Visiting Assistant Professor
Dr. Jennifer Esperanza is an anthropologist whose research focuses on globalization, consumption and representations of ethnicity in popular culture. Her work explores these themes in island Southeast Asia ( Indonesia and the Philippines) and North America. In 1996, Jennifer received a BA with honors in Anthropology & Linguistics from the University of Southern California and received an MA in Cultural Anthropology from UCLA in 1999. Jennifer completed her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology (UCLA) in 2007. Jennifer’s dissertation, “Outsourcing Otherness: Discourses of Modernity and Otherness in the Global Handicrafts Market” is an ethnography which follows processes of ethnic art production, marketing and consumption in the transnational economy. She conducted fieldwork in Bali, Indonesia and various cities throughout the United States from 2001 to 2004, following how ethnic art producers, distributors and consumers articulate discourses of cultural “Otherness” and modernity.