Hugh Gusterson
Hugh Gusterson is an English anthropologist at the University of British Columbia and George Washington University. His work focuses on nuclear culture, international security and the anthropology of science. His articles have appeared in the LA Times, the Boston Globe, the Boston Review the Washington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Foreign Policy, and American Scientist. He is a regular contributor to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and has a regular column in, an anthropology journal.
Biography
Hugh Gusterson grew up in England. He has a B.A. in history from Cambridge University, a master's degree in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD in anthropology from Stanford University. He taught at MIT from 1992-2006 before moving to George Mason University and George Washington University. Since 2020 he has taught for the anthropology department of the University of British Columbia.His early work was on the culture of nuclear weapons scientists and antinuclear activists. In that work he explored weapons scientists' and activists' contending social constructions of weaponry and international peace and security. More recently he has written on teenage use of alcohol. and counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, arguing that U.S. counterinsurgency campaigns would fail and, in the process, damage U.S. civil society as well as Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2016 he published Drone - a book about drone warfare that won the Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. A leading critic of attempts to recruit anthropologists for counterinsurgency work, he is one of the founders of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists. He is currently researching the polygraph, as well as conducting a research project on nuclear waste disposal in Australia.
Gusterson served on the American Association of Anthropology's Executive Board from 2009–12, co-chaired the committee that rewrote the Association's ethics code 2012, and currently serves on the Association's Task Force on Engagement with Israel/Palestine. He was President of the American Ethnological Society from 2016-18. He won the American Anthropological Association's anthropology in media award in 2020.
He is married to Allison Macfarlane, former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They have two children.
Works
', University of California Press, 1998,- '
Editor
- , editors Catherine Lowe Besteman, Hugh Gusterson, University of California Press, 2005, The insecure American: how we got here and what we should do about it, editors Hugh Gusterson, Catherine Lowe Besteman, University of California Press, 2009,
- , editors Jutta Weldes, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson, and Raymond Duvall, University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
- , edited by Network of Concerned Anthropologists, Prickly Paradigm Press, 2009 Life by Algorithms, University of Chicago Press, 2020
Videos
- , March 1, 2015 talk at the Helen Caldicott Symposium: The Dynamics of Possible Nuclear Extinction
- , July 6, 2016 talk at TedxFoggyBottom at the George Washington University
- February 5, 2019, LEAP Initiative Series at the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University.
- Harvard University November 4, 2017
- American Ethnological Society Presidential address July 10, 2017
Chapters
- , Living with the bomb: American and Japanese cultural conflicts in the Nuclear Age, editors Laura Elizabeth Hein, Mark Selden,M.E. Sharpe, 1997,
- , Naked science: anthropological inquiry into boundaries, power, and knowledge, editor Laura Nader, Psychology Press, 1996,
- , Technoscientific imaginaries: conversations, profiles, and memoirs, editor George E. Marcus, University of Chicago Press, 1995,
- , Pedagogy and the practice of science: historical and contemporary perspectives, editor David Kaiser, MIT Press, 2005,
- , Cultures of insecurity: states, communities, and the production of danger, editor Jutta Weldes, U of Minnesota Press, 1999,
Interviews
- Covid and Culture interview on KNME TV, December 19, 2020