Faye V. Harrison has been named the 2022 recipient of the Society for Applied Anthropology’s Malinowski Award and will deliver the Malinowski Address at the Awards Ceremony on Friday, March 25 in Salt Lake City, Utah. According to the award’s description: The Bronislaw Malinowski Award is presented to an outstanding social scientist in recognition of efforts to understand and serve the needs of the world's societies, and who has actively pursued the goal of solving human problems using the concepts and tools of social science during one's entire career.
Professor Harrison adds this recognition to a long list of previous awards, which includes twice receiving the Presidential Award from the American Anthropological Association (2007 and 2018), the Distinguished Service Award from the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (2018), the William R. Jones Most Valuable Mentor Award from the Florida Education Fund (2013), the Legacy Scholar Award from the Association of Black Anthropologists (2010), the Zora Neale Hurston Award for Mentoring, Service & Scholarship (2007) from the Southern Anthropological Society, and the Society for the Anthropology of North America Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America (2004). In 2021, Professor Harrison was selected by a panel of past presidents of the American Anthropological Association's as a Distinguished Lecturer, a biennial recognition of "intellectual contributions in anthropology" (as stated on the AAA website).
Professor Harrison has written and edited important books which helped chart new paths of anthropological thought and practice, including three editions of Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further Toward an Anthropology for Liberation; Outsider Within: Reworking Anthropology in the Global Age; Resisting Racism and Xenophobia: Global Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Human Rights, and African-American Pioneers of Anthropology. A central member of the "decolonizing generation" (Allen and Jobson 2016), her collective work is widely recognized not only as foundational for the contemporary decolonization movement within anthropology and across the wider intellectual milieu, but also as an important contribution to the development of transnational feminist theory and methodology.
Besides her scholarship, Professor Harrison has played important and transformative leadership roles in the institutional development of anthropology in the US and around the world. She is past President of the Association of Black Anthropologists (1989-91) and served twice on the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association (1990-91, 1999-01). From 1993-2009, she chaired the Commission on the Anthropology of Women, a unit of the International Union of Anthropological & Ethnological Sciences (IUAES). In 2013 she was elected to a five-year term as President of that world organization. During her term of office, the executives of both the IUAES and the World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA) collaborated in establishing the bicameral World Anthropological Union (WAU), and she co-chaired WAU's inaugural steering committee.
The Department of Anthropology joins the Department of African American Studies in commending Professor Harrison’s exemplary record of academic excellence and social responsibility.