BIO
Marlaina H. Martin joined the Department of Anthropology as a Henderson-Harris Postdoctoral Fellow in Fall 2024. She completed M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Anthropology at Rutgers University–New Brunswick after double majoring for B.A. degrees in Anthropology (honors) and American Studies (then American Civilization) at Brown University. She also earned a graduate certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Rutgers University–New Brunswick.
Martin’s driving intellectual interests bring anthropology into conversation with critical race, media, gender, body and embodiment, and cultural studies. Long interested in potentially beneficial overlaps of identity and cultural production, she explores how Black women and nonbinary media-makers go about envisioning, creating, and sharing projects that challenge if not wholly reimagine normalized production models that cast Hollywood– and its promoted economic, cultural, and social structures– as not just standard but ideal. To do so, Martin intentionally looks to spaces and communities of independent media production–particularly photography, film, video, and social media content creation– to center the voices, experiences, and aspirations of these often-marginalized people in the contexts they have chosen to enter if not build themselves. This, in turn, aims to shift the perspectives and broaden the purviews of testimony on what media means and how it shapes (or might alternatively shape) society. Martin’s mixed-methods approach combines participant observation, content analysis, formal and semi-formal interviewing, archival research, and cyberethnography. Through research flexible in its theoretical and methodological pathways, Martin explores this question: ‘How does education in and access to media technologies enable different Black feminist (re)imaginings of self, social circle, and larger (or even future) worlds?’
Prior coming to UVM, Martin was the Public Anthropology Postdoctoral Fellow with the online Anthropology magazine, SAPIENS. Before this, she held a year-long joint Visual Culture Postdoctoral Fellowship between The Phillips Collection art museum and University of Maryland, College Park’s Department of Anthropology. She would go on to stay with the latter for an additional two years after securing a President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Publications
Area(s) of expertise
Anthropologies of Media, Race, and Gender; Colorblindness, Post-racialism, and Afrofuturism discourses; Black Feminism; Media Production and Distribution; Gender and Sexuality; Body and Embodiment; Cultural Studies
Bio
Marlaina H. Martin joined the Department of Anthropology as a Henderson-Harris Postdoctoral Fellow in Fall 2024. She completed M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Anthropology at Rutgers University–New Brunswick after double majoring for B.A. degrees in Anthropology (honors) and American Studies (then American Civilization) at Brown University. She also earned a graduate certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Rutgers University–New Brunswick.
Martin’s driving intellectual interests bring anthropology into conversation with critical race, media, gender, body and embodiment, and cultural studies. Long interested in potentially beneficial overlaps of identity and cultural production, she explores how Black women and nonbinary media-makers go about envisioning, creating, and sharing projects that challenge if not wholly reimagine normalized production models that cast Hollywood– and its promoted economic, cultural, and social structures– as not just standard but ideal. To do so, Martin intentionally looks to spaces and communities of independent media production–particularly photography, film, video, and social media content creation– to center the voices, experiences, and aspirations of these often-marginalized people in the contexts they have chosen to enter if not build themselves. This, in turn, aims to shift the perspectives and broaden the purviews of testimony on what media means and how it shapes (or might alternatively shape) society. Martin’s mixed-methods approach combines participant observation, content analysis, formal and semi-formal interviewing, archival research, and cyberethnography. Through research flexible in its theoretical and methodological pathways, Martin explores this question: ‘How does education in and access to media technologies enable different Black feminist (re)imaginings of self, social circle, and larger (or even future) worlds?’
Prior coming to UVM, Martin was the Public Anthropology Postdoctoral Fellow with the online Anthropology magazine, SAPIENS. Before this, she held a year-long joint Visual Culture Postdoctoral Fellowship between The Phillips Collection art museum and University of Maryland, College Park’s Department of Anthropology. She would go on to stay with the latter for an additional two years after securing a President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Publications
Areas of Expertise
Anthropologies of Media, Race, and Gender; Colorblindness, Post-racialism, and Afrofuturism discourses; Black Feminism; Media Production and Distribution; Gender and Sexuality; Body and Embodiment; Cultural Studies