Allison Kendra is the first Director of Program Development and Education at CIFAS and an instructor in the Comitas Field School. They received their PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University in 2021. They are a sociocultural anthropologist who critically studies the state, inequality, and the environment in the Americas. As a community-oriented educator and researcher, they are committed to engaged teaching, mentorship, scholarship, and service.
In their teaching and research, they analyze how state and international interventions are deployed, their impacts on people’s everyday lives, and their roles in shaping racialized and gendered inequalities. Their first book-length project, Wars on Drugs and Uprisings: The Maintenance of Everyday Intervention in Peru, examines how racialized and gendered inequalities are involved in the implementation and lived experience of protracted war. This research is based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork in Peru’s Huallaga Valley, where for decades the governments of the United States and Peru have conducted militarized and development-based interventions that combine the war on drug crop production with the war on terror. These interventions are premised on the Huallaga as a site of conflict between Shining Path insurgents, civilians, and the state in Peru’s internal war in the 1980s and ‘90s, and as a former global leader in the production of coca, the leaf crop used to make cocaine. Rather than framing these circumstances as episodic periods of violence and intervention, Allison’s research highlights the ongoing colonial legacies of race, class, and gender that are engrained in these proceedings. Working across scales, this research presents an analysis of the local, national and international politics of these interventions and their impacts on everyday life, inequality, and the environment.
Allison’s teaching and research build on approaches and methodologies in sociocultural anthropology, including multimodal forms of research and engagement, informed by their interdisciplinary background and teaching in the sciences and arts. They have had the opportunity to work across many departments and institutions, developing and teaching over 30 core and elective courses in Anthropology, Sociology, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Race and Ethnicity Studies. They have also mentored and developed programming with many Centers for Teaching and Learning. Their 15 years of professional experience as an educator builds on a lifelong commitment to multidirectional and collective learning towards action.
Renzo Taddei is the Director of the CIFAS Field School in Ethnographic Methods. Under Lambros Comitas’s supervision, he earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University in 2005, with a dissertation on the traditional environmental knowledge about the atmosphere and weather of peasants in rural Northeast Brazil and its tense relationship with scientific meteorology, on the one hand, and local politics, on the other. The doctoral dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft Prize at Columbia University. With Comitas, he created the CIFAS Summer School in Ethnographic Methods in 2003.
He has done fieldwork in Brazil, Uruguay, and the U.S. on topics related to the interface between scientific and traditional and Indigenous environmental knowledge. Previously, he worked in Argentina on youth violence and soccer fandom.
Dr. Taddei has been a visiting professor at Yale University, Duke University, and the University of the Republic in Uruguay. Currently, he is a tenured professor at the Federal University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, where he teaches anthropology and science and technology studies. Between 2005 and 2014, he was a research associate and later principal investigator at the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED) at Columbia University. From 2020 to 2024, he has served on one of the standing committees of the World Meteorological Organization. He is currently one of the lead authors of the upcoming report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Renzo was born and raised in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Before becoming an anthropologist, he received a B.Sc. degree in Industrial Engineering (1995) and a Master’s degree in Education (2000) from the University of Sao Paulo. He also had a short experience as a professional photographer between 1998 and 2000.
In 2017, he published Meteorologists and Rain Prophets: Knowledge, Practices, and Politics of the Atmosphere (Terceiro Nome publishers, in Portuguese). He co-organized two books: After the Rains Didn’t Come (2010, published by Funceme and CIFAS) and The Anthropocene: On Modes of Composing Worlds (2022, Fino Traço publishers), both in Portuguese. His work has appeared in journals such as American Anthropologist, Nature Climate Change, Weather Climate and Society, Climatic Change, Climate Services, Environmental Science and Policy, Energy Research and Social Science, Latin American Research Review, and Social Semiotics.
Dellica King is the Administrative Coordinator at CIFAS, where she supports the institute’s operations, communications, and collaborative initiatives. She brings over a decade of experience working across sectors, including research, project coordination, trust administration, interviewing, marketing, and community engagement. Her professional background reflects a strong commitment to community-informed work, collaborative problem-solving, and organizational care.
Dellica holds a BA in Philosophy from St. Thomas University and a diploma in Fibre Technologies from the Kootenay School of the Arts. Her training in philosophy—particularly in ethics, logic, and critical inquiry—provides a strong foundation for her engagement with anthropological approaches to social complexity and human relations. She has worked on a range of projects with Indigenous organizations, nonprofits, and governments, with a focus on facilitating strategic planning, supporting program development, and building inclusive processes rooted in mutual respect. At CIFAS, she ensures smooth day-to-day coordination and communication across teams and partners, contributing to the institute’s overall operational effectiveness and organizational coherence.
