Josh Babcock (he/him/his) is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brown University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2022. His research focuses on colonial images and decolonial futures as they get made across media, sites, and scales. Josh’s current book research project, Image and the Total Utopia: Desiring Distinction in Multilingual, Multiracial Singapore, is about the social lives of totalizing colonial images that shape aspirations for racial and linguistic belonging in the modern world. It is also about the desires that not only sustain investments in totalizing colonial images but also exceed and perpetually threaten to undo them.
His emerging work examines images of the state and (liberal) democracy in the U.S. and Southeast Asia; images of indigeneity among 19th-century migrants from British Malaya to New Orleans; and settler-colonial romances centered on the ghost town of Singapore, Michigan. He is also working on a project about the Singapore Sling as a contested emblem of uniquely Singaporean identity. Josh’s work has appeared in American Anthropologist, the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Signs and Society, Language & Communication, Visual Anthropology Review, Society and Space, and the Journal of Southeast Asian Media Studies. Josh also publishes as a member of the editing and authorial collective, South/South Movement. His work has been supported by Fulbright and the Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund, among others. He is committed to inclusive, antiracist, and culturally sustaining pedagogy in and outside the classroom. His broader teaching and research interests include sociocultural and linguistic anthropology; raciolinguistics; social movements; desire, gender, and sexuality; inter-colonial histories and decolonial practice; verbal art and performance; science, technology, and society (STS); critical placemaking; and collaborative public pedagogies.
