Sodikoff, Genese Ph.D.
Assistant Professor - Anthropology
Hill Hall 629
Curriculum Vitae

Telephone: (973) 353-5331
sodikoff@andromeda.rutgers.edu

Education

2005 Ph.D. Anthropology, University of Michigan

2000 M.A. Anthropology, University of Michigan

1998 M.A. Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University

1996 M.A. International Development and Social Change, Clark University

1989 B.A. English and Cultural Anthropology, University of California at Santa Barbara

Research Interests

Professionally and academically, I have focused on rain forest conservation and international development in Africa, specifically the Comoros (1989-1991) and Madagascar (1994-2002). Over several periods of fieldwork in Madagascar since 1994, I have examined the significance and role of low-wage labor in rain forest conservation projects, as well as the politics of biodiversity loss. My teaching and research interests include political ecology, conservation and development, agrarian economies, biotic and cultural extinction, human-animal relations, labor regimes, green capitalism, historical anthropology, medical anthropology, and Africa and the Indian Ocean islands.

Current Research Projects

At present, I am finalizing a book manuscript entitled, "Workers of the Vanishing World: Labor and Rain Forest Conservation in Madagascar." I am also beginning new research on the social anthropology of extinction. The first phase of the research concerns the science, politics, and technology of ex situ conservation in the U.S., specifically the captive breeding and repatriation of endangered lemurs. I consider these practices in light of the politics of diversity and nativism in the U.S., constructs of nature and the nation-state, and the public’s sense of compounding existential risk.  In addition, I am compiling an edited volume, “Extinction Encounters: Dying Forms and the Ethics of Retrieval,” comprised of studies which examine the collateral effects of biotic and cultural extinctions.

Recent Publications

Sodikoff, Genese.  2008.  “Forest Conservation and Low-wage Labour.”  InGreening the Great Red Island: Madagascar in Nature and Culture, editedby Jeffrey C. Kaufmann.   Pretoria: Africa Institute of South Africa.

Sodikoff, Genese. 2007. "An Exceptional Strike: A Micro-history of 'People versus Park' in Madagascar." Journal of Political Ecology 14: 10-33.

Sodikoff, Genese. 2005. "Forced and Forest Labor in Colonial Madagascar, 1926-1936." Ethnohistory, 52(2): 407-435.

Sodikoff, Genese. 2004. "Land and Languor: Ethical Imaginations of Work and Forest in Northeast Madagascar." History and Anthropology 15(4): 367-398.

Sodikoff, Genese. 2003. "The Case of the Lace Leaf: Nineteenth Century Naturalism and the Containment of Malagasy Species." Michigan Discussions in Anthropology 14: 167-192.

Thomas-Slayter, Barbara, and Sodikoff, Genese. 2001. "African Women and Sustainable Development: Institutional Trends in Natural Resource Management Projects." Development in Practice, 11(1): 45-61.