Rebecca Dudley

Summary

Rebecca Dudley is a PhD candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology and a Harvey Graduate Fellow with American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her historical anthropological research focuses on legacies of the plantation in contemporary industrial agriculture in the Deep South, including the racialization of labor, technology, financing, commodity flows, and knowledge on industrial farms. She examines how family networks, institutions of governance, and agricultural practices and technologies intersect to enact, reify, and/or challenge racialized logics of farming and environmental interactions -- and how these enactments, reifications, and challenges produce or restrict possibilities of farm sovereignty and self-determination during the contemporary era of radical climate change and late capitalism. In this research, she uses theoretical lenses from economic and environmental anthropology, feminist science and technology studies, history, and Black studies and experiments with mapping, collage, and ethnographic narrative. Before beginning her dissertation research, Rebecca worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture Farm Service Agency. 

Awards and Fellowships

Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, 2022

Washington University Center for the Humanities Graduate Student Fellowship, 2022

Harvey Graduate Fellow, American Culture Studies, Washington University in St. Louis, 2019

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