Teams

Study 3 Team
Memorialization, Contested Knowledge, and the Sociopsychological Impacts of Disinformation in the Context of COVID-19
(2022-2025)

Principal Investigators

Sarah E Wagner, Principal Investigator

Professor of Anthropology, The George Washington University

Sarah Wagner is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research focuses on post-conflict societies, memory, forensic science applied in the wake of war, and, most recently, on COVID-19 death and mourning. In the fall of 2021, she led a team of GWU students geolocating flags for the In America: Remember installation.

Roy Richard grinker, co-pi

Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs,
The George Washington University

Roy Grinker conducts cross-cultural research on mental illness, developmental disorders, and stigma. He is currently studying grief, mourning, and memorialization in the COVID-19 pandemic. He is the author of Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness.

Joel Kuipers, co-pi

Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs,
The George Washington University

Joel Kuipers has carried out extensive ethnographic analyses of the role of language in “troubles” in the eastern Indonesian island of Sumba, in US psychiatric clinics, U.S. science classrooms, COVID-related Zoom funerals, and among teenage cell phone users. His current work focuses on how claims and assumptions about memorializations of COVID victims are contested, debated, and inscribed.

Maria jose pelaez, project manager

PhD Student, Linguistic Anthropology,
The George Washington University

Maria Jose is a PhD student in linguistic anthropology at the George Washington University. Her dissertation examines how the “promise” of an Alzheimer’s cure moves (materially and semiotically) between Colombia and the US, shaping state interactions and turning geographies into sites of medical anticipation and governance.