My practice includes experimental writing, performative ethnography, and media exploration of knowledge production. Specialties are urban ethnography, children and childhood, autoethnography, social inequality, both in the US and in Haiti. I also work on Haitian folkloric dance and the legacy of Katherine Dunham.
Areas of Research
children, race, dance
Publications
2014 Chin, Elizabeth, Ed. Katherine Dunham:Recovering an Anthropological Legacy, Choreographing Ethnographic Futures. Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research Press, 2014
Chin, Elizabeth “Michael Jackson’s Panther Dance: Double Consciousness and the Uncanny Business of Performing While Black” Journal of Popular Music Studies, special issue on Michael Jackson.23 (1): 58-74. 2011.
Chin, Elizabeth “The Consumer Diaries, or, Autoethnography in the Inverted World,” Journal of Consumer Culture, 7(3):335-353. 2007.
Chin, Elizabeth. “Confessions of a Negrophile,” Transforming Anthropology 14(1): 48-56. 2006.
Chin, Elizabeth. Diary Excerpts “Shopping in Ikea” and “Capitalism Makes Me Sick,” New Review of Literature, 2(1):123-138. 2005.
Chin, Elizabeth. “Diary Excerpts: How to Teach Commodity Fetishism and My Grandmother’s Rings” New Review of Literature 1(2) April, pp. 167-182. 2005.
Chin, Elizabeth. “Ethnically Correct Dolls: Toying with the Race Industry.” American Anthropologist 101(2):305-321. 1999.
Chin, Elizabeth. “Barbie Sex Videos: Making Sense of Children’s Media-making” in Doll Studies: The Meaning of Toys and Girls’ Play Miriam Forman-Brunell, ed. New York: Peter Lang. 2014.
Chin, Elizabeth. The Neoliberal Institutional Review Board” in Feminist Activist Ethnography and Neoliberalism, Dana-Ain Davis and Christa Craven, eds. Lexington Books. 2014.
Chin, Elizabeth. Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 2001.