SCHOOL of INTERNATIONAL SERVICE

American University · Washington, D.C.

FACULTY BIOGRAPHIES – Robert Albro

Robert Albro
Assistant Professor
International Communication

Phone
202-885-1546

Fax
202-885-2494

E-Mail
albro@american.edu

Location
McCabe, Room 205

Web site
www.american.edu/sis/ic/index.htm

Biography
Trained in political, legal and linguistic anthropology, as well as in cultural studies, Prof. Albro is a widely published expert on social and indigenous movements in Latin America, transnational civil society, cultural rights frameworks and the work of cultural policy. His current research is concerned with global cultural policy making, as it meaningfully shapes the terms of globalization, where cultural claims are increasingly advanced as the basis of grassroots social justice efforts, and as culture is regularly made the subject of new national, international and multilateral legal and regulatory efforts to define and to protect it.

Prof. Albro's work is informed by an effort to understand how and why the culture concept - now formulated in terms of property, heritage, and as a right - is increasingly conceived less as an intransigent obstacle to progress, and more as a resource, an intangible asset, as information capital, and as a source of expert knowledge and key problem-solving instrument, for work in public diplomacy, international development, human rights, new social movements, emerging cultural industries, and military planning, among others.

On the one hand, Prof. Albro's research considers the particular ways these arenas recognize the value of culture, while framing distinct problems and different priorities for it to address. On the other hand, his work examines the significance of new kinds of cultural workers, producers and representatives, invested in diverse efforts to codify, market, document, publicize, and digitize cultural expressions, along with accompanying conflicts among communities and nations in the struggle to designate, secure, possess, and sanction cultural legacies as heritable rights.

Since 1991 Prof. Albro has also continued to conduct long-term ethnographic research on both popular and indigenous political responses to the changing terms of multicultural democratization and economic globalization in Bolivia. This work explores alternative conceptions of citizenship, sovereignty, and democracy, as these have informed coalition building within and across urban social movement efforts, as articulated through local associational politics and in response both to the changing terms of indigenous identity in a country with a majority indigenous population and to the work of transnational indigenous advocacy.

Prof. Albro's research and writing have been supported over the years by the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Council for Learned Societies, among others. He has wide teaching experience, most recently at Wheaton College (Norton, MA), and from 2005 to 2007 at George Washington University, where he was a senior research associate in its Program on Culture in Global Affairs at the Elliott School of International Affairs.

Education
PhD, University of Chicago
BA, University of Chicago

Selected Awards

• Fulbright Scholar
• Fellow in International Studies at the Library of Congress's Kluge Center
• Human Rights Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, 2004-2005
• Rockefeller Humanities Fellow at the Smithsonian

Professional and Academic Associations

• Chair of the Committee for Human Rights of the American Anthropological Association (AAA)
• Member of the AAAS's Science and Human Rights Coalition
• Member of AAA's Ad Hoc Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the U. S. Security and Intelligence Communities
• Research Associate, Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage

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This page was last updated on: December 21, 2007.