People • Postdoctoral Fellows

Annie Lorrie Anderson-Lazo
U.C. Chancellor ’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow

U.C. Chancellor ’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow Annie Lorrie Anderson-Lazo is a cultural anthropologist, community organizer and political storyteller. She received her Ph.D. from the Culture and Power Program of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz in 2003 and wrote a dissertation based on her fieldwork among Garifuna women organizers conducting community development work through the implementation phase of the Guatemalan National Peace Process (1996-1998). During her two years in Livingston, Guatemala, she also apprenticed with Don Berto, the octogenarian Master Storyteller of the Garinagu community. Since 2003, she has lived in San Diego working with various nonprofit organizations in the areas of social justice organizing, civic engagement and resource development. Her recent writings and research focus on the relationships among food justice organizing, stories about foodscapes and foodways, the ethical responsibilities of engaged social science researchers, and the potential of variously-situated collaborators to use community based participatory research to support social change efforts in the communities around them as well as to decolonize the traditional disciplinary orthodoxies, epistemologies and methods that have located social scientists outside the communities where they live and work. Her other interests include critical food theory, critical race studies, intersectionality, indigenous movements, and borderland theories that advance the understanding of the border as a multicultural landscape of social, political and economic relations.

Annie Lorrie joined the Center for Global California studies in late September 2010 as the UC Chancellor’s postdoctoral research fellow in Minority Health and Health Disparities. Her publications include "Introduction to Practice What You Teach: Activist Anthropology at the Sites of Cross-Talk and Cross-Fire," New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry, 2009; "A Reflection on Political Research and Social Justice Organizing," New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry, 2009; and her doctoral thesis, Of One Accord: Garifuna Collective Action and the Social Transformation of the Guatemalan Peace Process in Labuga (1996 – 1998), Department of Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz, CA.