Robin Balliger

Prof. Balliger is a cultural anthropologist whose research interests include globalization, geography, media and popular culture, music/sound, postcolonial theory, political economy, the Caribbean and Latin America.  She has received fellowships including Fulbright, MacArthur, National Science Foundation, Mellon, and the Textor Award for Outstanding Anthropological Creativity.  Since the mid-1990s, Prof. Balliger has conducted research in Trinidad on expressive culture, media expansion, and national identity formation.  Her current project centers on the ways in which the cultural sphere in Trinidad has been repositioned to communicate ‘global’ status through arts-related urban development projects – and reactions to these changes by national artist/activists.

Selected Publications: 

• “Post-Fordism, Sound, and Urban Space,” Book Review of Music and Urban Geography by Adam Krims in City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action. Vol. 12/2 July 2008.
• "The Politics of Cultural Value and the Value of Cultural Politics: International Intellectual Property Legislation in Trinidad," Trinidad Carnival: The Cultural Politics of a Transnational Festival. Eds. Garth Green and Phil Scher. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.
• “Empire in the Present: Exploring the Indies through the Cultural Geography of the Commonwealth” Special Issue - East Indies/West Indies: Comparative Archipelagoes.  Anthropological Forum.  Vol. 16/3, 2006.
•  “The Sound of Resistance,” The Global Resistance Reader. Ed. Louise Amoore. London: Routledge. 2005.

Education: 

• PhD and MA, Stanford University
• BA, University of California, Berkeley