Assistant Professor

B.A.(high honors; Magna Cum Laude),   Anthropology, University of Central Florida, 1995.
Ph.D.  Anthropology, University of Georgia, 2002.
Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship,    Microdemography, Brandeis University, 2003-2005. 

Bio

Dr. Joseph is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Georgia and completed an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Demography at Brandeis University where she was hosted by the Departments of Sociology, Anthropology and Human Biology. Given her research interests in Bedouin lives in transition, she is eager to bring an engaged pedagogy to Zayed that aims to create a learning environment within the classroom and beyond that diffuses hierarchy and fuses compassion and critical thinking.

Office: Abu Dhabi South Campus, (Room Z-034)
Phone: +971 2 599 3169
Email: Suzanne.Joseph@zu.ac.ae

Teaching Areas

Humanities and Social Science (HSS) courses offered in International Studies, including Emerging Civilizations and Imperial Encounters. HSS course in Bedouin Society offered in Emirati Studies.
 

Class, race and gender inequality; marriage and the family; biodemography and health; Orientalism; cultural representation and domination; social justice.

Research and Professional Activities

Dr. Joseph’s research focuses on macro North-South and local demographic disparities between social class or status groups within Global South countries. Her early work on biodemography and social class has broadened to include focus on distinct but interlocking structures of race-gender-class oppression. Her research on Bedouin communities in Lebanon and Syria demonstrates that demographic facts cannot be studied in isolation from the political economic and social institutions which define them and are defined by them. She has completed a book manuscript, Reproducing Kin: Class, Gender and the Demographic Divide in Bedouin Society, which locates Bedouin women’s reproductive lives within a political economy of class, kinship and gender framework that aims to understand how demographic inequalities are structured locally and across transnational boundaries. She also plans to carry out comparative work on Gulf Bedouins.

Dr. Joseph’s research is interdisciplinary and ranges widely, including anthropological demography; political economy of bioreproduction and health; the global demographic divide; kinship studies; Orientalism, eugenicism,  and white supremacy; culture and power.