I am giving a talk in October for the Royal Anthropological Institute: https://www.therai.org.uk/conferences/anthropology-and-conservation/panels#10866 Here is the abstract for my talk based on original research at one of my fieldsites in the Texas Hill Country. Javelinas (Pecari tajacu) are porcine-like mammals that range from the southwest United States to northern Argentina. While common in west and…
Category: Research
Qualifying Exam Essay: Javelinas in SPAAAACE and Time
I have passed my qualifying exams and so am making my essays available on my blog. The other essays can be found: Attending to Animals in Anthropology and Power and Politics Within and Beyond the Human. Question: How have different disciplines placed javelinas in cultural, ecological, historical, archaeological, and other frameworks within and beyond Texas?…
Qualifying Exam Essay: Power and Politics Within and Beyond the Human
I have passed my qualifying exams and so am making my essays available on my blog. The other essays can be found: Attending to Animals in Anthropology and Javelinas in SPAAAACE and Time. Question: In Society against the State (1989), Pierre Clastres argues that a serious failing of Western philosophy and social theory is an inability to…
Qualifying Exam Essay: Attending to Animals in Anthropology
I have passed my qualifying exams and so am making my essays available on my blog. The other essays can be found: Power and Politics Within and Beyond the Human and Javelinas in SPAAAACE and Time. Question: In a recent essay, Laura Ogden argues “that the biological species is a limited lens for understanding the…
My Most Recent Publication on Faculty and Student Mental Health
You can read the article here: “Mental health in academia: Hacks for cultivating and sustaining wellbeing” Johnson and Lester 2021
Fieldwork Diary July 8-9, 2021
I am conducting research across Texas on Human and javelina relations. I am interested in how humans and other animals negotiate space at sites of encounter. During this trip out to one of my fieldsites in the Texas Hill Country, I wanted to document the quality of javelina bedding sites (which you can see in…
A Brief Lindbergh Update
One of my more popular posts of late has been The Fall and Rise of Lindbergh: A Javelina Story. In that post, I tell the story of a javelina in one of the groups that I work with in the Texas Hill Country. In brief, Lindbergh was outcast from their group and I recount the…
The Fall and Rise and Lindbergh: A Javelina Story
I have been working with javelinas in Texas for nearly a year. My first encounter with them occurred at Big Bend National Park and I have since visited groups all over Texas. The group that I am currently most fond of–partially because they are easiest to hang out with and partially because of the wonderful…
Shadows, Ambiguity, and More-Than-Human Politics
I am currently working on a manuscript exploring the ways that both literal and metaphorical shadows produce ambiguity in more-than-human communities. In order to be participating members of these communities, we have to find ways to engage in a politics that bridges evolutionary, ontological, and perceptual barriers. I attempt to do so through the ethnographic…
Speaking for the Dead: Narratives of Genomics and Colonization
This is a paper that I wrote for a Ph.D. course: Nature and Capitalism. I’ve been sitting on it and I don’t think I am going to do anything else with it. It’s a bit long but I figured this is the place to put it. In Speaker for the Dead (1986)—the sequel to the…
