Vanessa Agard-Jones
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University
Vanessa Agard-Jones is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, where she maintains affiliations with the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, the Center for Science and Society, the Earth Institute, and the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies. At its most expansive, Agard-Jones’ work asks how coloniality is made material: in social forms, in human and nonhuman bodies, and in the landscapes in which we live. With a focus on Black life in the Atlantic world, she conducts historical and ethnographic research on racialization, environmental degradation and the politics of gender and sexuality. In Body Burdens: Toxic Endurance and Decolonial Desire in the French Atlantic (in preparation), Agard-Jones reframes the concept of body burden to account for the accretion of toxicities in Martinique, a French territory in the Caribbean. Focused on material exposures to a pesticide called kepone/chlordécone and on immaterial exposures to racism, sexism, and homophobia, Body Burdens asks how contemporary debates about sovereignty on the island are articulated through the prism of ideas about porosity and contamination. Agard-Jones is a member of the Social Text Collective, Scholars for Social Justice and serves on the editorial boards of PoLAR: the Political and Legal Anthropology Review and Environment and Society: Advances in Research.
Working Group Affiliations
Black Atlantic Ecologies, Project Director