Anand Pandian
· Krieger-Eisenhower ProfessorJohns Hopkins University · Medicine
Active 1995–2025
About
Anand Pandian is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, with a joint appointment in Earth & Planetary Sciences. His research interests include ecological ethics, sustainable design, environmental humanities, sensory ethnography, experimental writing, engaged anthropology, and participatory teaching and research, with a focus on India, America, Baltimore, and Earth. Pandian has authored several books, including 'A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times' and 'Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life and How to Take Them Down.' His work explores the cultivation of ecological sensibility, the moral imagination in environmental ethics, and the relationships between human and nonhuman worlds, emphasizing the importance of openness and care in meeting ecological challenges. He has conducted fieldwork with Tamil filmmakers, artists, musicians, and craftsmen, and is currently working on a new book project about the global struggle to build a zero waste future, drawing stories from the United States, India, Ghana, and Spain. Pandian also serves as a curator of the Ecological Design Collective and has contributed to ethnographic writing and collaborative projects in ecological imagination and transformation. He has held leadership roles, including serving as President of the Society for Cultural Anthropology through 2025, and has been involved in editorial boards and scholarly networks supporting his research and teaching.
Research topics
- Computer Science
- Artificial Intelligence
- History
- Sociology
- Psychology
- Ecology
- Linguistics
- Art
- Aesthetics
- Environmental ethics
- Anthropology
- Cognitive science
- Biology
- Philosophy
- Geography
Selected publications
The artisanal anthropology of Jane I. Guyer
Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory · 2025-07-30
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingEnvironmental Humanities · 2022 · 3 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Sociology
- Aesthetics
Abstract Migration is a bedrock reality of earthly life. This truth invites us to imagine the span of the Americas beginning not with borders and walls but instead with movement beyond them. What might our continents and countries begin to look and feel like if we acknowledged the necessity of these crossings, the kinship and well-being that movement sustains? The essay explores these questions through a series of meditations on the monarch butterfly, a creature that has become in recent years the symbol of a more expansive vision of North American belonging. Anand Pandian describes affinities for the butterfly articulated and expressed by artists, migrant rights activists, butterfly enthusiasts, and migrants themselves, in the United States and in Mexico. In the company of migrants, both human and lepidopteran, Pandian explores an alternative vision of collective life beyond national walls and borders. With the lifeways of the monarch butterfly, the most crucial lesson has to do with the relationships that propel movement across borders, the ties that draw together those within and those without. A society of rigid walls and borders may seek to repudiate their reality, or their necessity. And yet these relationships remain at work in our world of pervasive motion and migration, binding our fates together with living beings and distant places far beyond the span of the lines we draw.
2021-02-05
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding2021-02-02 · 1 citations
book1st authorCorrespondingOne. ‘‘A Rough Spade for a Rugged Landscape’’ On Savage Selves and More Civil Places
2021-02-05
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingPunctum Books · 2020-02-07
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding2020-05-01
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding2020-09-17
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding4. The Ecology of What We Write
2020-05-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingDuke University Press eBooks · 2020
1st authorCorresponding- Computer Science
- Ecology
- Computer Science
Recent grants
Place, Emotion, and Regional Identity
NSF · $89k · 2009–2012
Frequent coauthors
- 3 shared
Donald S. Moore
- 3 shared
Cymene Howe
Rice University
- 3 shared
Daud Ali
- 2 shared
Jake Kosek
- 1 shared
Paul Shankman
- 1 shared
Diego Cagüeñas Rozo
- 1 shared
M. Prabu
Tamil Nadu Veterinary and Animal Sciences University
- 1 shared
M. P. Mariappan
Awards & honors
- Infosys Prize in the Social Sciences, Infosys Science Founda…
- Second Prize, Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, S…
- Johns Hopkins Catalyst Award, JHU Office of the Provost (201…
- Exploration of Practical Ethics Award, JHU Berman Institute…
- Second Prize, Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, S…
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