Robin Balliger

Personal bio
Robin Balliger earned her PhD in anthropology at Stanford University and currently serves as Lecturer in the Anthropology Department. She was Associate Professor and Chair of “Art, Place, and Public Studies” and Liberal Arts at San Francisco Art Institute for over twenty years (until SFAI closed in 2022). Balliger’s current project is on the City of Oakland, particularly on arts, culture, and racial politics in the context of urban restructuring. In 2019 she was invited to present her research on precarity at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany and subsequently published articles in Art and Gentrification in a Changing Neoliberal Landscape and Journal of Urban Cultural Studies (2021). Balliger previously conducted extensive research in Trinidad on popular music, media expansion, and identity formation in national/transnational space, work described by scholars as “pioneering” in music and sound studies. She received fellowships from Fulbright, MacArthur Foundation, National Science Foundation, Wenner Gren, Mellon Foundation, she was awarded the Textor Award for Outstanding Anthropological Creativity, and students have honored her with teaching awards. Publications appear in The Global Resistance Reader, Trinidad Carnival: The Cultural Politics of a Transnational Festival, Media Fields Journal, and Race, Poverty, and the Environment. Prior to graduate school, Balliger was a musician, activist, and co-founder of Komotion International, a legendary artist collective, gallery, and performance space that exemplified the radical politics and creativity of San Francisco’s Mission District.

Currently teaching