Deborah Durham

This profile was current as of 2020, when she was part of the on-campus Kellogg community.

Deborah Durham is a cultural anthropologist. She specializes in the study of youth and identity, both in Botswana and worldwide, and she has also studied aging and the middle class in Turkey. Her recent research has focused on complaints voiced around the world about obtaining adulthood and the meaning of adulthood. 

During her visiting fellowship, she will complete a book project that examines how youth in Botswana devise paths to adulthood, addressing the growth of materialism, government projects to develop youth that focus on entrepreneurialism, and intersubjective ideas about selfhood built through sentiment and emotion. She is the recipient of a 2019 American Council of Learned Societies Project Development Grant, which will support her field research in Botswana for the project. 

Durham is a member of the Editorial Collective for Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory and is co-editor of Elusive Adulthoods, The Anthropology of New Maturities (2017; Indiana University Press), with Jacqueline Solway. Durham also co-edited, with Jennifer Cole, two books on youth in the context of globalization: Generations and Globalization: Youth, Age, and Family in the New World Economy (2007, School for Advanced Research Press), and Figuring the Future: Globalization and the Temporalities of Children and Youth (2008, School for Advanced Research Press).