About Nora Haenn, PhD

Nora Haenn is a Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at North Carolina State University.  Her research examines the everyday ways rural people create “globalization from below.” While globalization is often depicted as something built by international businesses and governments, around the world people also create globalization just by going about their normal activities. Haenn is especially interested in how rural people enact and contest globalization in a few areas: when they manage their farms, forests and other natural resources; when they undertake international migration; and when they encounter rural-urban distinctions.

Since the early 1990s, Haenn has focused on the municipality of Calakmul in southern Mexico. In addition to having published numerous articles, Haenn uses in-depth knowledge of globalization within a single field site her to explain in her book, Marriage after Migration (2020), the origins of Mexican labor migration as a gendered, family strategy that counteracts “globalization from above.” Her latest project considers how rural people imagine “a good life” and refuse migration especially in the face of climate change and other pressures to move.

Haenn regularly advocates for a greater understanding of rural Mexicans and Central Americans, wherever they live, at a time when people from the United States, Mexico, and Central America have such a significant effect on one another's lives.

Banner photo credit: Luis Melodelgado