HEATHER MERRILL

Associate Professor of Geography and Anthropology
Executive Director of the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues
M.A. 1992 Anthropology, University of Chicago
Ph.D. 1999 University of California, Berkelely

Office:  255 W. Louther St
Office Phone:  (717) 245-1846
E-mail:  merrillh@dickinson.edu

My work spans the fields of cultural, political and urban geography, anthropology, and women’s studies. It is interdisciplinary with an emphasis on the ways in which postcolonial migrants express political consciousness and create identities in the context of established relations of power in urban spaces of the advanced capitalist world. Through ongoing ethnographic field work, I explore the ways in which new forms of capitalism transform everyday practices and their associated power relations, and the ways that immigrants and local receiving societies struggle over meanings, taken for granted notions of sameness and differences, and the legitimacy of space in the preservation of identity. My book, An Alliance of Women: Immigration and the Politics of Race, 2006, the University of Minnesota Press, explores the spatial politics of gender, race, and immigration in Turin, Italy and the way that migrants through their everyday practices are affecting Turinese and more generally Italian and European political and social identities as an instance of the complexity and instability of group and individual cultural identities in contemporary Europe.