People
Dillon Mahoney
Assistant Professor
Contact
Office: SOC 117
Email: dmahoney1@usf.edu
Teaching, Advising, and research
I am a broadly trained applied cultural and linguistic anthropologist with background and interests in issues of indigeneity, heritage, and economic development in East Africa and the United States. Whether exploring art vendors on the Kenyan coast, farmers experimenting with new agricultural techniques in Eastern Kenya, refugees in Tampa, or indigenous peoples in New Hampshire, my approach is to ask questions and frame my research participants as knowledgeable sources of crucial information rather than simply in need of help. Throughout my projects, I take a participatory approach that, while interested in eventual action or intervention, is also cognizant of internal power dynamics and the complexities of both “community” and “participation.”
I have extensive experience teaching introductory and upper-level undergraduate anthropology courses as well as graduate seminars (Contemporary Applied Anthropology; Anthropology of Development; Anthropology of Media; Teaching Anthropology). The courses I teach are grounded in and reflect my research interests and teaching philosophy: that students learn best when course material and abstract theory connect directly to issues in their lives.
I have extensive experience designing and running field schools in coastal Kenya as well as organizing large student-based service-learning projects in the United States. In the fall of 2020, a colleague of mine and I worked with our students to qualitatively evaluate the impacts of pandemic policies among a large sample of USF students (n=178).
I have extensive experience designing and running field schools in Kenya as well as organizing large student-based service-learning projects in the United States. My ongoing research in Kenya is a collaboration with the Kenya Institute of Primate Research (KIPRE), and is based in the greater Amboseli-Tsavo ecosystem between Kajiado and Makueni Counties. During the summer of 2024, we started a new USF Kenya Conservation and Development Field School in partnership with KIPRE. Working collaboratively with government and community based organizations, my two Kenyan co-directors and I (Stan Kivai and Nancy Moinde) are exploring environmental threats such as deforestation, water scarcity, and climate change to find means to resolve conflict between humans and wildlife, issues of water scarcity and access, and competition among conservation stakeholders.
For more information about the field school, click here.
USF Kenya 2024
Since 2001, my research has focused on urban informal economies, the tourism industry, and socio-economic change in Kenya. My 2017 book, The Art of Connection (California), provides a history of Kenya’s coastal tourism and crafts industries and culminates in a discussion of the impact of new digital technologies on small business in the coastal city of Mombasa. Bringing together the studies of globalization, development, art, and communication, the book illuminates the lived experiences of informal economies and shows how traders and small enterprises balance new risks with the mobility afforded by digital technologies. I wished to capture an African ‘grass-roots’ that, to paraphrase James Ferguson, would be not local and communal but globally connected and opportunistic. These strategies often involve the use of Fair Trade stickers and clever branding to balance revelation with obfuscation – or what is revealed and what is not – so that traders can make their own roles as potentially exploitative intermediaries invisible. I have contributed two chapters based upon research in Kenya to 2017’s Global Africa (Hodgson and Byfield, eds., California) and 2020’s The Oxford Handbook of Kenya Politics (Cheeseman, Kanyinga, and Lynch, eds., Oxford).
As an applied anthropologist, I use anthropological insights and methods to address important social problems of today. Since 2016, I have been working with Swahili-speaking refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in Florida’s Hillsborough and neighboring Pinellas Counties. Beginning as a project on diet and nutrition, our team of faculty and students (including many East African students) have now spent several years conducting research and working on volunteer projects via Hillsborough County Schools, the Tampa Bay Refugee Task Force, and several community-based organizations and churches. I received a “Welcomer Award” from the Florida Department of Children and Families in 2017 for my work helping refugees. I have spoken about our work and research at several conferences and in several media formats including podcasts, and I was quoted in a front page 2017 Tampa Bay Times article on the topic of resettlement of refugees from the DRC. Here is me featured on Will Lucas’s anthropology podcast in May 2020 talking about my work with refugees. Since early 2018, I have partnered with a local youth group to help produce Swahili-language educational (and fun) videos to both teach young people technical skills and to help them empower themselves by toying with the technology and the representations of themselves and life in America they can produce. Our YouTube channel is called Umoja wa Afrika – Tampa (Africa United – Tampa).
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I worked closely with colleagues at USF and community partners to investigate the impact of pandemic policies on populations of recently resettled refugees in the Tampa Bay Area. Our first report on Congolese household heads was completed in July 2020 and additional reports have been completed on Arabic and Spanish speaking refugee populations in collaboration with faculty and students at Morsani Medical School. Through early 2021, I worked with a team translating public health resources into Swahili. Please contact me for more on Swahili language translation or for our most recent informational flyer on COVID-19 vaccines. There has been media coverage of our work with translation and outreach during and after the pandemic.
Another ongoing project focuses on the indigenous history of New Hampshire, specifically during the contact period of roughly 1600-1800. This project is focused on oral history and heritage, and has led to several public presentations and online courses in New Hampshire. This project is ongoing, the goal being to provide a powerful critique of romanticism in indigenous New Hampshire history and a rethinking of inherited wisdom and knowledge production regarding history and archaeology in the state. Coming from a New Hampshire maple-syruping family and growing up on the road between Goffstown’s two “Indian Rocks,” my work in New Hampshire, which started in the 1990s, is a passion project. I am extremely grateful to the Manchester and New Hampshire Historical Societies, as well as the Indigenous New Hampshire Collaborative Collective (INHCC) for their friendship and ongoing support. Please reach out if you are interested in indigenous New Hampshire history!
For more information on any of these projects, or to just chat, please reach out by email. I will do my best to get back to you in a timely manner.
Graduate Students
Nadege Nau, Emily Holbrook, Tyler Koerner, and Caroline Stahley