Carolyn Nordstrom, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, has received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. The grant will fund the development of a new literary genre of creative non-fiction that can be used by both academic and lay audiences to research and document illegal war-zone organizations.p. For the last two decades, I have been conducting fieldwork in war zones, and have studied the ways in which people gain the necessities to wage war and create peace, and how people pay for these services,Nordstrom said.Drugs, precious gems, human labor and sex are routinely used in international black markets to purchase everything from guns and computer-based weapons systems to antibiotics and food.p. “The integrity of my ethnographic research and the safety of those among whom I work have rested on having to delete basic data, which erases the extra-legal from public discourse. I want to develop a form of creative non-fiction that explores the lives of real people working in this complex, extra-legal network without revealing their locations.”p. Nordstrom will spend the next academic year traveling to the epicenters of war, interviewing a wide range of people, including war orphans, military staff, international profiteers, smugglers, elite detectives, and officials in agencies such as Scotland Yard. Her research will serve as the basis for a book that explores the lives, communities, values and cultures of people involved in the world of extra-governmental war-zone organizations and their impact on 21st century wartime economics.p. A member of the Notre Dame faculty since 1997, Nordstrom specializes in political anthropology, peace and conflict resolution, civilians in war zones, medical anthropology, gender, culture theory, Africa and Asia. She is the author ofShadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First CenturyandA Different Kind of War Story,and co-editor ofFieldwork under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and SurvivalandThe Paths to Domination, Resistance, and Terror.Nordstrom also is a faculty fellow in Notre Dames Kellogg Institute for International Studies.p. Established in 1925 by U.S. Sen. Simon Guggenheim and his wife as a memorial to their late son, the Guggenheim Foundation offers research fellowships in the fields of the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities or creative arts to writers, scholars or scientists who have demonstrated an exceptional capacity for productive scholarship.
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