Assistant Professor, Anthropology
About
Alyssa Paredes is LSA Collegiate Fellow in the Department of Anthropology between 2020-2022 and will be Assistant Professor of Anthropology beginning 2022. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist with research interests in the human, environmental, and metabolic infrastructures of transnational trade. She uses multi-sited, multi-scalar, and multi-lingual methods to carry out immersive and socially engaged fieldwork in the Philippines and Japan. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology with distinction from Yale University.
Dr. Paredes’ first book project, Plantation Peripheries: The Multiple Makings of Asia’s Banana Republic, tracks the dramatic shifts that occur between the Philippine region of Mindanao, where export bananas are among the most resource-intensive of all agricultural industries, to Japanese urban centers, where they are ubiquitous items that sell for cheap. Her work identifies the conventions of crop science, agrochemical regulation, market segmentation techniques, and food standards as arenas where actors contend over the commodity chain’s production calculus. In chronicling how local actors reinsert themselves into the very calculations that efface them, she ties together approaches in environmental and economic anthropology, science and technology studies, human geography, and critical food studies. More information on her research, publications, and teaching can be viewed on her website.
At the University of Michigan, Dr. Paredes aspires to produce and support scholarship that welcomes marginalized voices into intellectual circulation, while engaging the personal interests and concerns of diverse groups of student learners. As a native of Metro Manila, she is also interested in the university’s historical ties to the U.S. colonial administration in the Philippines and she plans to explore the intersections between zoological expeditions, ethnological photography, and the civilizational endeavor through archival research.
Dr. Paredes welcomes opportunities to get to know students and scholars with related interests.
