Sally Cole

Courses/Syllabi

ANTH 620: Writing Methods in Inter-Cultural Communication
ANTH 479 Feminism and Anthropology
ANTH 424 Experiments and Experience in Ethnographic Writing
ANTH 498 The Anthropology of Brazil
ANTH 379 Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective
ANTH 315 Field Research

Research Interests

Sally Cole is Professor of Anthropology at Concordia University and a past editor of Anthropologica, the journal of the Canadian Anthropology Society/Société canadienne d’anthropologie.

Cole’s current research on feminist activism in Latin America (in collaboration with Lynne Phillips, University of Windsor) analyses feminist alliances with transnational anti-globalization networks, regional social economy projects and national state initiatives (see “Feminist Flows, Feminist Faultlines: Women’s Machineries and Women’s Movements in Latin America” Signs, 2009). In a forthcoming book Contesting Publics: Feminism, Activism and Ethnography (Pluto Press), Cole and Phillips explore the paradoxes of these new political spaces as they produce both new forums for participation and new forms of exclusion and re-inscriptions of inequalities.

Cole’s longstanding research interests are in the anthropology of gender and social change. Publications based on ethnographic field research have focused on: gender, work and households in northern Portugal (see Women of the Praia: Work and Lives in a Portuguese Coastal Community, Princeton University Press, 1991); masculinity and nationhood in the history of the Portuguese cod fishery on the Newfoundland Grand Banks (1990); Inuit youth and gendered vocational training in the eastern Canadian Arctic (1985); change and continuity in the gender division of labour in Portuguese-Canadian immigrant households (1998); and, new gender dynamics in the households of migrant workers in an export processing town in northeastern Brazil (2009).

Sally Cole also conducts research in the history of anthropology, specifically the history of ethnographic writing in the discipline. This research is published in her books Ruth Landes: A Life in Anthropology (2003) and Rainy River Lives: Stories Told by Maggie Wilson (2009) both with the University of Nebraska Press. Ruth Landes pioneered the anthropological study of gender in the early 20th century. Maggie Wilson, was one of the first aboriginal auto-ethnographers who, through storytelling, documented Ojibwa experiences of colonization at the turn of the 20th century.