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Photograph of Orisanmi Burton

Orisanmi Burton Assistant Professor Department of 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


I am on leave during the 2020-2021 academic year while on fellowship at The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

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 U.S. 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 – 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 “criminal justice”? How can conceptualizing the US prison as a domain of war open new analytical, theoretical, and methodological terrain?
For the Media
To request an interview for a news story, call AU Communications at 202-885-5950 or submit a request.

Scholarly, Creative & Professional Activities

Selected Publications

Research Interests

United States, race & racialization, crime & punishment, policing & security, social movements, Black studies, gender studies, war, ethnographic methods, archives