Elizabeth Cullen Dunn

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn (born 1968) is an American political anthropologist and geographer. Her work focuses on responses to catastrophic social change, particularly in the post-Soviet world.

Education

Dunn holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Johns Hopkins University (1998).

Scholarship

Broadly summarized, Dunn’s work investigates governance, the state, and the ways in which these processes strive to produce governable subjects. She investigates these topics by examining the ways they are manifest in people’s lived experiences. Though all Dunn’s work deals with these topics, thematically, it can be divided into three bodies of literature: on foreign direct investment (FDI) in Poland and the former Eastern Bloc more broadly; on global food safety regulation; and, most recently, on forced migration.

FDI in Poland

In her book, Privatizing Poland, Dunn examines the attempts at transition from Eastern European planned economies to neoliberal economic models. In doing so, she investigates the importance of governance, discipline, and the production of subjectivities to economic models. Dunn uses the takeover of a Polish baby food canning factory by the American company Gerber as a case study for this investigation. What she finds is that, while there are similarities in the management and organizational techniques applied to industry in the West and the former Warsaw Pact countries, differences in economic structure and planning mechanisms produced rhythms of work and of life generally that were very different in Poland from those in the capitalist West. These rhythms in turn influenced the attitudes and personhood of the Polish people. The result is that introduction of neoliberal capitalism came to be a project not just of privatization and market reform, but rather of cultural transformation, an attempt to shape the Polish people into neoliberal subjects, adapted to the rhythms of life and work under neoliberal capitalism.[1]

Global Food Safety Regulation

In her work on global food safety regulation, Dunn examines how the state reacts to outbreaks or changing incidence of food-borne illness. She examines the state’s attempts to control or eliminate these diseases via regulation, while nevertheless adhering to its own foundational, politico-economic principles (e.g. socialist, planned economy; neoliberal capitalism). She identifies the ways in which processes of food production and the regulation thereof work to produce governable subjects by instilling particular values of self-governance or dependence on the state. Dunn also utilizes the presence of disease-causing organisms or outbreaks of food-borne illness as tracers to identify geographical and social spaces in which the state fails to control illness. She investigates how these spaces of chaos or “wildness” can have various causes, sometimes representing a failure of the state to fully penetrate the spaces of every-day life; while in other instances being an integral, reproduced aspect of governance.[2][3]

Forced Migration

Much of Dunn’s work on forced migration has looked more specifically at the plight of internally displaced persons in the republic of Georgia. In this work, Dunn builds on scholarship that has critically examined the phenomenon of humanitarian aid – its penchant for providing immediate aid rather than long-term support, the resultant inadequacy of ‘standardized’ aid packages, its responsibility to local elites and foreign donors, and the divisive question of aid in relation to politics. Examining these questions herself, and using them as a foundation, she identifies how humanitarian aid functions as a condition, keeping the ‘recipients’ of aid in a state of limbo, between the past and the future, unsure of what to expect from the future, and therefore unable to act in the present. Finally, she investigates the ways in which this condition, constantly reproduced by the very structures which claim to provide stability and relief, in fact transforms the recipients of aid into easily governable subjects, beholden to a system that insists on maintaining their physical lives, while denying them the solid footing from which to end their reliance on this same system.[4]

Career

After graduating with her PhD, Dunn accepted a fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin from 1999-2000. Later that year, she received a joint appointment as assistant professor in the Department of Geography and the Program in International Affairs at the University of Colorado in Boulder, CO. In 2006 she accepted a fellowship to Yale University’s Center for Agrarian Studies. She remained in her position as assistant professor until 2008, when she was promoted to the position of associate professor in the same departments at University of Colorado. In 2014, Dunn moved to her current position as Associate Professor in the Departments of Geography and International Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. In 2015, she received a fellowship at Copenhagen University’s Department of Comparative Cultural and Regional Studies.[5]

Selected publications

Dunn, E. (in preparation). Unsettled: Displacement, Aid and the Problem of Existence in Postwar Georgia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Dunn, E. (2004) Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. (In Polish translation, Prywatyzujac Polske, 2008, Warsaw: Krytyka Polityczna).

External links

• Elizabeth Dunn profile on the Indiana University Geography Department website.
• YouTube video of Dunn speaking on the refugee crisis in Europe.

References

1. Dunn, E. (2004) Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
2. Dunn, Elizabeth. (2007)"Escherichia coli, Corporate Discipline, and the Failure of Audit." Space and Polity 11:35-53.
3. Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen. (2008) “Postsocialist Spores: Disease, Bodies and the State in the Republic of Georgia.” American Ethnologist 35
4. Dunn, E. (in preparation). Unsettled: Displacement, Aid and the Problem of Existence in Postwar Georgia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.