简介

Daniel M. Goldstein is Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, where he has taught since 2005. A political and legal anthropologist, Prof. Goldstein studies the global meanings and practices of security, democracy, and human rights. He is concerned with questions of law, violence, and social justice for marginalized urban people in Latin America and the United States. Prof. Goldstein has written about problems of crime and insecurity for residents of the so-called marginal communties of Cochabamba, Bolivia’s fourth largest city, and the conflicts that arise when the quest to make “security” clashes with transnational discourses of human rights. His first book was an ethnography titled The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia, published by Duke University Press in 2004. This was followed in 2010 by a collection titled Violent Democracies in Latin America (co-edited with Desmond Arias) and in 2012 by a second ethnography, titled Outlawed: Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian City, both from Duke University Press. Prof. Goldstein’s research and writing has been supported by grants and fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Coming soon, Prof. Goldstein’s next book is titled The Owners of the Sidewalk: Security and Survival on the Fringes of the Global Economy. This book examines the work of legal and illegal market vendors in the Cancha, Cochabamba’s huge outdoor market; it compares the security concerns of these two groups of vendors, to explore the consequences for people deemed “illegal” as they try to make a living in the city’s enormous informal economy. At the same time, Prof. Goldstein is engaged in a new research project looking at the consequences of securitization of immigration for residents of a New Jersey town. This research considers the wave of laws currently emerging at the municipal and state levels across the United States, as undocumented Latino immigration is configured as a security “problem.” This project, funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and the National Science Foundation, explores the ways in which undocumented immigrants are not the passive victims of immigration law, but active users of the US legal system as they defend their rights and pursue justice for harms done to them in the United States. In addition to his scholarly work, Prof. Goldstein has explored the possibilities of an activist anthropology, joining his pedagogy and research with projects to create social justice and advocate politically for and with his research subjects. In Bolivia, Prof. Goldstein created an anthropological field school/service-learning program in the communities in which he worked in Cochabamba. For five summers, he led a group of undergraduates as they practiced ethnographic research methods and engaged in service work with local communities in Bolivia. He has also worked as an activist on immigration issues and immigration reform in New Jersey and the United States. At Rutgers, Prof. Goldstein teaches courses on human rights, political and legal anthropology, transnationalism and globalization, and the peoples and cultures of Latin America.