- meljohn@southwestern.edu
- 512.863.1406
- Mood-Bridwell 310
Melissa Johnson
Professor of Anthropology
Expertise
Topical: Nature, the more than human and the human; Race, Racism, Critical Race Theory; Environment and Place; Conservation; Social Theory; Environmental History; Racial History; Tourism; Gender. Area: Belize; Caribbean; U.S.-Mexico Borderlands; Central Texas
Dr. Johnson is a cultural anthropologist who specializes in environmental issues (most currently framed as the human and the more-than-human), race and gender, and the Caribbean and Latin America. She focuses most of her research on Belize’s Afro-Caribbean Creole population. Her book, Becoming Creole: Nature and Race in Belize (Rutgers University Press, 2018), explores how people become who they are in relationship to the natural worlds in which they live; and how these relationships in turn are always entangled in processes of racialization. Her analysis focuses on Creole communities in northern and central Belize. She has also published on the intersections of race and environment in the history of Belize, conservation as a process of creolization in Belize, the interrelationship between gender, race and ecotourism in Belize, and theorizing rural Creole lifeways as a mode of commoning that aligns with the Black Radical Tradition. Future projects include a multi-species analysis of jaguar-human becomings in Belize, a study of the encounter of the rebellious British colonial officer, Edward Despard, the British subjects and enslaved individuals who were displaced from the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua to Belize in the late 18th C, and ideas of freedom, race and landscape; a consideration of rural Belizean entanglements with climate change, theorizing race as simultaneously materially present and socially constructed, rethinking the human through the human-cashew relationship in Belize, and critically considering swamps as a site of relational living. She also works with students on Southwestern University’s historical roots in slavery, indigenous genocide and other processes of racial exclusion. She has conducted an interdisciplinary faculty-student collaborative project on environmental justice in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, and a project with Southwestern student Kimberly Griffin (Env Studies ’10) on a social and environmental history of the San Gabriel River in Central Texas.
She serves on the Editorial Board for the journals Human Ecology and the Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR).
She is especially interested in bringing critical analysis of systems of privilege and oppression to the examination of the intersections of the human with non-human–from analyses of the meanings of place and landscape to relationships between human and non-human animals. Critical to her analysis is displacing Eurocentric modes of being and thinking. The contexts that attract her attention are those in which people and other things are moving–sites of tourism, international biodiversity conservation, toxicity, emigration, immigration, and transnational and trans-place networks, to name a few.
She is passionate about teaching, and regularly teaches Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Method and Theory in Cultural Anthropology, Global Environmental Justice, Race, Class and Gender in the Caribbean and the Anthropology Senior Research Seminar. She also teaches a First Year Seminar “Understanding Race and Racism,” and often teaches May Term classes (Race & Nature, Eating Culutres (Food)). She is committed to doing all that she can to promote social justice in her communities. She chairs the Race and Ethnicity Studies program, and served as a member and leader of Southwestern’s Diversity Enrichment Committee for many years. She is also a long-standing member of the program committee for Environmental Studies.
She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan (Anthropology) in 1998 and her B.A. from Williams College (Biology with concentration in Environmental Studies) in 1984.
Johnson has also received multiple awards including the AKA Spirit of Giving Award for Support of Students of Color in 2022, the Jesse E. Purdy Excellence in Scholarly and Creative Works Award in 2019, the Joe S. Mundy Award for Exemplary Service in 2009 and the Southwestern University Senior Teaching Award in 2006.
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