Articles by Brad Erickson
Public Anthropologist, 2024
This article traces contemporary patterns of housing and homelessness to colonial geographies as ... more This article traces contemporary patterns of housing and homelessness to colonial geographies as race-place schemata: historic and ongoing relationships to territory that articulate and impose white supremacy while stimulating resistance to it. These phenomena are approached through the four fields of anthropology, placing a contemporary ethnography of gentrification/displacement in Oakland in conversation with the archeological record of colonization. The demographic tracking of human populations through census instruments and discourses of biological distancing suggest implications for biological anthropology, and socio-linguistic analysis is applied to colonial naming practice. Intended as an essay-length land acknowledgement and critical interrogation of contemporary white spatial entitlement, this research centers the capacity of territorial aesthetics and the geographic organization of the Spanish imperial project to produce continuing place-based dominance over colonized peoples through dispossession of their lands, containment of their populations, assimilation and erasure of their life ways, and surveillance over and defense against their resistance.
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Visual Studies, 2021
This article explores the openness of the grotesque body as a problem space to theorise links bet... more This article explores the openness of the grotesque body as a problem space to theorise links between Carnival and political discourse. Data from ethnographic field research on Carnival in the Catalan city of Vilanova i la Geltrú is interpreted through the analysis of Mikhail Bakhtin, who argued that Carnival uses a system of festive-popular images to enact the cycle of disease, death and rebirth through the medium of the grotesque body. The first half of the article uses visual data from contemporary Carnival and 16th century images of the grotesque to present and solve a problem encountered applying Bakhtin’s model: missing images of new life. The second part explores ways that the logic and aesthetics of the grotesque body and other carnivalesque modes such as ambivalent laughter and practice utopias extend beyond Carnival to shape the broader politics of Catalan civic life.
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American Ethnologist, Jan 1, 2011
In this article, I explore articulations between ritual practice, public sociality, and the polit... more In this article, I explore articulations between ritual practice, public sociality, and the politics of immigration in Catalonia (Spain). I investigate phenomena associated with a vernacular interculturalist project known in Catalan as convivència (engagement between neighbors), an alternative to both xenophobic and liberal multiculturalist discourses circulating in Europe. I focus on the capacity of ritual practice to shape embodied socialities between hosts and immigrants and contextualize these dynamics by asking, what congeries of history, public reasoning, techniques of sociality, and policy feed momentum toward polarization or toward pluralism?
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Popular Music and Society, 2016
This article explores space imagery in the music of George
Clinton and David Bowie and argues th... more This article explores space imagery in the music of George
Clinton and David Bowie and argues that different horizons of Black and
white terrestrial experience give rise to divergent astral imaginaries.
Analysis of song lyrics, liner notes, and statements by the artists in light
of their social contexts and the theoretical lens of Bakhtin’s grotesque
body shows that Bowie models white imaginations of evolutionary
transcendence in contrast to Clinton as provocateur of a Black
carnivalesque seeking liberation from lived inequality.
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Anthropoliteia, Aug 21, 2014
This article presents ethnographic data to argue that Oakland's problems cannot be solved by poli... more This article presents ethnographic data to argue that Oakland's problems cannot be solved by policing but through upending the concept of "crime," and redistributing power and resources.
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This short essay places "People Get Ready" in political context with attention to images of mobil... more This short essay places "People Get Ready" in political context with attention to images of mobility as articulations of the project of Black liberation.
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Caramella: Revista de Música i Cultura Popular, 2011
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Caramella: Revista de música i cultura popular
In this short article, I explore ways that Catalan scatological Christmas traditions provide a gr... more In this short article, I explore ways that Catalan scatological Christmas traditions provide a grotesque language to critique top-down politics from the bottom up.
