Dr. Mukhopadhyay specializes in gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, and culture-cognition, with research in the USA and India on gendered families, politics, and science-engineering. In graduate school she co-created one of the earliest gender-culture courses. She has developed numerous gender classes and taught, for 20 years, a popular anthropology and gender-oriented, multi-section Human Sexuality course. Gender-related publications include: Cognitive Anthropology Through a Gendered Lens (2011). How Exportable are Western Theories of Gendered Science? (2009), A Feminist Cognitive Anthropology: The Case of Women and Mathematics (2004), Women, Education and Family Structure in India (1994, with S. Seymour). She co-authored an early Annual Review of Anthropology article on gender (1988) and is in the Association for Feminist Anthropology. In other work, she served as a Key Advisor for the AAA RACE project; co-authored How Real is Race: A Sourcebook on Race, Culture and Biology, (2nd Edition, 2014) and promotes active learning approaches to teaching about culture (cf.2007).
Tami Blumenfield is a faculty member in the School of Ethnology and Sociology at Yunnan University and was a 2016 Fulbright Scholar affiliated with Yunnan University. Since 2001, she has been engaged in a long-term ethnographic fieldwork project in northwest Yunnan Province, studying changes in education, social life, and ecology in Na communities. Blumenfield is the co-editor of Cultural Heritage Politics in China, with Helaine Silverman (2013), and of Doing Fieldwork in China…With Kids! with Candice Cornet (2016). Blumenfield also produced Some Na Ceremonies, a Berkeley Media film by Onci Archei and Ruheng Duoji. Blumenfield holds a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Washington.
Susan Harper, Ph.D., is an educator, activist, and advocate in Dallas, Texas. She holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Southern Methodist University and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies from Texas Woman’s University. Her ethnographic research focuses on New Religious Movements, primarily NeoPaganism, in the American South; the intersection of gender, sexuality, and religious identity; and ses, sexuality, and sex education. Her work has been published in the Journal of Bisexuality. Susan is passionate about a variety of social justice causes, including domestic and intimate partner violence prevention and recovery, sexual assault prevention and recovery, LGBTQ equality and inclusion, and educational justice. She has given presentations on LGBTQ equality and inclusion to a variety of audiences, including the North Texas Society of Human Resource Managers, The Turning Point Rape Crisis Center, and various religious organizations. She teaches courses in anthropology, sociology, and Women’s and Gender Studies at various universities and colleges in the DFW area. She also serves as Graduate Reader/Editor for Texas Woman’s University. She is currently working on an autoethnography about burlesque and visual anthropology project exploring the use of Pinterest by practitioners of NeoPaganism.
Abby Gondek is a PhD candidate in Global and Socio-cultural Studies (majoring in Anthropology/Sociology) at Florida International University in Miami, Florida. She defended her dissertation proposal in April 2016. Her project, “Jewish Women’s Transracial, Transdisciplinary and Transnational Social Science Networks, 1920-1970” uses social network analysis and grounded theory methodology to understand the relationships between the anti-racist and pro-political/economic justice stance taken by Jewish female social scientists and their Jewish gendered-racialized subjectivities. Further information about her work is available from http://transform-art-gender.webs.com and http://abbygondek.blogspot.com.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the many people who supported this writing project. We especially appreciate the editorial guidance of Nina Brown and the constructive feedback from two anonymous reviewers. We are grateful to our students as well, particularly those in Blumenfield’s Gender in East Asia at Furman University who read a draft version of this chapter in 2016 and shared feedback that helped us improve the chapter, and to Mukhopadhyay’s students at California State University Chico and at San Jose State University. We also thank the many individuals who shared their lives with us and with other anthropologists, enabling us to understand and appreciate the breadth, depth, and richness of human cultural diversity.
