Kate Sullivan joined the faculty of the CSULA Anthropology Department in September 2005 after completing her Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of California Santa Barbara in December 2004. Her research investigates social and discursive relations of power in transnational public forums focused on the development and governance of marine resources. She queries the intertwined roles of mass media and environmental relations in the context of globalizing economic and cultural forces. Her research and publications contribute to a growing body of studies that critically examine the constitutive relations of power in environmental politics. Professor Sullivan’s overarching goal is to explore the contingent and evocative notion of democracy, particularly as it is manifested in quotidian practices and relationships. Professor Sullivan conducts ethnographic field research in British Columbia, Canada, Washington State, U.S.A., and Santiago and X Región de Los Lagos, Chile. She has also done ethnographic fieldwork in the coastal fisheries of Texas

Kate Sullivan is currently expanding the department’s focus on media anthropology. Since coming to CSULA, she has created a multi-media computer lab, equipped with digital video editing stations for student multi-media production. Her teaching goals are to foster curiosity and an open-minded approach to the contemporary world. She encourages her students to develop the critical reading, writing and thinking skills necessary for understanding everyday operations of class, ethnic, racialized, gendered, sexualized and postcolonial relations of power in our society. Professor Sullivan is teaching courses on the anthropology of media and film that focus on contemporary politics and technologies of representation, a course on biopolitics and political ecology, and Introductory Anthropology.

Professor Sullivan’s book in progress, based on her dissertation, explores the vociferous public conflicts that have arisen over the rapid expansion of industrialized salmon farming along the Pacific Rim of the Americas. She unpacks the discursive strategies deployed by salmon farming industry managers, industry workers, competing industries, local communities, environmental NGOs, First Nations, news reporters, and government bureaucrats as they engage with each other over how the global salmon farming industry will be developed in each of their respective regions. Her dissertation field research was supported by a grant from the University of California Pacific Rim Research Program.

Professor Sullivan recently organized a symposium for PoLAR, the journal of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association (forthcoming Spring 2006). The symposium explores the confluence of environmental relations and competing assertions of sovereign control in the context of transnational pressures and alliances. Her symposium article explores the ways in which First Nations in British Columbia, Canada, are using public forums and mass media to press their sovereign claims and to assert control over the development of marine resources in their territories. Her emerging work picks up the thread of indigenous land and resource claims in Chiloé, Chile, where local rural communities are working to assert control over their land and seascapes in the wake of the development of the international salmon farming industry and a burgeoning tourist industry aimed at people from urban Santiago and foreigners. She is also finishing a chapter about the web-based campaigns mounted over salmon farming for an edited volume about water and equity in the era of globalization, which continues the work of Reflections on Water: New Approaches to Transboundary Conflicts and Cooperation (2001).

Sample publications:

forthcoming 2006 Negotiating Sovereignty in the Context of Global Environmental Relations. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 29(1).

forthcoming 2006 (Re)Landscaping Sovereignty in British Columbia, Canada. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 29(1)
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2004 Mass-Mediated Transnational Public Spheres: Debating the Production of Farmed Salmon Destined for Global Markets. Dissertation. University of California Santa Barbara.

2001 Discursive Practices and Competing Discourses and the Governance of Wild North American Pacific Salmon Resources. In Blatter, Joachim, and Helen Ingram, eds., Reflections on Water: New Approaches to Transboundary Conflicts and Cooperation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

1999 Fishing in the Media: Mainstream Print News and the Commercial Fishing Industry in Texas. Cultural and Agriculture Fall 21(3): 31-43.

1998 Rights of Passage: Property Rights in North American Pacific Salmon Stocks. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 21(1): 53-64.

1995 Shaping Environmental Education Practices. Practicing Anthropology 17(4): 5-1.

Ph.D., Anthropology, University of California Santa Barbara

M.A., Anthropology, The University of Texas at Austin

B.A., Anthropology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado

Dr. Sullivan is currently serving a second term as elected Treasurer for Culture and Agriculture, a section of the American Anthropological Association.
Member of American Anthropological Association
Member of Law and Society Association,
Member of Society for Economic Anthropology
Member of Society for Applied Anthropology