Rebecca Louise Carter is an anthropologist and urban scholar specializing in the intersected study of creativity, kinship and relatedness, the reconfiguration of human value, and processes of radical structural and social change in the United States, Africa, and the African Diaspora. Carter's research focuses on the conditions of vulnerability and violence that impact human dwelling in the urbanized and increasingly partitioned world, tracing in particular the ways in which people inhabit and transform these conditions—where and how they live and what they imagine and do. Carter's work moves, therefore, towards an anthropology of aliveness and progress, examining the revelations, practices, and movements that define humanity in the current and future age.  

Carter's first book, Prayers for the People: Homicide and Humanity in the Crescent City (Chicago 2019) is a historical and ethnographic study of the reimagining of self, city, and society in New Orleans, the “Crescent City.” Set within an African American religious community in the years just after Hurricane Katrina, Carter examines how residents mourn and memorialize the dead, primarily the young black men who are most frequently the victims of homicide. Identifying a centuries-old system of erasure, particularly well illuminated in the wake of the storm, the book makes clear the doubly constituted nature of violence in poor black neighborhoods—with social death and physical death as concurrent realities. Yet Carter directs readers to the frameworks and practices of liberation that constitute the crescent or emergent city, focusing in particular on theologies of sacred humanity formed in and through the Black Church. Inspired by ministers who preach a current and critical vision of a beloved community and guided by grieving mothers who hold birthday parties for the deceased to assert the value and continued relatedness of lost loved ones, Prayers for the People traces the emergence of an old and new African American religious ideal. The book thus identifies a “restorative kinship” by which the faithful work against the denial of black personhood—as well as the violent severing of familial and social bonds—to recover and sustain their families and communities. Centering black women as the vital mediators of this work, Carter positions social and moral awakening alongside the necessary development of a connective politics, with the Black Church as a significant site of urban congregation and transformation. 

Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Humanities/Social Sciences, Brown University, 2016

Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, 2016-2017

Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award, Brown University, 2015

 

Carter teaches courses in social and cultural anthropology, urban anthropology and the built environment, disasters and social-environmental sustainability, ethnographic research methods, and the anthropology of the United States and the circum-Atlantic world.