It’s been a while! Since I last posted, I moved to Maine, completed and defended my dissertation in 2022 while teaching in the Anthropology Department at Bates College, and started post-production on Viking Futures film. I am just wrapping up the last week of grading for my Spring Short Term course Economic Ecologies now and will be revising my manuscript and article drafts with an editor to prepare for press and journal submission.
I also was so pleased to teach an incredible group of Bates students in my Spring Ethnographic Filmmaking course. The course is titled, Multimedia Storytelling for Social Change and students pushed their growing edges to create incredible media projects. Last week, we were so pleased to share them in a public screening with Bates community. One film featured a the proprietor of a local Thai restaurant in a gas station in Lewiston where Bates is located, Tina Thai Express. While we watched, we munched on delicious dishes from Tina’s. Another student’s film, juxtaposed the experiences of Black and African Bates students with research on institutional aims for diversity and inclusion. Students projects also included the social and class dynamics in Bates’s parking politics and car culture, the political and racial dynamics of hallucinogenic mushrooms on campus and the U.S., and emotional and personal portraits of Bates’s Latinx students’ experiences.
Research on the Viking Futures book project continues. With generous support from the Bates College Faculty Development Fund, I conducted research in Iceland in summer 2021 and summer 2022. I will not be returning to Iceland this summer so I can focus on revising for publication and making a cut of my documentary film project on the Panama Papers Offshore Banking Scandal and protests in 2016. But, I hope to return in 2024 to see friends, interlocutors, and continue archival research.
I am looking forward to returning to the Anthropology Department at Bates College for my third and final year as a Visiting Assistant Professor there. I am not looking forward to a year of job and postdoc applications but am always excited to meet and make new friends and thinking-partners where I land.
Sending care and joy to friends and colleagues across our oceans and air.
Dr. Jen K. AlVarez Hughes