Kristin PhillipsAssociate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies
Education
- PhD, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2009
Research
Specializations
- Energy, Infrastructure & Environment
- Energy & Environmental Justice
- Race, Poverty, & Inequality
- Food, Hunger, & Food Sovereignty
- Political Culture
- Meaning, Representation, & the Politics of Knowledge
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- US South
As a sociocultural anthropologist with regional interests in East Africa and the southern United States, my research examines the basic human project of ‘getting by’ in an age of planetary reckoning. I study how people understand and live with poverty and inequality; how they engage and experience policies and infrastructures; and how they vie for voice and resources amidst other everyday pursuits of livelihood, connection, and meaning.
My first book project traced how generations of food insecurity have shaped political activism in rural central Tanzania (An Ethnography of Hunger: Politics, Subsistence, and the Unpredictable Grace of the Sun; Indiana University Press: 2018). An Ethnography of Hunger was Co-Winner of the 2020 Society for Economic Anthropology Book Prize for best book in the last three years an Honor, an Honorable Mention for the 2019 African Studies Association’s Book Prize, and a finalist for the 2020 Fage & Oliver Prize of the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom.
I now have two concurrent research projects on the intersections of energy, poverty, and infrastructure, both funded by the National Science Foundation. The first, “Energy Burden and the Making and Meaning of Home” (NSF #2218064) is an ethnography of the disproportionate energy burden (spending more than 10% of income on energy costs) on low-income households in the Deep South and its significance in their struggle to secure housing and make meaningful homes. Since 2017 I have also collaborated with Erin Dean to study energy, infrastructure, and gender in Tanzania. The project (NSF #1853185 and NSF #1853109), focuses on people and places unserved by the national electricity grid. We ask how people in Tanzania navigate the convergence and contradictions of two global projects—energy access and energy transition—that seek to both expand energy production, markets, and consumption and also reduce carbon emissions in the context of unequal relationships, postcolonial histories, and highly gendered ideas about energy, labor, and space.
Selected Publications
Phillips, Kristin D. Accepted. Energy. Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology.
Phillips, Kristin D. & Aikande Kwayu. Accepted. Statebuilding, Infrastructure, & Citizenship in Rural Tanzania: Persistence & Change in Nyumba Kumi Kumi (the Ten-House Cell). African Affairs.
Phillips, Kristin D. 2024. “The Messy Ethics of Household Biogas in Tanzania: Making Good Energy Off the Grid.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Phillips, Kristin D. 2023. “Southern Politics, Southern Power Prices: Race, Utility Regulation, and The Framing of Value.” Economic Anthropology 10(2): 197-212.
Phillips, Kristin D. & Kristen Cheney. 2022. “Eyes on the Prize: Towards a Reimagining of the Role of Awards in African Studies.” African Studies Review.
Dean, Erin, Enock Makupa, & Kristin D. Phillips. 2022. “Working Together Apart: Remote Research Collaboration in the Time of COVID.” Anthropology Now.
Phillips, Kristin D. 2022. “The Future Sits in Places: Electricity, Value, and Infrastructural Triage in Tanzania.” Economic Anthropology. 9(2): 223-239.
Phillips, Kristin D. 2020. “Prelude to a Grid: Nature, Labor, and Cosmology on a Tanzanian Electric Frontier.” Cambridge Journal of Anthropology. 38(2): 71-87.
Phillips, Kristin D. 2018. An Ethnography of Hunger: Politics, Subsistence, and the Unpredictable Grace of the Sun. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Phillips, Kristin D. 2018. “Paternalism.” In Callan, Hilary. International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Wiley-Blackwell. (2 pages)
Phillips, Kristin D. 2015. “Nyerere’s Ghost: Political Filiation, Paternal Discipline, and the Construction of Legitimacy in Multiparty Tanzania.” In Fouere, Marie-Aude. Remembering Nyerere: History, Memory, Legacy. 97-126. Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota Press.
Phillips, Kristin D. 2013. “Dividing the Labor of Development: Education and Participation in Rural Tanzania,” Comparative Education Review 57(4), 637-661.
Phillips, Kristin D. 2011. “Educational Policymaking in the Tanzanian Postcolony: Authenticity, Accountability and the Politics of Culture.” Critical Studies in Education, 52: 3, 235-250.
Phillips, Kristin D. 2010. “Pater Rules Best: Political Kinship and Party Politics in Tanzania’s Presidential Elections”. PoLAR: Political & Legal Anthropology Review 33(2), 109-132.
Phillips, Kristin D. 2009. “Hunger, Healing, and Citizenship in Central Tanzania”. African Studies Review. 52(1): 23–45.
Phillips, Kristin D. & Amy Stambach. 2008. “Cultivating Choice: The Invisible Hands of Educational Opportunity in Tanzania,” In The Globalisation of School Choice? Edited by M. Forsey, S. Davies, and G. Walford. 145-164. Oxford: Symposium Books.
Teaching
- ANT 560: Methods in Cultural Anthropology
- ANT 585: Alive to the Anthropocene: Anthropology for the 21st Century
- ANT 385: Energy Matters: Energy, Culture, & Society
- ANT 385: Anthropology & the Environment: People, Nature, Place
- ANT 190 Freshman Seminar: The Politics of Humanitarianism in Africa
- ANT 202: Concept and Methods in Cultural Anthropology
- ANT 207 Foundations in Development Studies
- ANT 280R Anthropological Perspectives on Africa
- ANT 385: Energy, Environment, & Culture in Africa
- AFS 263/IDS 285 Introduction to African Studies
In 2015 Kristin D. Phillips was the recipient of a Crystal Apples Teaching Award for Graduate Instruction.