You are here: 小蓝视频 College of Arts & Sciences Faculty Orisanmi Burton

Back to top

Photograph of Orisanmi Burton

Orisanmi Burton Assistant Professor CAS | ANTH | Anthropology

Degrees
PhD The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Anthropology
MLIS Palmer School of Library and Information Science, Archival Studies
BA Hampshire College, Interdisciplinary Studies

Bio
As a social anthropologist working in the United States, my research examines the imbrication of grassroots resistance and state repression. Within this broad area of inquiry, my present work explores the collision of Black-led movements for social, political, and economic transformation with state infrastructures of militarized policing, surveillance, and imprisonment. I analyze the productivity of this collision; how it gives rise to new formations of knowledge, subjectivity, intimacy, gender, organization, and statecraft across time and space. I ask: how do Black radical demands generated within and against US prisons presage alternative futures for people and places on both sides of prison walls? In what ways have state-organized responses to these demands - via diverse configurations of repression, reform, and incorporation 鈥 been key drivers of US historical development and state formation? Through what bureaucratic, ideological, and material processes is this dynamic political struggle transformed into an administrative problem of 鈥渃riminal justice鈥? How can conceptualizing the US prison as a domain of war open new analytical, theoretical, and methodological terrain?

My first book was published in October 2023 by The University of California Press.
For the Media
To request an interview for a news story, call 小蓝视频 Communications at 202-885-5950 or submit a request.

Teaching

Fall 2024

  • ANTH-210 Race and Racism

  • ANTH-642 Public Anthropology

Spring 2025

  • ANTH-496 Selected Topics:Non-Recurring: Ethnography, Power, Archive

  • ANTH-898 Doctoral Continuing Enrollment

  • ANTH-899 Doctoral Dissertation

Partnerships & Affiliations

Scholarly, Creative & Professional Activities

Selected Publications

  • Burton, Orisanmi (2023).Radical History Review.聽Vol. 146.聽
  • Burton, Orisanmi (2021).American Anthropologist.聽Vol. 123, No. 3.聽
  • Burton, Orisanmi (2021).Spectre Journal.
  • Burton, Orisanmi. 鈥淲hen Lions Have Historians鈥: Black Political Literacy in the Carceral University." In Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in Higher Education, edited by Bianca C Williams, Dian D.聽 Squire and Frank A.聽 Tuitt. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2021.
  • "Authority, Confinement, Solidarity, and Dissent," a discussion with Catherine Besteman, Karina Biondi, and Orisanmi Burton (2019). . Polar: Political & Legal Anthropology Review. eBook.
  • Burton, Orisanmi (2018). 聽The Black Scholar, Vol. 48, No. 3.

Honors, Awards, and Fellowships

2021 Freedom Scholar, Marguerite Casey Foundation

2020-2021聽Evelyn Green Davis Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for聽Advanced Study, Harvard University

Research Interests

United States, race & racialization, prisons,聽policing, security, war, social movements, Black studies, mascullinity, ethnographic methods, archives