Lieba Faier
Department of Geography
1255 Bunche Hall
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1524
t: 310.825.3525
f: 310.206.5976
email: lfaier@geog.ucla.edu

EDUCATION

Ph.D. Anthropology (Women’s Studies), University of California, Santa Cruz, 2003
M.A. Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1996
B.A. World Arts and Cultures (Anthropology), University of California, Los Angeles, 1993

SUBFIELDS

Cultural and spatial theory, feminist thought, ethnography, political economy, weather and natural resources, and relations among Japan, Southeast Asia, and the United States.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

My work brings ethnographic and feminist approaches to understanding the spatial and cultural dynamics of contemporary transnational processes, particularly as these pertain to people's lives in Japan, the Philippines, and the United States.

GRANTS

(SELECTED)
Toyota Foundation Grant (with Tim Choy, Michael Hathaway, Miyako Inoue, Shiho Satsuka, and Anna Tsing for the Matsutake Worlds Research Group), 2007-2009

SSRC Abe Fellowship, 2006-2008

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, Cornell University, The Society for the Humanities and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, 2004-2005

Postdoctoral Visiting Research Fellowship, University of California, San Diego, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, 2003-2004

Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Grant, 2000

Fulbright Fellowship (Japan), 1998-2000

Summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and College Honors, University of California, Los Angeles, 1993

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Faier, Lieba. 2012. “Affective investments in the Manila region: Filipina migrants in rural Japan and transnational urban development in the Philippines.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. (“Quick View” publication available online: doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00533.x, in print 2013).

Faier, Lieba. 2011 “Chapter 12: The Worldly Work of Writing Social Geography” in A Companion to Social Geography, Paul Cloke, Vincent Del Casino, Ruth Panelli, and Mary Thomas, eds., Wiley-Blackwell, 198-213.

Faier, Lieba. 2011 “Fungi, Trees, People, Nematodes, Beetles, and Weather: Ecologies of Vulnerability and Ecologies of Negotiation in Matsutake Commodity Exchange.” Environment and Planning A. (Special issue on “Disarticulations in Commodity Chains,” guest edited by Jennifer Bair and Marion Werner) 43(5): 1079-1097.

Faier, Lieba. 2009. Intimate Encounters: Filipina Women and the Remaking of Rural Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press.

The Matsutake Worlds Research Group (Tim Choy, Lieba Faier, Michael Hathaway, Miyako Inoue, Shiho Satsuka, and Anna Tsing). 2009. “A New Form of Collaboration in Cultural Anthropology: Matsutake Worlds.” American Ethnologist 36(2): 380-403.

The Matsutake Worlds Research Group (Tim Choy, Lieba Faier, Michael Hathaway, Miyako Inoue, Shiho Satsuka, and Anna Tsing). 2009. “Strong collaboration as method for multisited ethnography: on mycorrhizal relations” in Multi-sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Research, Anthony Mark Falzon, ed., Ashgate Press, 197-214.

Faier, Lieba. 2008. “Runaway Stories: The Underground Micromovements of Filipina ‘Oyomesan’ in Rural Japan.” Cultural Anthropology 23(4): 630-659.

Faier, Lieba. 2007. “Filipina Migrants in Rural Japan and their Professions of Love.” American Ethnologist 34(1): 148-162.