: Cultural Anthropology: The Science and Politics of Storytelling, Culture and Interpretation, Money and Magic, Economic Ecologies (Environmental Humanities approaches to humans and non-humans in the North Atlantic), and Queering Capitalism. Jen is also conducting research for an article on intersections between white identity, masculinity, and queerness in alternative investing communities such as WallStreetBets and orgs dedicated to ESG investing and appropriations of Viking identity in white supremacist movements. Their second book project is on the queer and indigenous human and non-human entanglements and racial and gendered imaginaries that include human spaceflight futures and global film production in Iceland’s storied ‘North’.

Jen has held fellowships with a variety of organizations including the Leifur Eiriksson Foundation, the American Scandinavian Foundation, and the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Institute for Advanced Study, and Steven J. Schochet Foundation in Queer, Trans, and Sexuality Studies.

Book Project

Jen’s book project examines the economic and political effects of (settler)colonialism, queering and utopian capitalism in Iceland, the U.S. and the “New” North Atlantic. Jen is particularly interested in how the myth of economic disenchantment in modernity continues to impact financial, political, and ecological decision making. Jen is interested in talk about the future in Iceland as the ubiquity of enchantments and push-back, assists, and refusals of Icelandic and North Atlantic human/non-human relations point to the more magical aspects of capital. She examines Icelandic storytellers, stories, and stories about Iceland from the 2016 Panama Papers Offshore Banking Scandal to Iceland’s founding and cosmological sagas to see how enchantment is put to work within and between premodern, liberal, and neoliberal borders and eras.

Jen’s dissertation argued that we should take Icelandic storytellers and foreign interlocutors’ claims about enchantment and modernity seriously. Enchantment of the economic in Iceland and the “magic” of modern economizing (or exceeding) are, at the core, both forms of ecological relationships that provide tools for her interlocutors to understand past and present negotiations with non-humans. Jen examines embodied performances and cultural productions as forms of storytelling that challenge a language/materiality divide and shape financial decision making. Through storytelling, Icelandic performances of and engagements with economic enchantment are not disavowed. The avowal of enchantment may very well augment our understanding of North Atlantic historical erasures and the production of mythological “universals” such as whiteness, indigeneity, queerness, and "the future". The persistence and re-emergence of the non-human in Iceland’s financial story offers deep reflection and foil for the forceable removal, erasure, and renaming of enchantments in other post-colonies and in the ongoing settler-colonial ‘now’ for so many within and beyond its North Atlantic shores.

Jen’s first book project engages whiteness, political protest, heritage tourism, homo-nationalism, gender “liquidity”, and the making of “homo economicus Icelandicus” to unpack anthropological assumptions about the “nature” of language and materiality. Viking Futures shows how enchanted Icelandic stories survive under a myth of disenchantment and become strategized and performed to (re)produce Western ontological assumptions as universal while also showing the eruptions and refusals that undergird capitalism and the concept of economy itself.

Professional and Film Work

Jen also works as a professional video and web producer, financial researcher, museum and archives specialist, and ethnographic filmmaker. For her latest project, Jen conducted fieldwork in Iceland from June-August 2013, October 2015-November 2016, and June 2021. She is in post-production on her first feature-length documentary, Viking Futures, shot in Iceland, Denmark and the US in 2015-2017 and was a contributing editor for Cultural Anthropology's Visual and New Media Review section from 2016-2020. Jen has been writing, directing, and producing a variety of short, narrative, and experimental documentary films since 1996.

Jen previously worked on research, digital media, exhibit and video projects for the Discovery Channel’s Curiosity Project (now Curiosity Stream), The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, The Smithsonian’s National Zoo, the Moving Images department at the The Walker Art Center, The University of Minnesota, Minnesota Opera, Bloomberg, Al Jazeera Plus, the Eric Carle Museum for Picture Book Art, Powell’s Books (Portland, OR), and Curiosity Retreats, LLC.

Past Research and Education

Jen’s previous research examined language, history, economy and "kinship" in lesbian bar culture and among queer youth experiencing homelessness in Portland, Oregon. They graduated cum laude with a B.A. in Anthropology and Gender Studies from Mount Holyoke College in 2010 after almost a decade working at Powell’s Books (Portland, OR) and studied Icelandic and Folklore at the University of Iceland (Háskoli Íslands).

Personal Notes

Jen’s interest in economy, history, and identity emerges from her own identifications. Jen is a white nonbinary, queer woman and lesbian-feminist with Mexican and Indigenous heritage. Her ancestors were British, French-Canadian, Mexican, American Southerners, and American Indians. Most migrated to the Pacific Northwest of the United States in the 20th Century where her family remain today. Others, like her grandfather’s Yakama and Walla Walla kin were forceable removed and moved through settler-colonial projects that continue at present. Only snippets and flashes of her family history are known beyond a few generations (all elders now gone) which propels her desire to understand the power of stories and of their silences and erasures - and the force of chosen and made kin.

Jen is also a multi-instrumentalist and digital composer. Her experimental analog, digital, and low-fi music projects have been featured on compilations in the US and Sweden. They are currently recording music and sound projects under their own name. Past bands and solo projects include Lewis&Clark*, dance/cry, viado, Killingsworth, mothic, and queer feminist experimental rock band, Os Posse.

All photos on site by Jen K. AlVarez Hughes unless otherwise noted.