Nell Haynes is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Linguistic Anthropology at Northwestern University. Her research addresses themes of performance, authenticity, globalization, and gendered and ethnic identification in Latin America. She holds a Bachelor of Science Degree from Northwestern University in Anthropology and Theater. She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology at American University in 2013 with a concentration in Race, Gender, and Social Justice. Nell previously was a postdoctoral fellow at the Centro de Estudios Interculturales e Indígenas at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where she published her first book, Social Media in Northern Chile. She is currently working on her second book, based on fieldwork in La Paz, Bolivia. The book explores how the pop culture spectacle of lucha libre featuring women as chola characters reflects and contributes to current debates over the nature of "authentic indigeneity" in Bolivia. Nell has also published in a number of edited and co-authored books, as well as prestigious academic journals.
SOCIAL MEDIA IN NORTHERN CHILE: POSTING THE EXTRAORDINARILY ORDINARY is now available from UCL Press in hardback, paperback, epub, and as a FREE Open Access pdf. Click here to buy or download.
Based on 15 months of ethnographic research in the city of Alto Hospicio in northern Chile, this book describes how the residents use social media, and the consequences of this use in their daily lives. Nell Haynes argues that social media is a place where Alto Hospicio’s residents – or Hospiceños – express their feelings of marginalisation that result from living in city far from the national capital, and with a notoriously low quality of life compared to other urban areas in Chile.
In actively distancing themselves from residents in cities such as Santiago, Hospiceños identify as marginalised citizens, and express a new kind of social norm. Yet Haynes finds that by contrasting their own lived experiences with those of people in metropolitan areas, Hospiceños are strengthening their own sense of community and the sense of normativity that shapes their daily lives. This exciting conclusion is illustrated by the range of social media posts about personal relationships, politics and national citizenship, particularly on Facebook.
HOW THE WORLD CHANGED SOCIAL MEDIA is now available from UCL Press!
This book offers a comparative analysis summarising the results of the ethnographic research exploring the impact of social media on politics and gender, education and commerce. What is the result of the increased emphasis on visual communicatin? Are we becoming mroe individual or more social? Why is public social media so conservative? Why does equality online fail to shift inequality offline? How did memes become the moral police of the internet?
How the World Changed Social Media argues that the only way to appreciate and understanding something as intimate and ubiquitous as social media is to be immersed in the lives of the people who post. Only then can we discover how peole all around the world have already transformed social media in such unexpected ways and assess the consequences.
Go to the UCL Press website to order your copy or download free PDFs now
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latest news
21.07.2017 I will be giving a talk at the Universidad Mayor de San Andres in La Paz, Bolivia. 19.00 hrs in the Anthropology Library. Open to the Public!
6.2017 Heyworth Public Library becomes first public library (joining 19 academic libraries) in the country to acquire Social Media in Northern Chile.
4.2017 Talk at Loyola University Chicago's Student Anthropology Society Seminar Series on April 27th at 4pm. My talk is titled Global Cholas: Reworking Authenticity and Indigeneity in Bolivian Lucha Libre.
3.2017 Talk titled "Belaboring Masculinity with Social Media Memes: The Copper-mining Region of Northern Chile" on the panel "A Cross-cultural Examination of Intersectional Race, Gender, and Sexuality Normativities in Online Spaces" at Notre Dame for the Intersectional Inquiries and Collaborative Action: Gender and Race Conference. March 3 at 11am.
11.2016 American Anthropological Association Conference panel on "The Value of Social Media" with Heather Horst, Tom McDonald, and Daniel Miller (among others) in Minneapolis, MN.
10.2016 My article, "Kiss with a fist: The chola’s humor and humiliation in Bolivian lucha libre" is now out in the Journal of Language and Sexuality special issue on Transnational discourses of peripheral sexualities in the Hispanic world.
09.2016 Lucha Libre seminar (via Skype) with Heather Levi at University of Maryland's Latin American Studies Center on Lucha Libre
06.2016 Social Media in Northern Chile is now available via UCL Press!
05.2016 Talk at the Villarica campus of Universidad Católica on 12 May on Digital Anthropology in Alto Hospicio (sala CEDEl)
03.2016 Official launch of the Why We Post Website, first three books of the Why We Post Book Series and the Online Course (in English as well as 8 Other Languages!).
10.2015 Presentation on December 16 at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in the conference, Memory, Conflict, and Coexistence: Interculturality and Decolonization in Latin America and the World / Memoria, conflicto y coexistencia: Interculturalidad y descolonización en América Latina y el mundo
09.2015 My chapter, UnBoliviable Bouts: Gender and Essentialisation of Bolivia's Cholitas Luchadoras, is now out in the edited book, Global Perspectives on Women in Combat Sports.
03.2015 See my article, Global Cholas: Reworking Tradition and Modernity inBolivian Lucha Libre, the most read article of 2014 in the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. It's also now reprinted in Open Anthropology, AAA's new Open Access online journal.
