Biography

Colby College - Anthropology

Associate Professor of Anthropology at Colby College
Higher Education
Winifred
Tate
Waterville, Maine
I am a political anthropologist examining struggles for democracy, citizenship and political change in the wake of the more than a century of prohibitionist drug policy regimes. I am currently the director of the Maine Drug Policy Lab at Colby College, which brings together policymakers, scholars and students, providing evidence-based analysis for addressing critical drug policy issues in our state and beyond, and conducts research on problematic drug use and access to treatment in Maine. Our research in Maine focuses on how drug use, addiction and recovery is conceptualized and imagined among community members, law enforcement and health care providers. My current project, "Women, Drug Use and Recovery in Maine," employs qualitative methods to center the experience of women, which has been largely neglected in both scholarship and policy debates.
My research in Latin America is focused on Colombian communities and entrenched paramilitary violence, human rights abuses and illicit economies. My current book project, Paramilitary Politics, draws on research I have been conducting over the past decade on paramilitarism, globalization and community resistance, examining the forms, legacies, and deep histories of Colombian violence. I am particularly concerned with how this violence shapes the daily lives, practices and possibilities of residents in rural communities, the production of history about this violence, and its legacies in contemporary Colombian politics. I share photos and stories from my fieldwork in an ongoing instagram ethnography project, Imagining War & Peace in Colombia.