Education

Ph.D. Anthropology (Women’s Studies), University of California, Santa Cruz, 2003

M.A. Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1996

B.A. World Arts and Cultures (Anthropology), University of California, Los Angeles, 1993

Research

My work brings ethnographic and feminist approaches to understanding the spatial and cultural dynamics of contemporary transnational processes, particularly as these pertain to people's lives in Japan, the Philippines, and the United States.

Selected Publications

• In Progress.  The Banality of Good: Rights, Bureaucracy, and Human Trafficking to Japan, book manuscript
• Faier, Lieba and Lisa Rofel. 2014. “The Ethnography of Encounters.”  Annual Review of Anthropology 43(1): 363-377
• Faier, Lieba. 2013. “Everyday Articulations of Prostitution.” Gender, Place and Culture 21(8): 979-995
• Faier, Lieba. 2013. “Affective investments in the Manila region: Filipina migrants in rural Japan and transnational urban development in the Philippines.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38 376–390. (available online: doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00533.x).
• Faier, Lieba. 2011 “Chapter 12: The Worldly Work of Writing Social Geography” in A Companion to Social Geography, Paul Cloke, Vincent Del Casino, Ruth Panelli, and Mary Thomas, eds., Wiley-Blackwell, 198-213.
• Faier, Lieba. 2011 “Fungi, Trees, People, Nematodes, Beetles, and Weather: Ecologies of Vulnerability and Ecologies of Negotiation in Matsutake Commodity Exchange.” Environment and Planning A. (Special issue on “Disarticulations in Commodity Chains,” guest edited by Jennifer Bair and Marion Werner) 43(5): 1079-1097. (PDF)
• Faier, Lieba. 2009. Intimate Encounters: Filipina Women and the Remaking of Rural Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• The Matsutake Worlds Research Group (Tim Choy, Lieba Faier, Michael Hathaway, Miyako Inoue, Shiho Satsuka, and Anna Tsing). 2009. “A New Form of Collaboration in Cultural Anthropology: Matsutake Worlds.” American Ethnologist 36(2): 380-403. (PDF)
• The Matsutake Worlds Research Group (Tim Choy, Lieba Faier, Michael Hathaway, Miyako Inoue, Shiho Satsuka, and Anna Tsing). 2009. “Strong collaboration as method for multisited ethnography: on mycorrhizal relations” in Multi-sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Research, Anthony Mark Falzon, ed., Ashgate Press, 197-214.
• Faier, Lieba. 2008. “Runaway Stories: The Underground Micromovements of Filipina ‘Oyomesan’ in Rural Japan.” Cultural Anthropology 23(4): 630-659. (PDF)
• Faier, Lieba. 2007. “Filipina Migrants in Rural Japan and their Professions of Love.” American Ethnologist 34(1): 148-162. (PDF)

Grants & Awards

(SELECTED)

ACLS Fellowship, the American Council of Learned Societies, 2017-2018

Howard Fellowship, the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation at Brown University, 2017-2018

Hellman Fellowship, 2011-2012

Toyota Foundation Grant (with Tim Choy, Michael Hathaway, Miyako Inoue, Shiho Satsuka, and Anna Tsing for the Matsutake Worlds Research Group), 2007-2009

SSRC Abe Fellowship, 2006-2008

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, Cornell University, The Society for the Humanities and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, 2004-2005

Postdoctoral Visiting Research Fellowship, University of California, San Diego, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, 2003-2004

Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Grant, 2000

Fulbright Fellowship (Japan), 1998-2000

Summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and College Honors, University of California, Los Angeles, 1993

Graduate Students

Timur Hammond, Assistant Professor of Geography, Syracuse University