Faye V. Harrison

Dr. Faye Venetia Harrison is an American anthropologist. Her research interests include political economy, power, diaspora, human rights, and the intersections of race, gender, and class. She is currently Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She formerly served as Joint Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at the University of Florida. Harrison received her BA in Anthropology in 1974 from Brown University, and her MA and PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University in 1977 and 1982, respectively. She has conducted research in the US, UK, and Jamaica. Her scholarly interests have also taken her to Cuba, South Africa, and Japan. From 1989 to 1991, Harrison served as President of the Association of Black Anthropologists (ABA). During her term with the ABA, she worked to ensure ABA presence at American Anthropological Association (AAA) conferences and commissions, and helped to establish the ABA’s journal Transforming Anthropology (first published in 1990). She served as President of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences from 2013 to 2018, a position that allowed her to collaborate with anthropologists around the world. She is an author in and editor of Decolonizing Anthropology (1991,1997, 2010) and wrote Outsider Within: Reworking Anthropology in the Global Age (2008), in addition to dozens of articles, encyclopedia entries, essays, book chapters, and reviews. The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology describes the edited volume Decolonizing Anthropology as a "key moment of reinvention" for American anthropology, encouraging the re-centering of anthropological work by people of color. The authors included in the volume argue for the necessity of directing the focus of anthropological work towards the advancement of global equality and human liberation, and outline the methodological, ethical, and political considerations this decolonized anthropology would require. In her introduction, Harrison emphasizes the importance of reading the work of intellectuals from the Global South and understanding the impact of the intersections of race, class, and gender on cultural consciousness and colonial discourse. The book was the result of the first invited session from the ABA at an AAA conference, given by Harrison and her colleague Angela Gilliam in 1987, which was also titled “Decolonizing Anthropology.” Harrison credits the work of anthropologists Bernard Magubane and James C. Faris as a key source of inspiration for the session and, later, the volume.