Sarah Page
About Me
I am a Teaching Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, and I am happy to have joined ECU’s faculty in the fall of 2018. I teach several different kinds of courses in the Anthropology Department. These courses are focused in undergraduate education, and include: Intruduction to Anthropology, Global Understanding, and Sexual Behavior from an Anthropological Perspective. I really enjoy introducing students to the study of human culture and biodiversity across time and space, the discipline of anthropology.
My dissertation research captures the early stages of a fledgling Jamaican human rights movement in which sexually minoritized people are struggling to counter the effects of political homophobia with homegrown activism and realize positive social change. There, queer grassroots groups and NGOs are organizing within the context of a homophobic society that incentivizes their continued exclusion. My research unpacks the systemic nature of this exclusion as well as evidencing the activitsts’ work in combatting it. By tracing the complex of beliefs and behaviors and practices underwriting Jamaican homophobia; through the collision of hierarchies of race, class, economy, gender, sexuality, and the state, I argue that scapegoating of this highly vulnerable segment of the population on the basis of sexual orientation is a state project to create consensus within the polity. Not the least of these is to solidify a common basis for a political constituency among the very poor and the elite—who under any other circumstances, would have interests so divergent so as to be unable to relate to one another. My work seeks to identify the multiple layers of discrimination meant to segregate LGBTQ individuals from the whole of Jamaican society—and also the work and lives of the activists working to dismantle it.
I am preparing the next phase of my research that will access Jamaican LGBTQ activists living in exile. Whereas my dissertation research focuses on the movement from within Jamaica, I now turn my efforts to connect with activists working abroad in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States to safeguard the protection of basic rights of sexual minorities back home in Jamaica. I am keen to learn how their lives have changed since going into exile, which aspects are easier, or more difficult. At present, I am beginning preliminary research and establishing contacts in London, Toronto and New York City.
Education
2018 Ph.D., Anthropology, University of Florida
2008 M.A., Anthropology, University of Florida
2004 B.A., Anthropology, University of Tennessee