Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Sociology
Platner Hall 104
562 . 907. 4200 ext. 4998
tfarmer@whittier.edu
Academic History
Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin
M.A., University of Texas at Austin
B.A., University of Rochester
Academic Interests
Political economy; the intersection of technology, social relationships, and water/wastewater/environment; built environment; gender; Middle East and North Africa.
Professor Tessa Farmer earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin in spring 2014. Dr. Farmer is a sociocultural anthropologist of the Middle East specializing in the environmental and social dynamics of urban life, specifically in Cairo, Egypt. She performed dissertation fieldwork in an informal settlement in Cairo, where she investigated the conjunctions of social relations, built forms and biological life that interact around the common resource of water. Her research explores the ways in which lower income residents of Cairo work to obtain sources of potable water and deal with the ramifications of sewage in their urban ecology, as well as rereading social life to include non-human factors, such as water.
