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

Baird Campbell is PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at Rice University. His dissertation “The Archive of the Self: Trans Self-Making and Social Media in Chile,” brings together queer/trans studies, studies of the archive, and science and technology studies to explore how trans activists in Chile use social media such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to iteratively craft gendered subjectivities. Broadly, his research is concerned with how social media and other digital technologies shape—and are shaped by—their users.

Before arriving at Rice, Baird received B.A.’s in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Applied Linguistics, and French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan. He also received an MA from Tulane University’s Stone Center for Latin American Studies, where he won the Greenleaf Prize for best paper by a LAS Graduate Student in the Social Sciences for his paper “Social Media as a Tool for Linguistic Maintenance and Preservation among the Mapuche”. His MA thesis, Movilh-ization: Hegemonic Masculinity In The Queer Social Movement Industry In Santiago De Chile explored the role of hegemonic masculinity in shaping the demands of Chile’s LGBTI movement.

Baird is also the managing editor of Platypus, the official blog of the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology & Computing, has served as a copy editor for Harvard University Press, and as a digital content editor for Cultural Anthropology. He is also a former co-coordinator of Rice’s Ethnography Studio, an experimental ethnographic methods space. For the last two years, he has served as Film Festival Manager for the Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival.

Before arriving at Rice, Baird worked as an ESL instructor in Madrid, Spain for two years, and as adjunct instructor of Spanish at Finlandia University. At Rice, he has served as TA for Introduction to Anthropology, Introduction to LGBT Studies, co-instructor of Contemporary Social Movements, and has TA’d for several online courses through Rice Online. As instructor of record he has taught two iterations of “Writing with and about Social Media,” a First-Year Writing Intensive Seminar, as well as “Masculinities.”

Baird’s research has been published in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia, and is forthcoming in a Spanish-language edited volume published by the Institute of Ethnomusicology of the Pontificate Catholic University of Peru.