Allison Kendra is the first Director of Program Development and Education at CIFAS and an instructor in the Comitas Field School. They received their PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University in 2021. They are a sociocultural anthropologist who critically studies the state, inequality, and the environment in the Americas. As a community-oriented educator and researcher, they are committed to engaged teaching, mentorship, scholarship, and service.

In their teaching and research, they analyze how state and international interventions are deployed, their impacts on people’s everyday lives, and their roles in shaping racialized and gendered inequalities. Their first book-length project, Wars on Drugs and Uprisings: The Maintenance of Everyday Intervention in Peru, examines how racialized and gendered inequalities are involved in the implementation and lived experience of protracted war. This research is based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork in Peru’s Huallaga Valley, where for decades the governments of the United States and Peru have conducted militarized and development-based interventions that combine the war on drug crop production with the war on terror. These interventions are premised on the Huallaga as a site of conflict between Shining Path insurgents, civilians, and the state in Peru’s internal war in the 1980s and ‘90s, and as a former global leader in the production of coca, the leaf crop used to make cocaine. Rather than framing these circumstances as episodic periods of violence and intervention, Allison’s research highlights the ongoing colonial legacies of race, class, and gender that are engrained in these proceedings. Working across scales, this research presents an analysis of the local, national and international politics of these interventions and their impacts on everyday life, inequality, and the environment.

Allison’s teaching and research build on approaches and methodologies in sociocultural anthropology, including multimodal forms of research and engagement, informed by their interdisciplinary background and teaching in the sciences and arts. They have had the opportunity to work across many departments and institutions, developing and teaching over 30 core and elective courses in Anthropology, Sociology, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Race and Ethnicity Studies. They have also mentored and developed programming with many Centers for Teaching and Learning. Their 15 years of professional experience as an educator builds on a lifelong commitment to multidirectional and collective learning towards action.