Laurian Bowles, PhD

Laurian Bowles is a cultural and visual anthropologist who researches, writes and teaches about social mobility, sensory politics, and the visual economies of women’s labor in Africa and the Diaspora. As a critically engaged scholar with 20 years of fieldwork experiences in North America and Africa, Laurian attends to the way activism, through everyday forms of mobilization, provides insight into practices of resistance and refusals in marginalized communities. Especially interested in the haptic nature of photography, as well as the circulation of pictures as material artifacts, Laurian explores how feelings about race, class, and sexuality are materialized through visual storytelling. With support as a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellow, Leeway Grant recipient, and former Dissertation Fellow at Western Illinois University, Laurian has published work in Visual Anthropology Review, Kalfou, and African Arts, as well as presented papers and lectures in Ghana, South Africa, The Netherlands, UK, and US.

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Laurian and Beth recently co-edited a special edition of The Senses & Society comprised of six essays that celebrate and critically reassess anthropologist Paul Stoller’s scholarship on sensory fieldwork methods. The issue includes their introduction and an essay entitled “Epistolary storytelling: a feminist sensory orientation to ethnography” based on letters they exchanged while conducting research in Ghana and Belize.

Longterm collaborators, Beth & Laurian also co-edit a website [envisionimprint.org] and won a Leeway Art & Change grant in support of their ongoing research about feminist and queer cross-racial social movements in Philadelphia.