Alexandra Widmer
Research Scholar
Ph.D.
Residence: September 1, 2009–April 30, 2013
Profile
My current research tracks the transition from scientific debates on demographic decline in the early 20th century New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) to late colonial and post colonial concerns about curbing overly quick population growth. This is a shift from describing changes in human population size in racial terms or evolutionary possibilities to a framework that links population size with environmental sustainability and development goals. I explore how scientific understandings of human groups were associated with colonial management strategies to curb racial decline and how these changed to post colonial plans about balancing fertility with economic development. I am also interested in how demographic predictions become entangled with local politics of gender and generation and come to bear on women’s experiences during pregnancy and the post partum period. To this end, I conducted ethnographic and oral history research in Vanuatu. In my PhD dissertation in social anthropology from York University, I wrote about colonial and missionary biomedical practices and epistemologies and their implication in the secular and religious aspects of modernity in Vanuatu. Before coming to this project, I taught full-time in the Anthropology department at York University in Toronto. I have also studied social anthropology and international development at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
Selected publications
Widmer, Alexandra. "Of field encounters and metropolitan debates: Research and the making and meaning of the Melanesian ‘race’ during demographic decline. " Paiduema 58 (2012)
Widmer, Alexandra. "Making Mothers: The Changing Relationships of Birth and Raising Children in Pango Village, Vanuatu." In: An Anthropology of Mothering, eds.: Michelle Walks and Naomi McPherson. Toronto: Demeter Press, 2011.
Widmer, Alexandra. "Native Medical Practitioners, Temporality and Nascent Biomedical Citizenship in the New Hebrides . " Political and Legal Anthropology Review 30 (1 2010)
Widmer, Alexandra. "The Effects of Elusive Knowledge: Census, Health Laws and Inconsistently Modern Subjects in Early Colonial Vanuatu. " Journal of Legal Anthropology 1(1) (2008)
Talks and presentations
