POST-DOCTORAL FELLOW (2015-2018)
HISTORY & CLASSICS, UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA
Sara is an anthropologist whose work explores the everyday experience of global and translocal processes in Northern North America. Her current project traces the object lives of Aboriginal art and craft made in the "contact zone" of occupational therapy programs in TB sanatoria, with links to the wider Aboriginal art market and practices of museum collecting. The biographies of objects produced at TB hospitals and now held in museums contextualize the production, sale, and collection of such objects within larger processes of cultural exchange and interaction in Northern Canada and globally.
This research compliments a longstanding interest in processes of interaction, migration, and trade between Northern North America and locations elsewhere in the continent and around the world. Her dissertation, To Come and Go: Transnational Life Between Mexico and Alaska (University of British Columbia 2015), examines the experiences of place and patterns of transnational mobility of three generations of people who have been living between Acuitzio del Canje, Michoacán, Mexico and Anchorage, Alaska, USA for several decades. Over time, these people orient their lives to both locations as they live, work and imagine their futures across the continent. For most of them, Acuitzio, Anchorage, and the experience of mobility between the two places are necessary to feel at home in the world.
Sara is also an active member of the Arctic Crossings Network of Scholars of the Global Circumpolar North and the Society for the Anthropology of North America.