Laura Eramian

Education

• BA Hons, MA, The University of Western Ontario
• PhD, York University

Research interests

Laura Eramian is a social anthropologist whose work focuses on personhood and everyday relationships of patronage, kinship, friendship, and neighbourliness in situations of violent conflict. She investigates these issues through the everyday social lives of urban dwellers in small town Rwanda. Key questions in her research deal with how personhood and ethnic boundaries are forged in the predicaments of Rwanda’s “post-conflict” moment, how people configure belonging in their social worlds in the absence of key relations lost in the 1994 genocide, and how post-genocide social formations provide insight into the broader quest for modern nationhood in Rwanda.

Dr. Eramian is publishing her doctoral work in a series of journal articles and a book manuscript. Her current and future research projects focus 1) on the political economy and social life of Rwanda’s post-genocide “reconciliation industry” and 2) on urban Rwandans’ unsuccessful entrepreneurial ventures and what those failures mean to them in the context of state and non-state post-genocide development agendas. Dr. Eramian has also embarked on a new collaborative research project on troubled friendships among Halifax residents. The project aims to understand the effects of failed friendships on people’s lives, senses of self, and social belonging.

Selected publications

• 2020. Moving on by settling down? Ambiguities of urban housing and home in post-genocide Rwanda. Housing Studies. Available in Early View: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02673037.2020.1729962
• 2019. Neutral evaluators or testimonial connoisseurs? Valuing and evaluating reconciliation in post-genocide Rwanda. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale.
• 2018. Peaceful Selves: Personhood, Nationhood, and the Post-Conflict Moment in Rwanda. New York: Berghahn Books.
• 2017. “Neither obedient nor resistant: State history as cultural resource in post-genocide Rwanda.” Journal of Modern African Studies. 55(4).
  
• 2017. "Testimony, Disbelief, and Opaque Peace Building in Postgenocide Rwanda." Political and Legal Anthropology Review 40(1): 52-66.
• 2015. "Ethnic Boundaries in Contemporary Rwanda: Fixity, Flexibility, and their Limits." Anthropologica 57(1): 93-104.
• 2014. "Ethnicity without labels?: Ambiguity and excess in “post-ethnic” Rwanda." Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology (70): 96-109.