Gonzalez-Tennant

Personal information

Last name

Gonzalez-Tennant

Position

PhD Candidate | Adjunct Instructor

Website

http://www.anthroyeti.com

Brief Bio

Originally from Chicago, my family and I moved to Northwest Arkansas early in my life and I consider myself a midwesterner/southerner hybrid. I am a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Florida. My research investigates/generates the linkages between engaged archaeology, visual anthropology, critical race theory, and reparations activism. I'm very good at mapping having taught courses on GIS in the US and New Zealand, getting much better at 3D content creation using Google SketchUp and Blender3D, and developing my skills as a maker of animated documentaries.

Full Bio

I attended the University of Arkansas for my BA in Anthropology (2004 - Cum Laude) and spent 13 months in New Zealand and shared my time between a research project on public archaeology and transnational, evangelical Buddhist groups. Then, I attended Michigan Technological University earning an MS in Industrial Archaeology (2005) by exploring an ethics-based approach to managing archaeological data with a case study from the high arctic islands of Spitzbergen. I have been a graduate student at the University of Florida since 2005.

I advanced to PhD candidacy in 2007 earning an MA in anthropology for preliminary research on the application of new information technologies to historic sites of shame. These sites form the foundation for my PhD work and include 19th and 20th century race riots, Internment Camps, and other examples of racially charged collective violence. Recently, I've become interested in PostColonial Studies and Academic Storytelling.

I frame my current work as engaged anthropology. Theoretically I am interested in Critical Race Theory (CRT), critical/liberation sociology, and Diaspora Studies. I am interested in CRT because sites of shame and their associated communities must interact with legal structures in a variety of ways. Diaspora Studies - as well as related currents in Cultural Studies - inform my framings of identity, particularly in relation to traumatic displacement events. Critical/liberation sociology provides a middle-range theory to operationalize my research with a commitment to a non-elite praxis.

Methodologically I draw on a four fields anthropology approach as well as growing trends in participatory GIS (PGIS), critical cartographies, and academic storytelling. I am interested in using visual anthropology and digital/virtual technologies to create emotive spaces for connecting present audiences with the past in ways that tease out modern-day correlates to historic instances of intolerance. This is aimed at joining with other emergent ideologies to transform society in universally positive ways. This also includes exploring a wide variety of digital/virtual environments as new modes of commemoration.

I draw on all of these to interrogate Black | White dichotomies in the US and Global South. I believe that stereotypical race- and class-based representations harm people in real and measurable ways. My project uses digitally-driven documentaries and virtual environments across multiple platforms to interrogate historic and modern catalysts for racially charged collective violence such as race riots, lynchings, and the illegal detention of immigrants and citizens.

I currently serve on the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) Student Committee as Communications Coordinator. In the past I have served as a Newsletter Current Research Editor with the Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) and as Assistant-to-the-Editor for the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA).

History

Member for

2 years 44 weeks

Blog

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