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Treganza Museum Anthropology Papers, 2008
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Expired link, please see pdf above., Jan 1, 2007
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Book chapters by Brad Erickson
Emancipatory Change in US Higher Education, 2023
Despite massive changes in both how and what we teach, and despite significant scholarship docume... more Despite massive changes in both how and what we teach, and despite significant scholarship documenting the inherent biases in both the collection and use of teaching effectiveness assessments, these assessment practices have remained virtually unchanged for decades. In particular, quantitative ratings in student “evaluations” and peer observations compound, disguise, and amplify existing biases, leading to significant impact in employment decisions. This chapter seeks to clarify why this is the time for a change in TEA practices, and to offer practical guidance in the development of transformative TEA practices for all educational institutions in order for them to better support the achievement of stated goals and outcomes.
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In K. R. Roth and Z. S. Ritter (eds.), Whiteness, Power, and Resisting Change in US Higher Education, Palgrave Studies in Race, Inequality and Social Justice in Education, 2021
In this essay I critique the two-tier faculty labor system and present strategies towards its abo... more In this essay I critique the two-tier faculty labor system and present strategies towards its abolition.
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Evil, truth and reconciliation, ed. M. Breen. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 116-134., 2004
I propose evil folklore as a distinct category meriting inquiry. Evil folklore consists of popula... more I propose evil folklore as a distinct category meriting inquiry. Evil folklore consists of popular traditions about persecuted social groups including proverbs, jokes, legends, and much more. Evil folklore is a broad category that serves to rationalize aggression. My focus is on the lore of dominant social groups used against relatively weaker groups. Evil folklore characteristically hinges on negative stereotypes that serve to dehumanize the target. In the examples that follow, evil folklore includes an element of defamation in which the target is falsely accused of aggression, an exact inversion of the actual state of affairs. To put it bluntly, evil folklore justifies extreme violence by blaming the victim.
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In Talking the walk: A communications guide for racial justice. H. Cutting and M. Themba-Nixon, eds., 2003
This book chapter presents strategies from a successful campaign to defeat anti-immigrant wedge p... more This book chapter presents strategies from a successful campaign to defeat anti-immigrant wedge politics targeting environmentalists.
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Conference papers by Brad Erickson
Resisting the Neoliberal University, Seven Hills Conference Center, San Francisco, 2018
In this conference paper I propose the abolition of the two-tier faculty system.
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108th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania., 2009
In this paper I explore affinities between ritual practice and the politics of immigration in con... more In this paper I explore affinities between ritual practice and the politics of immigration in contemporary Europe. In Catalonia (Spain), I investigated phenomena associated with a vernacular interculturalist project known in Catalan as convivència (lit. living with), an alternative to the deployment of both xenophobic and liberal multiculturalist discourses circulating in much of Europe. To make sense of this project, I focus on the capacity of ritual practice to constitute embodied socialities between long-term community members and newcomers and then explore affinities between the dispositions forged in ritual contexts and host-immigrant solidarities in the sphere of public policy.
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Reports by Brad Erickson
This report presents the findings of a six-month evaluation study of Healing the Healers, a pilot... more This report presents the findings of a six-month evaluation study of Healing the Healers, a pilot program addressing the secondary trauma experienced by youth service providers working with young people in crisis.
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Papers by Brad Erickson
Springer eBooks, Dec 8, 2022
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Visual Studies, 2020
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Popular Music and Society, 2016
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Uploads
Articles by Brad Erickson
Clinton and David Bowie and argues that different horizons of Black and
white terrestrial experience give rise to divergent astral imaginaries.
Analysis of song lyrics, liner notes, and statements by the artists in light
of their social contexts and the theoretical lens of Bakhtin’s grotesque
body shows that Bowie models white imaginations of evolutionary
transcendence in contrast to Clinton as provocateur of a Black
carnivalesque seeking liberation from lived inequality.
Book chapters by Brad Erickson
Conference papers by Brad Erickson
Reports by Brad Erickson
Papers by Brad Erickson
Clinton and David Bowie and argues that different horizons of Black and
white terrestrial experience give rise to divergent astral imaginaries.
Analysis of song lyrics, liner notes, and statements by the artists in light
of their social contexts and the theoretical lens of Bakhtin’s grotesque
body shows that Bowie models white imaginations of evolutionary
transcendence in contrast to Clinton as provocateur of a Black
carnivalesque seeking liberation from lived inequality.