Academic Research
“Caring Through Crisis”: The Politics and Therapeutics of Survival and Recovery in South Africa’s GBV “Emergency”
In 2018, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa declared gender-based violence an “emergency” in the country. While labeling GBV a crisis might lend urgency to the plight of survivors and serve to mobilize resources on their behalf, my project asks what is left out of an emergency care framework, what happens to survivors beyond the limited purview of treatment allocated by a short-term, crisis intervention model. I ask how this model of crisis became instantiated internationally, through global donors like USAID’s PEPFAR, and how it informs international development objectives and enumerations around violence. In so doing, I interrogate how emergency indicators impact the kinds of “empowerment” and “care” survivors can access, by working within a local Cape Town NGO to see how their staff and survivors navigate the process of recovery and restoration.
South African Syndemics
I am part of a research team headed by Dr. Emily Mendenhall of Georgetown University investigating the role of syndemics—specifically non-communicable diseases, including breast cancer, and mental illeness, in relation to chronic illnesses like HIV—in South Africa. This research is being conducted in collaboration between Georgetown University and the University of Witwatersrand with funding from the NIH.
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
Fletcher, E.H., Backe, E.L, et al. 2022. “Policy Statement: Mental Well-being among Anthropologists at Universities: A Call for System Transformation.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly. 36(1).
Mannivannan, Q., Anumol, D., Raja, S., Tamang, D., Rathore, K.S., Backe, E.L. and L.J. Shepherd. 2023. “Care Conversations.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 25(2):336-352.
Backe, E.L., Bosire, E. & E. Mendenhall. 2021. '“‘Drinking Too Much, Fighting Too Much’: The Dual “Disasters” of Intimate Partner Violence and Alcohol Use in South Africa.” Violence Against Women.
Backe, E.L., Bosire, E., Kim, A.W. & E. Mendenhall. 2021. “Thinking Too Much”: A Systematic Review of the Idiom of Distress in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry.
“Capacitating care: Activist anthropology in ethnographies of gender‐based violence.” 2020. Feminist Anthropology 1:192-198.
Backe, E.L., Lilleston, P. & J. McCleary-Sills. 2018. “Networked Individuals, Gendered Violence: A Literature Review of Cyberviolence.” Violence and Gender 5(3):135-146.
“A Crisis of Care: The Politics and Therapeutics of a Rape Crisis Hotline.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 32 (2018): 463-480.
BOOK CHAPTERS
Backe, Emma Louise and Alex Fitzpatrick. 2024. “Chapter 11: Fieldwork and Feeled-Work: Addressing Mental Health in Ethnography.” In Inclusive Ethnography: Making Fieldwork Safer, Healthier and More Ethical. Edited by Caitlin Procter and Branwen Spector. Sage Publishers.
Media Journalism
Podcast. “Anthropology and/of Mental Health Pt. 2.” Society for Cultural Anthropology (2020)
“The “Anthropology and/of Mental Health” series is a two-part exploration of anthropologists' experiences with mental health. In this episode, Anar expands the conversation about mental health in anthropology through the lenses of attention, grief, and responding to unexpected changes in our fieldwork and research. The interviews and contributions in this episode are the products of conversations that began before the Covid-19 present and the uprisings that have followed the loss of Black lives to police violence and anti-Black racism during the first part of 2020.”
Co-Editor. “Theorizing the Contemporary: Speculative Anthropologies.” Society for Cultural Anthropology. (2018)
“At the intersection of speculative fiction and anthropology, we find a sense of epistemological humility about the kind of worlds we could or should inhabit. Yet epistemological humility should not be confused with futility: possibilities and potentialities still matter. We do not know what we are capable of, and yet that need not keep us from the pursuit of what ifs. Through the imaginative interpellations of speculative fiction (SF), the contributors to this Theorizing the Contemporary series gravitate toward new localities and means of presence: ecological, technological, Afro-futuristic. Facing the imminent prospect of both disaster and discovery, they call us to resist despair and to craft tangible ways of shaping and repairing the worlds we still hope for.”
