Emma Shaw Crane

Emma Shaw Crane is an urban and environmental anthropologist. Her research and teaching focus on war, environment, and racialization in the urban Americas.

Her current book project, Counterinsurgent Suburb, is a study of the environmental and spatial arrangements that sustain U.S. empire on the peripheries of Miami, Florida. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork across a military base, a detention camp for migrant children, a nuclear power plant, and industrial plantations sustained by Indigenous Maya migrant workers. The project engages war as a transnational racial project that is routinized and reproduced in the American suburb.

A second project examines aftermaths of war in Bogotá and draws on long-term fieldwork with former guerrilla combatants in Colombia’s civil war. It examines how peripheral neighborhoods become the targets of municipal, humanitarian, and insurgent efforts to repair past atrocity, often in ways that seek to remake urban built environments.

Crane’s work is grounded in the principles and practices of research justice. She currently co-directs a project investigating exposure to unbreathable air as a form of collective punishment at a county jail and federal migrant detention center in Glades County, Florida.