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Hugh Gusterson

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Hugh Gusterson
NationalityBritish
Alma materCambridge University (BA)
University of Pennsylvania (MA)
Stanford University (PhD)
Scientific career
FieldsAnthropology
InstitutionsUniversity of British Columbia
George Washington University
George Mason University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Hugh Gusterson is an English anthropologist at the University of British Columbia and George Washington University.[1] His work focuses on nuclear culture, international security and the anthropology of science. His articles have appeared in the LA Times,[2] the Boston Globe, the Boston Review[3] the Washington Post,[4] the Chronicle of Higher Education,[5] Foreign Policy,[6] and American Scientist.[7] He is a regular contributor to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and has a regular column in Sapiens, an anthropology journal.[8]

Biography

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Hugh Gusterson grew up in England. He has a B.A. in history from Cambridge University, a master's degree in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania (as a Thouron Scholar), and a PhD in anthropology from Stanford University. He taught at MIT from 1992-2006 before moving to George Mason University and George Washington University. Since 2020 he has taught for the anthropology department of the University of British Columbia.

His early work was on the culture of nuclear weapons scientists and antinuclear activists. In that work he explored weapons scientists' and activists' contending social constructions of weaponry and international peace and security. More recently he has written on teenage use of alcohol.[9] and counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, arguing that U.S. counterinsurgency campaigns would fail and, in the process, damage U.S. civil society as well as Iraq and Afghanistan.[citation needed] In 2016 he published a book Drone[10] on drone warfare that won the Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. A leading critic of attempts to recruit anthropologists for counterinsurgency work, he is one of the founders of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists.[11] He is currently researching the polygraph, as well as conducting a research project on nuclear waste disposition in Australia.

Gusterson served on the American Association of Anthropology's Executive Board from 2009–12, co-chaired the committee that rewrote the Association's ethics code 2012, and currently serves on the Association's Task Force on Engagement with Israel/Palestine. He was President of the American Ethnological Society from 2016-18. He won the American Anthropological Association's anthropology in media award in 2020.

He is married to Allison Macfarlane, former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). They have two children.

Works

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  • Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War, University of California Press, 1998, ISBN 978-0-520-21373-9
  • People of the Bomb: Portraits of America's Nuclear Complex, University of Minnesota Press, 2004, ISBN 978-0-8166-3860-4
  • Drone Remote Control Warfare, MIT Press, 2016, ISBN 978-0-2620-3467-8

Editor

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Videos

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Chapters

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Interviews

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Other scholarly references

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References

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  1. ^ "Hugh Gusterson - The Department of Anthropology - The George Washington University". anthropology.columbian.gwu.edu. Archived from the original on 2015-03-04. Retrieved 2015-01-13.
  2. ^ GUSTERSON, HUGH (29 July 2001). "If U.S. Dumps Test Ban Treaty, China Will Rejoice" – via LA Times.
  3. ^ Intern (29 June 2012). "The Auditors". Boston Review.
  4. ^ "McDonnell should beware of donors with gifts". Washington Post.
  5. ^ Gusterson, Hugh (23 September 2012). "Want to Change Academic Publishing? Just Say No" – via The Chronicle of Higher Education.
  6. ^ "When Professors Go to War". 21 July 2008.
  7. ^ "Hugh Gusterson (Biography)". American Scientist Online. Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. Retrieved 30 December 2010.
  8. ^ "Columnist: Hugh Gusterson". Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. thebulletin.org. Retrieved 30 December 2010.
  9. ^ https://caph.gmu.edu/assets/caph/TeenDrinkingCulturesFinalReport_2010.pdf [bare URL PDF]
  10. ^ "Drone".
  11. ^ "Network of Concerned Anthropologists". Retrieved 30 September 2017.