Krause, Elizabeth

Job Title

Professor, Department of Anthropology, College of Social & Behavioral Sciences

Last Name

Krause

First Name

Elizabeth

Discipline

Anthropology

Expertise

Cultural Politics of Race, Gender and Class
Economic Anthropology
Ethnographic Writing
Italy and the U.S.
Medical Anthropology
Political Economy of Low Fertility
Social Memory and Historical Anthropology
Sociocultural Anthropology

Introduction

I conduct fine-grained, immersive ethnographic research to illuminate dynamics connected to reproduction, economics, and migration in Italy and the United States. Research areas include political economy of low fertility; social memory and historical anthropology; economic anthropology; immigration; globalization; medical anthropology; ethnographic writing; and digital storytelling. Major projects have centered on reproductive politics in a lowest-low fertility context among Italians, the formation of global households among Chinese migrant fast-fashion workers, and experiences of young parenting Latinas in Massachusetts.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 43

Open Access
Paper presented in the session Blurred Genres and the Search for Justice. Reviewed by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. 106th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association.
(2007) Krause, Elizabeth
Open Access
‘Cut and Sew’: Migration, Crisis, and Belonging in an Italian Fast-Fashion Zone.
(2020) Krause, Elizabeth
Open Access
Slow Rites, Fast Wrongs
(1977) Krause, Elizabeth; Bressan, Massimo
Open Access
Fertility Politics as "Social Viagra": Reproducing Boundaries, Social Cohesion and Modernity in Italy
(2007) Krause, Elizabeth; Marchesi, Milena
In this article, we investigate the delicacy of adopting pronatalism as a public position in Italy. Mounting scientific and political knowledge about the demographic "problem" exposes a new hegemonic formation that low fertility is dangerous. Drawing on ethnographic contexts, political debates, media publications, and policy documents, we trace the "demographic emergency" and compare two policies: a monetary baby bonus and a law restricting assisted reproduction. The coexistence of incentives to counter superlow fertility with prohibitions on high-tech baby making reflect the contested governance of "social cohesion." We conclude that scholarly and popular discourses serve as a sort of "social Viagra." Ultimately, both policies sought to rejuvenate family norms. Both aimed to fortify the political terrain of a nation-state struggling to achieve and maintain modernity against a backdrop of immigration and aging. Modernity became a weapon of the state to exert control over Italian fertility practices and of its critics to deploy orientalizing representations of backwardness.
Open Access
Bodies as Evidence: Mapping New Terrain for Teen Pregnancy and Parenting
(2016) Gubrium, Aline C.; Fiddian-Green, Alice; Jernigan, Kasey; Krause, Elizabeth
Predominant approaches to teen pregnancy focus on decreasing numbers of teen mothers, babies born to them, and state dollars spent to support their families. This overshadows the structural violence interwoven into daily existence for these young parents. This paper argues for the increased use of participatory visual methods to compliment traditional research methods in shifting notions of what counts as evidence in response to teen pregnancy and parenting. We present the methods and results from a body mapping workshop as part of ‘Hear Our Stories: Diasporic Youth for Sexual Rights and Justice’, a project that examines structural barriers faced by young parenting Latinas and seeks to develop relevant messaging and programming to support and engage youth. Body mapping, as an engaging, innovative participatory visual methodology, involves young parenting women and other marginalised populations in drawing out a deeper understanding of sexual health inequities. Our findings highlight the ways body mapping elicits bodies as evidence to understand young motherhood and wellbeing.
Open Access
Reproduction in Retrospective, Or What’s All the Fuss over Low Fertility?
(2018) Krause, Elizabeth
Open Access
"Calling the Question": The Politics of Time in a Time of Polarized Politics
(2013) Krause, Elizabeth; Sharma, Anurag
In this paper, we examine the role of time in shaping decision-making processes in a town meeting, a type of legislative body common in many New England towns. Town meetings are one of the oldest and most democratic institutions of local governance in the United States, and they provide a rich arena in which to investigate how large groups of people convene and make decisions together. A mixed-methods approach enabled our team of researchers to gain insight into the processes and dynamics that played out in one town meeting. We analyze the tensions between democratic values of “taking time” vs. “being efficient.” The dynamics are particularly compelling because of an absence of the typical two parties that dominate U.S. political culture. Attitudes toward time closely aligned with voting behaviors. Our study concludes that, even in the context of a culturally and economically homogenous New England town-meeting membership, orientations to temporality are contested and meaningful. Situated historically, these orientations reflect citizens’ embrace or rejection of “timethrift” and suggest implications for participatory democracy.
Open Access
Bridging Graduate Education in Public Health and the Liberal Arts
(2015) Aelion, C. Majorie; Gubrium, Aline C.; Aulino, Felicity; Krause, Elizabeth; Leatherman, Thomas
Open Access
Carnival, a “Sold” Woman, and Wet Economies: Challenges of making peasants the subjects of history
(2009) Krause, Elizabeth
While conducting research on fertility decline and its historical and contemporary meanings, I came across a video recording of a “sold” peasant woman. Her story struck me as remarkable yet obscure. She had been coerced into working as a wet nurse after being spooked during carnival time and subsequently giving birth to a stillborn. The eerie story seemed highly unusual—an outlier in historical narratives related to transformations in peasant cultural practices. Ongoing research, however, revealed other stories that suggested the significance of peasant women in lubricating global economies with their bodily substances. This paper has two purposes. First, it expands Eric Wolf’s notion of peasant culture not only as deeply integrated into global processes but also as a necessity for the very continuance of transnational markets. I intend the term “wet” to draw attention to the way in which bodily substances, i.e., milk, saturated economic activity in the environs of Florence and Prato. Submersed beneath the “dry” mercantile activity of straw hat production was a “wet” movement in lactating women. Second, this paper explores the challenging process of making peasants the subjects of history. Researchers may encounter jarring tales that do not fit easily into their categories. The tales may challenge the academic writer in terms of whether and how to represent them and their tellers. In addition, peasants’ interpretations of events may or may not fit into prevailing explanations. How do we deal with these multiple levels of dissonance? I take seriously the Wolf-inspired task of identifying how individual stories are deeply connected to global histories and structures. Toward this end, I offer a scaffolding that builds on the conundrum of combining erudite with subjugated knowledge’s and argues for resonant voice as one solution to the challenge of addressing the ongoing problem of integrating the “people without history” into the stories that get told, transcribed, translated, and retold.
Open Access
La cultura del controllo: Letture subaltern di un conflito urbano
(2017) Bressan, Massimo; Krause, Elizabeth