Dr. Lola Loustaunau will deliver the keynote address for the Anthropology 690 Student Conference: Ethnographic Approaches to Migration on Wednesday, April 29. The two‑day, end‑of‑semester conference is organized by Dr. Leonie Schulte and graduate students as part of Dr. Schulte’s Anthropology 690 course.
Dr. Loustaunau’s keynote, Trabajando Juntos: Community-Based Research with Immigrant Workers Across the Food System, draws on several years of community‑based research with immigrant workers who process, pack, and harvest food in the Pacific Northwest and Wisconsin. Her talk offers a behind‑the‑scenes look at what collaborative research looks like in practice—along with the tensions that emerge when working closely with worker communities while navigating the demands of academic research and publication.
Across three interconnected projects—Latina apple packers organizing during COVID, research on the endemic precarity shaping food processing workers’ lives, and current fieldwork with the Wisconsin Farmworkers Coalition—Dr. Loustaunau examines how researchers can build knowledge genuinely with and for workers while still holding onto core research questions. Central to her keynote is a reflection on how centering workers’ own knowledge reshapes both research findings and research methods, challenging traditional academic approaches to ethnography, migration, and labor.
The Anthropology 690 Student Conference will take place across two days and feature graduate student presentations of 15‑minute, conference‑style papers based on original research conducted over the semester. Together, the student presentations and Dr. Loustaunau’s keynote highlight the role of engaged, community‑based scholarship in advancing ethnographic approaches to migration.