Setha Low

The 2016 SANA Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America was awarded to Setha Low.

Inaugurated in 1994, the SANA Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America recognizes scholars with a notable long-term program of research and publication, and also takes into account contributions in other areas, such as teaching and training, SANA/AAA service, and community, activist, or policy involvements outside academia. Professor Setha Low has excelled in all of these areas.

Dr. Low received a BA in anthropology from Pitzer College, followed by a MA and PhD in anthropology from UC Berkeley. She is currently Professor of Environmental Psychology and Anthropology at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.

Over the course of a long and distinguished career, Professor Low has published numerous books and articles — well over 80 at last count. Setha began her career as a Latin Americanist working in Costa Rica and Guatemala, but developed a research interest in the U.S. when while co-teaching in the Graduate School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania she undertook a series of collective ethnographic projects to help students and faculty take people and their community and environmental needs into consideration when designing. These studies cast into relief the ways in which issues of race and class were often implicated in social conflict and unequal access to space in urban parks. This work blossomed when she moved to the Graduate Center and initiated a series of National Park Service projects with graduate students that clarified even further the ways in which gender, race and ethnicity generate relationships of inclusion and exclusion that play out in the stages of space. Her Rethinking Urban Parks: Public Space and Cultural Diversity with Scheld and Taplin argues for the use of critical ethnography in designing more inclusive public spaces.

Looking at these issues from the perspective of privatized space, Dr. Low published (and this is an amazing ethnographic work for many reasons) Behind the Gates: Life, Security and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America. This book shows how gating, an elitist middle-class strategy to keep social goods restricted, shows how gating also maintains a socially and racially segregated world. The fear of others she detected in gated community dwellers also appears in cosmopolitan urban neighborhoods and policy. Thinking through these issues more broadly, subsequent work pushed an examination of how security and securitization are both experienced and empolicied while creating opportunities for collective action even within highly privatized housing systems. Her new book Spatializing Culture shows how ethnographically driven analyses of space offers a more granular understanding of inequalities and exclusions while offering people the means for understanding the places in which they live.

Professor Low has held a number of prestigious fellowships at places such as the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and at The Getty Center. She has received numerous awards and honors, including the Anthony Leeds Prize for On The Plaza, and the Robert Textor Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology. Her work has been supported by institutions such as Wenner Gren, The National Park Service, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council among many others. She has held many leadership positions within the AAA and in the World Council of Anthropological Associations and been tireless in her efforts to disseminate anthropology. Like her published work, her invited talks and lectures are far too numerous to review but she has organized conferences, such as the Wenner Gren Conference on Engaged Anthropology where she considered the history of engagement and the obstacles faced by students today, such as concerns about how this kind of work is recognized by tenure committees.

This is just one small example of Dr. Low’s commitment to students and junior scholars. She has actively sought opportunities to collaborate with them on research and publication, and mentored a long line of now highly successful scholars many of whom are active members of SANA today. I know from my own experience as a graduate student that she is simultaneously generous, nurturing, and encouraging. I remember being absolutely stunned and inspired by the crispness of her analytic style and her ability to delineate the core questions implicit in work that we were reading and producing.

In quoting one of the jurors in the selection process, I have to agree that “Setha is a force.” Her books, articles, interviews, service and teaching make her an outstanding figure as both a distinguished scholar of North America, and a key contributor to the practice of North American anthropology.

Please join me in thanking and congratulating Professor Low. I’m sure I speak on behalf of the entire SANA membership when I say that we are honored to be able to present you with this award.