Greg Beckett

I am a cultural anthropologist who studies crisis, disaster, politics, and historical consciousness. I am interested in how people make sense of crisis, how they “look for life” amid difficult circumstances, and how they think about the past and imagine possible futures. My current research is on the “everyday logistics” of getting around Port-au-Prince. My geographic areas of expertise are the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, specifically Haiti, where I have worked for more than twenty years.

Some of my publications are available at https://uwontario.academia.ed/GregBeckett

2019. There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince. Oakland: University of California Press.

2017. The Politics of Disjuncture, Or Freedom from a Caribbean Point of View. Small Axe No 53 21(2):184–92.

2017. The Abolition of All Privilege: Race, Equality, and Freedom in the Work of Anténor Firmin. Critique of Anthropology 37(2):160–78.

2017. A Dog’s Life: Reflections on the Humanitarian Situation in Haiti. American Anthropologist 119(1):35–45.

2014. The Art of Not Governing Port-au-Prince. Social and Economic Studies 63(2): 97–123.

2013. The Ontology of Freedom: The Unthinkable Miracle of Haiti. Journal of Haitian Studies 19(2): 54–74.

2013. Thinking with Others: Savage Thoughts about Anthropology and the West. Small Axe 42: 166–181.

2013. The Politics of Emergency. Reviews in Anthropology 42(2): 85¬–101.

2013. Rethinking the Haitian Crisis. In The Idea of Haiti: History, Development and the Creation of New Narratives, Millery Polyné, ed. University of Minnesota Press, pp. 27–49.

2010. Phantom Power: Notes on Provisionality in Haiti. In Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency. John D. Kelly, Beatrice Jauregui, Sean T. Mitchell, and Jeremy Walton eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 39-51.

2004. Master of the Wood: Moral Authority and Political Imaginaries in Haiti. PoLAR: The Political and Legal Anthropology Review. 27(2): 1–19.

In addition to core courses in the department, I teach the following courses:

• 2277F Anthropology of Disasters
• 2279F/G Ordinary Ethics
• 3355F/G Zombies in Cultural and Historical Perspective
• 3365F/G Anthropology of the Future

My areas of teaching interest also include the following: critical social theory, Marxism, the anthropology of value, political anthropology, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, ethnographic writing and narrative form, and climate change and the economies of extraction.

I advise graduate students working on: disaster, crisis, and emergency; trauma; humanitarianism; ethics; the Caribbean and Atlantic World; historical consciousness; political anthropology; and climate change and extractive capitalism.