Amanda Poole is a cultural, environmental, and applied anthropologist. Her fields of specialization include applied ethnography, political ecology, rural and post-conflict development, forced migration and refugee studies, refugee education, and anthropology of the state. She has regional expertise in the Horn of Africa and the Appalachian Region of the United States.
Her recent book, Hosting States and Unsettled Guests: Eritrean Refugees in a Time of Migration Deterrence (Indiana University Press 2024), co-written with Jennifer Riggan, investigates the lived experience of shifts in global refugee policies. Using ethnographic interviews and participant observation with government officials, NGOs, and refugees in three camps in northern Ethiopia and Addis Ababa, Hosting States and Unsettled Guests explores refugee notions of progress, care, hope, and futurity, shifting the focus of refugee studies away from Europe to regions in the Global South to understand the violence of emerging forms of migration deterrence.
She also has regional expertise in Appalachia. She has researched and published on the social dynamics around hydraulic fracturing in Pennsylvania. She regularly leads student community-based research on sustainability issues in Northern Appalachia with support from the Appalachian Collegiate Research Initiative.
She has recently served as a Fulbright specialist, developing and conducting workshops on high-impact teaching practices and curriculum development in applied and environmental anthropology at the Institute of Anthropology and Ecology in Madagascar.
At IUP she teaches classes on cultural, contemporary, applied, and environmental anthropology, Africa, the anthropology of religion, and sociocultural theory. She codirects the departmental internship program and is a faculty member of the IUP Sustainability Studies Program and the Pan-African Studies Program.
Read more about Poole, and find some of her recent articles.