Dr. Jamie Johnson

UNT Faculty Profile

As an applied urban anthropologist and Senior Lecturer given to studying human arrangements, Dr. Johnson's scholarly pursuits and teaching interests include the built environment, material culture and global supply chains, NGOs and development in the neoliberal era, the global tourism industry, feminist theories and methods around issues of infrastructural racism, gentrification and development, discard studies, social and environmental justice, and gender and power, broadly construed. She combines anthropological investigation and pedagogy by collaborating with stakeholders on projects whose dual purpose is to train students in applied research. Ethnographic flexibility and sensitivity informs this goal, as her students and collaborators explore the intimate spaces of daily life, the institutions and infrastructures that bind them, and the precarity of those arrangements given the whole of human agency. Her doctoral work highlighted "heritage construction sites" as ongoing contestations of cultural heritage in the rugged Himalayan tourist destination of Leh, Ladakh - India. Back home, her recent projects in urban ecology examine suburban residential perceptions of the water-energy nexus, and are informed by a four-field approach to the human experience.

Research interests: urban anthropology, infrastructural racism, social and environmental justice