Carwil Bjork-James

Associate Professor (Social Movements, Indigenous Rights, Political Anthropology)
Law and in Gender and Sexuality Studies

Carwil Bjork-James is a cultural anthropologist who conducts immersive and historical research on disruptive protest, environmental struggles, state violence, and indigenous collective rights. He is the principal investigator of Ultimate Consequences, a digital archive on death in Bolivian political conflict, and author of The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia. 

From 2008 to 2013, he conducted ethnographic fieldwork and oral history interviews on social movements, race and space, protest tactics, and political change in Cochabamba, Sucre, and La Paz, resulting in a monograph, The Sovereign Street,  Using both anthropological and historical methods, The Sovereign Street explores how pivotal public events generate political legitimacy, contribute to major (sometimes revolutionary) transformations in the balance of power, and provide models for future political action. The ethnographic evidence collected about these events—of social life as experienced through the human body, the meanings attached to places, and social movement practices—explains how grassroots movements exert leverage upon the state through protest.

Ultimate Consequences is a quantitative and qualitative database, unique in its depth and completeness of coverage, of all conflict deaths in Bolivia since October 1982. It is supported by a research grant from the National Science Foundation and a Digital Humanities Incubation Grant from Vanderbilt University. Drawing on the database, Prof. Bjork-James wrote an expert witness report for the plaintiffs in Mamani et al. v. Sánchez de Lozada et al., the first US Federal case to hold a head of state liable for human rights violations.

Overall, Dr. Bjork-James' research agenda examines how subordinate social groups, particularly the urban poor and indigenous peoples, organize their own spaces and assertively use public spaces. It pursues a spatially aware ethnographic approach, interested in the practical and symbolic significance of urban places and indigenous territories, as well as a careful examination of the practices of social movements in sustained conflicts. His published scholarship has addressed the evolving international human rights regime, social movement interventions into global governance, anti-indigenous racism and state violence in eastern Colombia, and socio-environmental conflicts and state environmental policy in the Andes.

His teaching focuses on providing students with anthropological knowledge on globally relevant issues: indigeneity, environmental rights, the state, race, public space, cultural diversity, social inequality, and political change. Courses he regularly teaches include: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, History and Culture of the Andes, Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples, History of Anthropological Theory II, Race as a Cultural and Legal Construct, Biology and Culture of Race, and Political Anthropology: States and Their Secrets.

Scroll below to see Dr. Bjork-James’ publications or click on his website for publications and more.