Visual Studies Director & Associate Director
Tracy Xavia Karner, Director
The visual sociologist, Tracy Xavia Karner, uses visual sources to study the social construction and transformation of self and identity. She has explored these processes on the individual, social-cultural, organizational, and community levels in a variety of contexts, including hospitals, community service agencies, nationalist movements, and the mass media.
An award winning teacher and a nationally-known expert in the field of medical sociology, she is the recipient of an award from the American Sociological Association and of more than $2.7 million in grants to support her collaborative research projects. Dr. Karner has coauthored a textbook with Carol Warren , Discovering Qualitative Research: Field Methods, Interviews, and Analysis, (Roxbury, 2005) .
Her publications, which deal with gender, mental health, social policy, art aesthetics, ethnicity, and nationalist movements, have appeared in such peer reviewed journals as Symbolic Interactionism, Qualitative Health Research, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Communication and Cognition, American Studies Journal, masculinities, Clinical Sociology Review, Journal of Aging Studies, Journal of Aging and Mental Health, American Sociologist, Journal of Applied Gerontology, and Journal of Aging and Social Policy.
Phone: 713.743.3961
Email: txkarner@uh.edu
Jerome Crowder, Associate Director
A visual anthropologist, Jerome Crowder uses photography and ethnography to study cultural responses to urbanization and migration, especially among Andean peoples.
His scholarship has appeared in Visual Anthropology, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, American Ethnologist, and Anthropology News. He has also written the section on visual anthropology in the Encyclopedia of Anthropology.
His traveling photographic exhibit Sueños Urbanos: Urban Dreams: The Search for a Better Life in Bolivia is based on 10 years of ethnographic research with Aymara migrants in El Alto, Bolivia. It is currently touring museums and libraries across the country.
He has also exhibited his work in Bolivia (1996-2000) and his students' work in Perú (2005).
Dr. Crowder is Assistant Research Professor in the University of Houston's Department of Anthropology with joint affiliations with the Texas Learning and Computation Center (TLC2) and the Abramson Center for the Future of Health.
Phone: 713-743-4264
Email: jcrowder@uh.edu
