 | Anthropologists in the SecurityScape: Ethics, Practice, and Professional Identity Robert Albro received his Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1999. Since 1991, Dr. Albro has maintained long-term ethnographic research and published widely on popular and indigenous politics in Bolivia, with a particular focus on the changing terms of citizenship, democratic participation, and indigenous movements in this country. His current research is concerned with global cultural policy-making as it meaningfully shapes the ongoing terms of globalization, including the relevance of culture in contexts of security. Dr. Albro''s research and writing have been supported over the years by the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Council for Learned Societies, among others. Dr. Albro has also been a Fulbright scholar, and has held fellowships at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian Institution. Dr. Albro has held several leadership positions in the American Anthropological Association (AAA), including Chair of the Committee for Human Rights and Chair of the Ad Hoc Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the U.S. Security and Intelligence Communities. He was given the AAA''s President''s Award in 2009 for outstanding contributions to the Association. Most recently, he has taught at Wheaton College (MA) and at George Washington University. He currently teaches in the School of International Service at American University.George E. Marcus is Chancellor''s Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Irvine (UCI). He has conducted ethnographic studies of elites and elite cultures in a variety of settings: kings and nobles in modern Tonga of the South Pacific; contemporary political and business dynasties in the United States, Europe, and Latin America; art collectors; Portuguese aristocrats; and, most recently, the workings of the World Trade Organization. Since the mid-1990s, he has been working with the idea of "multisited ethnography," which involves direct and long-term contact and inquiry amid both cultures of experts and elites and those of ordinary people in everyday life. Through his founding of a Center for Ethnography at UCI, he has conducted experiments with the classic form of anthropology''s distinctive method of inquiry and its teaching to meet the challenge of new topics and contexts of research. Marcus''s projects continue to be explicitly collaborative, and he is interested generally in the nature of collaborations at the core of the contemporary practice of diverse ethnographic research. In recent collaborations, he pursued this interest in inquiries involving Portuguese nobles, European politicians, Latin American artists, U.S. bankers, and Brazilian intellectuals.Laura A. McNamara is a Principal Member of Technical Staff in the Exploratory Simulation Technologies Organization at Sandia National Laboratories. Trained in cultural anthropology, McNamara conducts field studies in national security environments to assess barriers and opportunities for new technology development and adoption. She has worked with nuclear weapon experts, intelligence analysts, and cybersecurity experts, focusing on issues of expert knowledge elicitation and representation, verification and validation in computational social science, uncertainty quantification, user-centered design strategies, innovation adoption, and software evaluation. Dr. McNamara received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of New Mexico in 2001, with a dissertation on the problem of knowledge loss in the post-Cold War nuclear weapons programs at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Dr. McNamara is a Fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology and spent two years on the AAA''s Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the U.S. Security and Intelligence Communities (CEAUSSIC). McNamara was recently appointed to the National Research Council''s Committee on Improving the Decision Making Abilities of Small Unit Leaders (2010-2011). In addition, she serves on Sandia''s Human Studies Board. She is coeditor (with Robert Rubinstein) of the forthcoming book Dangerous Liaisons: Anthropologists and the National Security State, to be published by SAR Press in 2011.Monica Schoch-Spana, a medical anthropologist, is a Senior Associate with the Center for biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and an Assistant Professor in the School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases. For more than 10 years, Schoch-Spana has briefed numerous federal, state, and local officials as well as medical, public health, and public safety professionals on critical issues in biosecurity. National advisory roles include serving on the Steering Committee of the Disaster Roundtable of the National Research Council (NRC), the Institute of Medicine Standing Committee on Medical Readiness, and the NRC Committee on Increasing National Resilience to Hazards and Disasters. She serves on the faculty and steering committee for the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a university-based center of excellence supported by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Archival and ethnographic case studies inform Dr. Schoch-Spana''s perspective on community reactions to public health and terrorist crises, including Anthrax Attacks 2001, World Trade Center Attack 2001, and Pandemic Influenza 1918. Select publications include "Community Engagement: Leadership Tool for Catastrophic Health Events" (Biosecurity and bioterrorism, 2007), "Leading during bioattacks and Epidemics with the Public''s Trust and Help" (Biosecurity and bioterrorism, 2004), "Educating, Informing and Mobilizing the Public" (in Terrorism and Public Health, B. Levy and V. Sidel, eds. Oxford University Press, 2003), and "Bioterrorism and the Public: How to Vaccinate a City against Panic?" (Clinical Infectious Diseases, 2002). In 2003, Dr. Schoch-Spana helped establish the biosecurity Center of UPMC; prior to that, she worked at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian biodefense Strategies starting in 1998. She received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Johns Hopkins University (1998) and B.A. from Bryn Mawr College (1986). |
