Description:

SPAN posdoctoral fellow Annie Wilkinson will give a talk on her research, followed by a Q&A.  This will be a hybrid event (Zoom webinar link forthcoming). For in-person attendees, lunch will be served at 12:15 pm and the talk will start at 12:30 pm. 

Annie Wilkinson is a SPAN postdoctoral fellow affiliated with Gender & Sexuality Studies and Anthropology.  She engages ethnography’s combination of sociological inquiry and deep listening to ethnographically study the politicization and polarization of gender and sexual politics. Her current research examines the contemporary sociopolitical and affective politics of anti-gender advocates and their followers in Mexico and the Americas as they build transnational anti-feminist/LGBT movements in conditions of intense political, economic, and social upheaval, uncertainty, and insecurity. Drawing together her previous experiences working in transnational feminist and LGBT movements and her ethnographic research on those who oppose them in Mexico, her book project, Illiberal Insecurities: Distrust and Post-Truth Populism in Anti-Gender Activism in Mexico, examines how transnational anti-gender activism taps popular in/securities conditioned by late neoliberalism and how these movements are challenging prospects for equality and democratic conditions in Mexico and around the world. Wilkinson’s work on topics such as transatlantic anti-gender movements, ex-gay movements and “conversion therapy,” and ethnographic research across the political spectrum has appeared in the International Journal of Feminist Politics, Feminist Anthropology, Social Anthropology, and North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA). Her research has been supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Fulbright Commission and the Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly Woodrow Wilson Foundation), and the US-Mexican Studies Center at the University of California San Diego.