Department of History - Carnegie Mellon University

Faculty

Karen Ann Faulk

Rank: Adjunct Professor
Ph.D.: University of Michigan, 2008
Department Member Since: 2009

Dr. Faulk is an anthropologist specializing in political and legal anthropology, with a current focus on social activism in Latin America.

Her current book manuscript is entitled Human Rights and the Place of the Local. The central focus of this book is on the application and modification of transnational human rights discourses by contemporary social movements in Argentina. The project interweaves methodological and theoretical practices traditionally the preserve of the disciplines of Anthropology and History, making new injunctions into the construction of a method of inquiry grounded in a historical excavation of ideas and a detailed attention to the meanings and interpretations afforded to these ideas in lived practice. In doing so, it reveals the importance of considering the disjunctions between universalist transnational discourses and their adaptation to local circumstances, even in places that have played an important role in their formulation.

Dr. Faulk is also undertaking a comparative study of workers’ cooperatives formed around the recycling industry during the period of neoliberal reform in Argentina, Colombia, and Brazil. Specifically, she places these cooperatives and the conditions they arose from within the political economic context of refuse collection as it developed historically from the 1940s through the present. This project adds to emerging research on contemporary issues of consumption and social service industries by providing a historically grounded ethnographical perspective on grassroots responses to the social, economic, and political changes engendered by the local application of neoliberalist ideology and the crises of environmental and economic non-sustainability.

Publications

Research Articles

“If they touch one of us, they touch all of us: Cooperativism as a Counterlogic to Neoliberal Capitalism.” Anthropological Quarterly, Summer 2008.

Book Reviews and Review Essays

“Writing as a Magical Act: Tracing Histories of Violence and Cocaine in Colombia,” review essay in consideration of Law in a Lawless Land and My Cocaine Museum by Michael Taussig. PoLAR (Political and Legal Anthropology Review), Fall 2008.

“30 Years Later: Exploring the Continuing Relevance of Argentine Human Rights Organizations” in consideration of Sustaining Human Rights: Women and Argentine Human Rights Organizations by Michelle D. Bonner. Published on H-Human Rights, January 2008.