This project is part of a wider research stream on race and exclusion at the Anthropology Department of American University (AU). This department was one of the first in the country to develop curricula in Applied Anthropology and has wide experience in applied research on race and social justice.
Sarah French Brennan
Sarah French Brennan is currently pursuing a PhD in Applied Anthropology at Columbia University Teachers College and working as a Research Assistant for the Muslim Youth Oral Histories Initiative. In 2007, she graduated with a BA, Magna Cum Laude with Honors in Anthropology from the American University. She worked as a research assistant for Professor Javier Moreno at the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy at Harvard University.
Aditi Fruitwala
Aditi Fruitwala received her Masters in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics. She also graduated Magna Cum Laude with honors in Anthropology from the American University. She has worked as a policy and publications intern with Canvas8, the Institute for Policy Studies, Green America, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, and Global Awareness.
Together, they founded Darfur Action, a student organization promoting activism for the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, Sudan. As a joint senior dissertation, Sarah and Aditi completed more than 100 interviews about contemporary experiences of racism in the US, work that constitutes the origin of this project.
Dr. Brett Williams
Brett Williams is a professor in the Anthropology Department at the American University in Washington, DC. She began her work as an anthropologist working among migrant farm workers in Illinois, exploring how they coped with terrible poverty and helping them organize a lettuce boycott and raise money for a halfway house. Since coming to Washington in 1976, Williams has written about gentrification, displacement, and homelessness; urban renewal and public housing; race and poverty; environmental justice in the Anacostia Watershed; urban nature; illness and inequality; the culture of and credit and debt.
Dr. Williams has published six books, including one on the African American hero John Henry, Upscaling Downtown, on the pain and promise of integration in an urban neighborhood and Debt for Sale, which explores the rise of the super-profitable credit industry. Working with community ethnographers, Williams and her students have done projects for the National Park Service, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Smithsonian Institution’s Festival of American Folklife. In this work she joins theory and practice in promoting better public policy and social justice.
Brett Williams is a professor in the Anthropology Department at the American University in Washington, DC. She began her work as an anthropologist working among migrant farm workers in Illinois, exploring how they coped with terrible poverty and helping them organize a lettuce boycott and raise money for a halfway house. Since coming to Washington in 1976, Williams has written about gentrification, displacement, and homelessness; urban renewal and public housing; race and poverty; environmental justice in the Anacostia Watershed; urban nature; illness and inequality; the culture of and credit and debt.
Dr. Williams has published six books, including one on the African American hero John Henry, Upscaling Downtown, on the pain and promise of integration in an urban neighborhood and Debt for Sale, which explores the rise of the super-profitable credit industry. Working with community ethnographers, Williams and her students have done projects for the National Park Service, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Smithsonian Institution’s Festival of American Folklife. In this work she joins theory and practice in promoting better public policy and social justice.
