Welcome back Dr. Emily Hertzman who has returned to the Department of Anthropology as a Research Associate and is serving as the coordinator of the Ethnography Lab. Along with the director, Joshua Barker, she is inviting faculty and students from the Department of Anthropology to participate in the lab’s programs and activities in ways that enhance and enrich their academic programs. Opportunities include pitching ideas for student-initiated interest groups, recommending methods workshops for the upcoming spring semester, and suggesting ideas for workshops, talks, or collaborations with the lab.

Imagined as an inclusive and creative space for experimentation and play, the Ethnography Lab is always keen on organizing both formal and informal events including film screenings, creative workshops, reading and discussion groups, as well as facilitating ad-hoc research collaborations. Since its inception, the Ethnography Lab has supported, through its physical, social and virtual infrastructure, a series of fieldwork-based research projects and courses, including the Kensington Market Research Project, the anthropology high school program, the Munk One ethnography practicum, Professor Tania Li’s Ethnography of the University course and CREST program (Centre for Research and Social Transformation, Kerala). To get involved with the Ethnography Lab please reach out directly to Emily Hertzman, emily.hertzman@utoronto.ca

Dr. Emily Hertzman is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research focuses on mobilities, identities, religious practices, and politics. She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Toronto in 2017, after completing both her B.A. (2001) and M.A. (2006) at the University of British Columbia. Her work examines how concepts of home and belonging are reshaped by broader societal changes including mobility, democratization, transnationalism, economic restructuring, liberalization, religious encounters, and personal identity construction. She conducts research primarily with Chinese Indonesian communities in Singkawang, West Kalimantan, as well as in Jakarta, Indonesia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. While a graduate student in the anthropology department, she was one of the founding members of the Ethnography Lab (2014), a faculty and student collaboration and resource center that promotes ethnographic research methods and practice inside and outside the university.
 
Before Joining the department as a Research Associate in January 2024, Dr. Hertzman served as a Research Fellow in the Religion and Globalization Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, at the National University of Singapore (2020-2023), and before that, she held the position of Richard Charles Lee Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asia Institute in the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto (2017-2019). She is a contributor to a Hong Kong-based research collaboration called Infrastructures of Faith: Religious Mobilities on the Belt and Road and has been working with Dr. Joshua Barker, Dr. Sheri Gibbings and Dr. Elan Lazuardi on a series of research projects that relate to changing urban infrastructures and informal sovereignties.   Dr. Hertzman is an editor of the CoronAsur: Religion and Covid-19 blog and a phygital book CoronAsur: Asian Religions in the Covidian Age (University of Hawaii Press, 2023). Her published work can be found in Global Networks, Modern Asian Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies, HAU, and Indonesia.