Joanne Nucho

Associate Professor of Anthropology; On leave for the 2024-2025 academic year
With Pomona Since: 2016
  • Expertise

    Expertise

    Joanne Randa Nucho is an anthropologist and filmmaker. Her research interests include critical infrastructure studies, urban studies, middle eastern studies as well as non-fiction film and video and visual ethnography.

    Her most recent work focuses on the relationship between infrastructures, urban development projects and the ways in which people begin to imagine themselves as part of a 鈥減ublic.鈥 Her book  (2016), part of the Princeton University Press series on culture and technology, is based on 16 months of ethnographic research in a neighborhood widely known as Beirut鈥檚 Armenian quarter. In it, she looks at urban infrastructures, services and utilities like electricity provision, bridges and roads as critical sites for political mobilization in order to reorient conversations about sovereignty and citizenship in conflict states and across broader contexts as well. The materiality of these infrastructures as socio-technical channels and what they mean to the subjects who navigate and experience them in everyday life are critical to the project of producing ideas about community and notions of the public good.

    Nucho鈥檚 non-fiction film work has screened in various contexts, including the London International Documentary Film Festival in 2008 and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in 2017.

    Research Interests

    • Visual Anthropology
    • Film and Video
    • Urban Studies
    • Critical Infrastructure Studies
  • Work

    Work

    鈥.鈥&苍产蝉辫;Public Culture  1 May 2022; 34 (2 (97)): 265鈥290.

    "" Postmodern Culture, vol. 30 no. 1, 2019.

    "" for The Immanent Frame, Social Science Research Council

    Research in the Sociology of Organizations Ser, V. 62. Co-edited with Kornberger, Martin, Geoffrey C Bowker, Julia Elyachar, Andrea Mennicken, Peter Miller, Joanne Randa Nucho, and Neil Pollock. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited. 2019.

    Public Books, September 2018

     Jadaliyya, Aug 2018

    "Collaborative Visual Methods: Parent Activism, Educational Justice and Photography in a Los Angeles Elementary School," co-authored with Sheena Nahm. Human Organization Vol. 77, No. 3, Fall 2018. 

    鈥淏ourj Hammoud: Seeing the City鈥檚 Urban Textures and Layered Pasts,鈥 Jadaliyya, March 2014.

    鈥淏ecoming Armenian in Lebanon.鈥&苍产蝉辫;Middle East Report, MER 265 Spring 2013.

     鈥淥bservational Cinema: Anthropology, Film, and the Exploration of Social Life by Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz.鈥 Book Review, American Ethnologist 38, no. 2 (2011): 394-395.

     鈥淭he Narrow Streets of Bourj Hammoud,鈥 nonfiction film, HDV, 72 min.

  • Education

    Education

    Ph.D., Anthropology, University of California, Irvine

    M.A., Islamic Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

    B.F.A., Film and Television Production, New York University

  • Awards & Honors

    Awards & Honors

    Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (2011)

    Fulbright Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Award (2010-2011)鈥