Baird Campbell, PhD

Anthropology
he/him/his

2021-22 Postdoctoral Fellow
Program in Writing and
Communication
Rice University

Social media ● gender ● sexuality ● queer studies ● postcolonial theory ● social movements ● queer temporalities ● memory ● the archive ● Chile ● Latin America

Hi there! I’m a recent Anthropology PhD at Rice University. I’m currently teaching a First-Year Writing Intensive Seminar, “Writing with and about Social Media,” and am preparing to teaching “Media, Culture, and Society” and “Masculinities” this summer. In the Fall, I will join Rice’s Program in Writing and Communication as a Postdoctoral fellow.

My dissertation, “The Archive of the Self: Trans Self-Making and Social Media in Santiago de Chile argues that social media constitutes a space for innovation on pre-existing forms of narrative resistance dating back to Chile’s military dictatorship (1973-1990), in which individual and group memory-work became a salient form of resistance. Additionally, I argue that online Chilean trans subjectivities and social media archives are to some extent mutually constitutive; as my interlocutors discover a broad range of trans subjectivities and experiences, they also alter their subjectivities in relation both to the platform itself and the communities it makes possible.

I am also passionate about public scholarship, and am working on several projects at the moment. The first is my ongoing work with Cool Anthropology, where I am currently a public scholarship fellow. I am also in the final stages of a collaborative project with several of my main interlocutors and Chilean photographer Karina Fuenzalida, an interactive web portal (de) les Trans, which seeks to question the primacy of the ethnographic gaze. Finally, I am in the process of turning key ideas from my dissertation research into publicly accessible, easily digestible materials available in English and Spanish.