Encounters, Oppression, and Recuperation:  A Conversation with Gregory Duff Morton

In the final panel conversation around the texts and ideas of First-Year Seminar, first-year students and faculty will speak with anthropologist and activist Gregory Duff Morton, whose teaching and research focus on migrant labor, economics, and social movement organizing in rural Latin America. Using Lėon-Portilla’s The Broken Spears as our touchstone text, this student/faculty panel will discuss the scholarly work required to reclaim indigenous narratives of history in the Western hemisphere, and the political stakes of such an effort. More broadly, the conversation will interrogate the challenges of bringing together academic research and civic engagement through the perspective of an anthropologist.
 
About our panelist: Gregory Duff Morton is assistant professor of anthropology at Bard College. A graduate of the University of Chicago and formerly a postdoctoral fellow in international and public affairs at Brown University’s Watson Institute, his academic work has appeared in Social Service Review, American Ethnologist, Anthropological Quarterly, Providence Journal, Journal of Recreational Mathematics, and World Development, among other publications. At Bard, he teaches courses such as Doing Ethnography, The Stranger in Latin America, as well as the Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences course The Anthropology of the Institution: Making Change through Social Service and Community Organizing. He also regularly teaches First-Year Seminar.