Shawn Parkhurst, PhD

Associate Professor

About

Social equality and mutual human understanding are commonly acknowledged as good, and widely experienced as rare.  My work seems always to unfold from this proposition.  It examines how and why social equality and inequality, along with cultural commonality and difference, emerge in different times and spaces, intertwine with certain ecosystems, and interact with particular linguistic practices.  Material geography is a sort of ghostwriter for these concerns.  A wonderful place Portugal (and, increasingly, Iberia as a whole) is generally the proving ground for all of the foregoing.  Making such analytical work useful depends, I am convinced, on engaging with the history of anthropology and the social sciences.