Carolyn Rouse joined Princeton’s faculty in 2000. Her work explores the use of evidence to make particular claims about race and social inequality. She is the author of Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam and Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment, which include an examination of how authority in Islam is used to validate notions of racial equality and social justice. In Uncertain Suffering: Racial Healthcare Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease, she focuses on uncertainties around what constitutes a racial health disparity, and the evidence-based research used to assert particular narratives of injustice and calls for reparations. In the summer of 2016, she began studying declining white life expectancies in rural California as a follow-up to her research on racial health disparities. Her work in medicine explores how statistical evidence is used to make claims about health care and social justice. She focuses on uncertainties around what constitutes a racial health disparity, and the evidence-based research used to assert particular narratives of injustice and calls for reparations. In 2008, Carolyn began building a high school in a fishing village at the western edge of Accra, Ghana. Her research focuses on the relationship between international development and social change in urban sub-Saharan Africa. Her manuscript Development Hubris: Adventures Trying to Save the World examines discourses of charity and development and is tied to her own project building a high school in a fishing village in Ghana.
Carolyn began her graduate career as a visual anthropologist and is also a filmmaker. She has produced, directed, and/or edited several documentaries including Chicks in White Satin (1994), Purification to Prozac: Treating Mental Illness in Bali (1998), and Listening as a Radical Act: World Anthropologies and the Decentering of Western Thought (2015). After taking a hiatus from filmmaking, she is now editing a non-MOOC/MOOC on World Anthropologies, shot in Cape Town South Africa in 2013.
As an extension of her commitment and training in visual anthropology, in the summer of 2016, she also created the Ethnographic Data Visualization Lab (VizE Lab) to work with students and colleagues on ways to visualize complex ethnographic data.
