Faculty Member Since 2012
Dr. Sara Busdiecker is associate professor of International Studies and director of African Diaspora Studies.
Dr. Busdiecker is a cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary African Diaspora Studies scholar. To date, she has focused much of her research and ethnographic fieldwork on populations at the geographic, scholarly, and activist margins of Afro-Latin America, including those found in contemporary Bolivia and Chile. She has made numerous trips to Bolivia, one of which involved a two-year stay funded by a Fulbright Fellowship in order to carry out research for her dissertation, "We Are Bolivians Too: The Experience and Meaning of Blackness in Bolivia."
Her current work in Bolivia focuses on the role of space / place and cultural performance in experiencing, defining, and mobilizing African descent in what is a majority indigenous and mestizo nation. Her work in Chile is concerned with the nature and trajectory of grassroots organizing among the multiple African descent identity organizations that have emerged in the country’s northernmost region since the year 2000.
In addition to sharing her research through publications (see Select Publications tab), Dr. Busdiecker also regularly presents at national and international conferences in African diaspora and black studies, anthropology, Latin American studies, and Afro-Latin studies, including those held by the Association for the Study of the Worldwide Diaspora (ASWAD), the Collegium for African American Research (CAAR), the National Council of Black Studies (NCBS), the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), among others.
In 2009-10, Dr. Busdiecker took a yearlong leave from her faculty position in order to serve as Regional Coordinator for the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) Andean Project to Promote Afro-descendant Human Rights in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. In that capacity, she worked with Afro-Andean activists and community leaders and U.N. officials to develop and disseminate educational materials relating to human rights, and to organize a human rights conference for representatives of various Afro-descendant communities and organizations in each of the three countries as well as a regional human rights training workshop, held in Lima, Peru, for Afro-descendant leaders from each of the three countries.
Video footage related to the project can be found at:
Dr. Busdiecker was awarded two grants to fund research abroad during the 2018-19 academic year.
Her project “Afro-Chilean Activisms: (Re)Claiming Ancestry and (Re)Asserting Belonging at the Borders of Nation and Diaspora” is supported by a Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund Grant in fall 2018. Her project “Intimate Transformation: (Re)Negotiating Race in South Africa’s Shifting Post-Apartheid Kinscape” is supported by a UNCF/Mellon Faculty Residency Program Fellowship in spring 2019.
Before coming to Spelman, Dr. Busdiecker taught a variety of courses at the University of a Michigan as a graduate student instructor, at the University of Notre Dame as a visiting and postdoctoral fellow, and at Texas A & M University as a jointly appointed faculty member in the Department of Anthropology and the Africana Studies Program. At Spelman, she regularly teaches sections of the College’s signature African Diaspora and the World course (ADW 111/112).
Among the other courses she teaches are Activism in Afro-Latin America (ADS 300) and Peoples and Cultures of the Global African Diaspora (ADS 320), each of which was awarded a Course Development Grant for Globalizing the Curriculum by Spelman’s Gordon Zeto Center for Global Education.
The global African diaspora; race, ethnicity, nation, and diaspora; grassroots organizing, activism, and social movements; performance; place, space, and identity; writing and representing identity and experience; ethnography; Latin America; Afro Latin America; Bolivia; Chile; family and child adoption in post-apartheid South Africa.
Busdiecker, Sara. 2023. "Afro-Bolivian Pasts and Presents in Scholarship." In Handbook of Afro-Latin American Studies, Bernd Reiter and John Anton Sanchez, eds. New York: Routledge.
Busdiecker, Sara. 2020. “Lo que importa: las vidas negras, el asesinato de George Floyd, y la abolición de la supremacía blanca de una vez por todas.” D’Cimarrón: Revista de la Diaspora Afrodescendiente 10. CEDET: Peru.
Busdiecker, Sara. 2019. "The promises and limits of Bolivia’s anti-racism law for Afro-Bolivians: tundiqui, the National Afro-Bolivian Council, and the battle against blackface." Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 14(3).
Busdiecker, Sara. 2019. Prólogo (Foreword). In Ganyingo: Voces y Espiritualidad Afroboliviana by Martin Miguel Ballivián. La Paz, Bolivia: Ediciones Serrano.
Busdiecker, Sara. 2019. "Crowning Afro-descendant Memory and Visibility in an Indian / Mestizo Country: Bolivia’s Black King as Tradition, Symbol, Strategy, and Spectacle." Transition Magazine 127, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University and Indiana University Press.
Busdiecker, Sara. 2018. "Redrawing Borders of Belonging in a Narrow Nation: Afro-Chilean Activism at the Hinterlands of Afro-Latin America." In Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles: Critical Perspectives on Blackness, Belonging and Civil Rights, Violet Showers Johnson, Gundolf Graml, Patricia Williams Lessane, eds. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Busdiecker, Sara. 2016. Biographical entries: Juan Carlos Ballivián; Angelica Pinedo; Bonifacio Pinedo; Julio Pinedo; Rolando Pinedo; Mónica Rey; Uchicho. In Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Franklin W. Knight, and Steven J. Niven, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Busdiecker, Sara. 2011. "Researching While Black: Interrogating and Navigating Belonging at the Margins of the African Diaspora." In Black Subjects in Africa and its Diasporas: Race and Gender in Research and Writing, Benjamin Talton and Quincy Mills, eds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Busdiecker, Sara. 2010. "The Emergence and Evolving Character of Afro-Bolivian Mobilization – From the Performative to the Political." In New Social Movements in the African Diaspora: Challenging Global Apartheid, Leith Mullings, ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Busdiecker, Sara. 2009. "Where Blackness Resides: Afro-Bolivians and the Spatializing and Racializing of the African Diaspora." Radical History Review 103:105-116.