Sarah Richardson

  1. Teaching Assistant Professor – Career
Email Addresssarah.l.richardson@wsu.edu
LocationCollege Hall 376

Biography

Background

Sociocultural and linguistic anthropology
PhD, George Washington University

Research Interests

State violence and impunity; human rights; critical humanitarianism; materiality and visuality; sensemaking; politics of memory, death, and mourning; gender; political ecology; ethnography; semiotics; multimodal methods;  Colombia; Latin America; Pueblo Gunadule; US empire.

Selected publications

  • 2024        Wagner, Sarah E., Maria Alexandra Lopez-Cerquera, and Sarah L. Richardson. “Techno-Scientific Truth-Making: Forensic Science and Inventions of Repair.” In The Oxford Handbook of Transitional Justice, edited by Jens Meierhenrich, Alexander Laban Hinton, and Lawrence Douglas. Oxford University Press.
  • 2025    In press. Feldman, Ilana, and Sarah L. Richardson. “Life-Making Under Humanitarian Law.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 21.
  • 2025     Bell, Joshua A., Candace Greene, and Sarah L. Richardson. “Object-Based Teaching and Learning in the University with Anthropological Museum Collections.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology,Lee Baker, editor. Oxford University Press.
  • 2026 Ngô, Tâm T. T., Sarah L. Richardson, Annika Scheming, and Sarah E. Wagner. “Not By Grief Alone: Mothers of the Missing and Disappeared.” In The Gender of Absence: Women Who Are Missing, edited by Liz Barnard, Sara Huston, Andreas Kleiser, and Kevin Sullivan. Second Global Report on Missing Persons. International Commission on Missing Persons and University of California Press.

Book chapters

  • In press  Richardson, Sarah L. “Regenerative Grammars: Cuerpos Gramaticales Against Impunity.” In The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Death, edited by Sarah L. Richardson, Sarah E. Wagner, and Ruth E. Toulson. Cambridge University Press.

Books

  • In press.   Richardson, Sarah L., Sarah E. Wagner, and Ruth E. Toulson, eds. The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Death. Cambridge University Press.

Accepted

  • Pending revisions. Richardson, Sarah L. “Extensive but Partial: Investigating Absence within NMNH’s Gunadule Molagana Collection.” In Putting Theory & Things Together: Working with Museum Collections, edited by Joshua A. Bell and Sarah L. Richardson. Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press.