Podcast. “#MeToo: Stories in the Age of Survivorship.” This Anthro Life (2018)
“As an ethnographer of sexual violence, who conducted fieldwork on a rape crisis hotline during the Pussygate controversy and has served as a Peer Advocate in George Washington University’s Anthropology Department to respond to incidents of sexual misconduct, I wanted to situate and historicize the #MeToo movement, with the recognition that the academy must similarly grapple with the perils of harassment and assault. This recognition of violence, particularly in light of the suffering slot, must be accompanied by the acknowledgement that the anthropological community contains survivors as well as perpetrators, experiences of trauma as well as complicity and predation. By offering an ethnopoetic approach to #MeToo, I propose opportunities to explore the gaps between lived experience and knowledge production, one whose theoretical intercession recognizes that a disposition towards care must also leave room for hesitation and creative reconfigurations of listening.”
“Letting Silence Have a Voice in #MeToo.” Sapiens (2018)
“Storytelling plays a vital role in addressing sexual assault, but what of the safety and well-being of survivors—both those who speak out and those who don't?”
“Personalizing Access, Personalizing Praxis. #HauTalk.” Allegra Lab (2018)
“Anthropology trained us to identify systems of oppression, those “invisibilized” dimensions of culture that reek of prejudice, privilege, and disproportionate power dynamics. These are the very theoretical and methodological orientations we bring to bear now in this public reckoning.”
“Engagements with Ethnographic Care. Anthropology News (2017).
“On care and self-care as an anthropologist and rape crisis advocate.”
Podcast. “Talking Feminist Anthropology with Emma Backe.” Lady Science (2019)
“Feminist Anthropology: Parts I and II.” The New Inquiry (2017)
“What does it mean to be a feminist anthropologist or to do feminist anthropological work? How might the failure to integrate feminism into mainstream anthropology help us to explain instances of harassment and assault, both within the field and in the academy?”
Podcast. “Cyberviolence: Many Ways, Many Motives.” 3 Women, 3 Ways (2020)
“We have all heard of cyber bullying, but that is just one way trolls, misogynists, and criminal can use the internet to target, harass, threaten, shame and terrorize their unfortunate victims. Who are the perpetrators and who do they target? What are the negative effects of these assaults? And what are we doing about it? Join us as we discuss the research into cyber violence, the reactions to it, and the impacts on victims and society.”
“Left to Their Own Devices: Gender, Cyberviolence and the Internet.” The New Inquiry (2018)
“While the expansion and globalization of Web 2.0 has allowed for the instantaneous dissemination of information and provided instrumental platforms for mobilizing feminist activity, it has not escaped the troubling effects of misogyny and sexism offline. The term cyberviolence came to international attention in 2015 when the United Nations published a highly controversial report on cyberviolence against women and girls alerting the global community to the global scale of online abuse. This violence has largely been used to target women who employ the Internet to call out instances of discrimination, participate in political conversations, and further many of the causes first laid out by early cyberfeminists.”
Podcast. “The Social Life of Robots, pt 2: Sex and Temperament in Three Cyborg Societies.” This Anthro Life (2018).
“In this episode hosts Adam Gamwell, Ryan Collins and Emma Backe tackle sex and gender norms underlying digital voice assistants like Siri, Cortana and Alexa, the history and gendering of science and technology studies (STS) and what this means in an era of AI and robots, and third, theories of rights such as the right to work, the right to sex and how robots clarify and confound these issues.”
Previous Research Partnerships
Guangzhou, China African Migrant Health Study
As part of a partnership between George Washington University’s Milken Institute of Public Health and Sun Yat Sen University, I was part of a research team that conducted ethnographic research in Guangzhou, China investigating the barriers to health care access for African migrants and health needs of the African migrant population. We discovered issues of racial discrimination against African migrants in the Chinese health care system, structural racism that contributed to poor health (poor living conditions), and informal health care networks to access medication for conditions like HIV. Research was led by Dr. Elanah Uretsky (Brandeis University).
Cellular Connections: Cell Phones & US High School Students
A longitudinal, ethnographic research project on how US high school students in the Washington, DC area understood and interacted with their phones, this NSF-funded project sought to complicate media ideologies that cell phones and social media were destroying the social skills of their users. We discovered the ways in which cell phones promoted social relationships across time and space, as well as the techniques students used to media trouble or conflict precipitated by phones and social media. This project was coordinated by Dr. Alex Dent (GW), Dr. Joel Kuipers (GW), and Dr. Joshua Bell (Smithsonian).
Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage
As part of the Creativity and Crisis: Unfolding The AIDS Memorial Quilt (2012), I helped to investigate the role of art activism in destigmatizing HIV and AIDS in the US and South Africa, and promote public education about the HIV epidemic. Collaboration with the Smithsonian also involved research for their Endangered Languages Program, undertaken in partnership with National Geographic.