Kate Fischer is a cultural anthropologist who earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from CU-麻豆影院. She teaches anthropology and women & general studies courses in the Honors program. She likes to think that by now she鈥檚 also earned an honorary degree as a coffee-ologist, having worked or researched in just about every part of the coffee commodity chain. Kate did most of her dissertation fieldwork in Costa Rica, looking at how the Costa Rican sense of self as exceptional has been challenged both by the decline of coffee production and the decline of the social welfare state. In the last few years she has been working with small-scale producers in Honduras and large-scale producers in El Salvador on coffee processing and quality at the intersections of art, science, and storytelling. Ongoing research at coffee conferences and social networks seeks to understand how ideas about quality and social justice circulate and are made sense of. When she isn鈥檛 teaching about coffee, social justice, Latin America, power, violence, and the state, you can find her obsessing over water-to-grounds ratios, hiking with her dog, or hanging out in her 1968 travel trailer.
Office: Kitt Central N215