Assistant Professor

About

  • Website

    ORCID Profile

  • Role

    Faculty

  • Position

    • Assistant Professor

  • Concentration

    • Cultural Anthropology

  • Department

    • Anthropology and Geography

  • Education

    • B.A., College of William & Mary, 2010
    • M.A., University of Arizona, 2014
    • Ph.D., University of Arizona, 2020
    • Postdoc, University of Virginia, 2021-2023

  • Curriculum Vitae:

Biography

On research leave, Jan.-Aug. 2026. I will not be checking emails frequently. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

I am a cultural and linguistic anthropologist. I study the effects of climate change on human societies.

I research social, cultural, and economic liabilities, including for practices of ownership, tenancy, and loss of land and houses, as well as effects for kinship, role succession, and social stratification generally.

My work centers on Tangier Island, Virginia, as well as other sites in southeastern and central mainland Virginia. I have also been working in the Francophone Caribbean since 2009.

Research Interests: social differentiation and distinction, property and land assessment, climate change, political ecology, political economy, health and well-being, historical ethnography, and the role of historicity in social change.

Research Methods: ethnographic methods (interviewing, participant-observation, residential fieldwork), qual/quant mixed methods, focus groups and community engagement workshops, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, semiotics, statistical measures, large digital datasets, and historical ethnography (archival, oral-historical, and comparative).

Languages: English, French, Haitian Creole

My Mentoring Philosophy

I prioritize treating my advisees as complete people, with histories, experiences, hopes, fears, and unique career goals.
My advisees can expect me to ask questions as we move through projects, courses, and their degree pathway together.
I ask my students for willingness to read, inquire, learn, and grow -- building both confidence and humility about the cutting edge of our science and the state of art in our discipline.
I am happy to work with students who want to pursue academic and nonacademic career pathways.
My graduate advisees prepare an Individual Development Plan (IDP), which is a living document that helps us both articulate and meet goals.

Publications

Numerous works in various stages of review, revision, and preparation.

Forthcoming. Yarrington, J. "That Sinkin’ Feeling: Environmentally-Induced Distress on a Disappearing Island." Accepted at Medical Anthropology Quarterly on 14 Jan 2026.

2025. Yarrington, J. "Poetics and Performance: Fanfa Bands and the Semiotic Landscape in Northern Haiti." Signs and Society 13(2). https://doi.org/10.1017/sas.2024.9

2024. Yarrington, J. "Channel Effects: The Political Afterlife of Maintenance Dredging on Tangier Island, Virginia, USA." Human Ecology 52(4): 905-921. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-024-00527-z

2024. Yarrington, J. "Gentrification as coastal planning in the Mermaid City." Theorizing the Contemporary, Coastal Futures series, ed. S. Moore, T. Hilton, A. Moore. https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/gentrification-as-coastal-planning-in-the-mermaid-city

2023. Yarrington, J. "Opinion: Land trusts may help solve climate-driving housing squeeze." Virginian-Pilot. https://www.pilotonline.com/2023/02/18/opinion-land-trusts-may-help-solve-climate-driven-housing-squeeze/

2022. Yarrington, J. "Fighting Integration with Fire: a history of urban renewal, housing integration, and violence in a southern American city." ArcGIS StoryMap created as director of the Environmental Justice Policy Clinic at the Repair Lab, Karsh Institute for Democracy, University of Virginia. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/f7e5cc93aee24dd48c78f08c3a5f39b2

2020. Yarrington, J. "A Time to Every Purpose: Kinship, Privilege, and Succession on a Disappearing Island." Doctoral dissertation, Anthropology, University of Arizona. https://repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/645747 

2018. Yarrington, J. "Sucre Indigène and Sucre Colonial: Reconsidering the Splitting of the French National Sugar Market, 1800-1860." Economic Anthropology 5(1): 20-31. https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12099

2018. Yarrington, J. "Producing the Periphery." In Locating Guyane eds. C. MacLeod and S. Wood. Liverpool University Press, 91-104. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv8j65s

2014. Yarrington, J. "Droits and Frontières: Sugar and the Edge of France, 1800-1860." Master's Thesis, Anthropology, University of Arizona. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2014.06.001

2014. Yarrington, J. "Messages from my Father-in-Law: Indexing Membership and Proximity in Long-Distance Voicemails." Language and Communication 38: 24-33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2014.06.001

Courses

  • Human Ecology (ANTH 330)

    Exploring socio-ecological systems, how they change, and how to study them. Units include acoustic ecology, political ecology, and the nonhuman. Interdisciplinary readings, including full ethnographic monographs.

  • Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (ANTH 100)

    Human societies and their cultural setting; variation in beliefs, social customs, and technologies; human differences in anthropological terms.

  • Cultures and the Global System (ANTH 200)

    This course introduces students to anthropological perspectives on the causes and consequences of globalization. The course combines abstract theorization with concrete descriptions and analysis of people’s everyday lives—i.e., ethnography—to critically examine the phenomenon of globalization in terms of social, economic, political, and environmental processes. Themes include: world systems; the production of culture; culture and social change; socioeconomic development; ethnicity and identity formation; religion; gender; migration; and debates about citizenship, governance, and human rights.

  • Methods in Cultural Anthropology (ANTH 441)

    Anthropologists and other social scientists produce scientific knowledge by connecting sociocultural theory and philosophy to methods of gathering information about everyday life, “on-the-ground.” The logic connecting theory to method is called a methodology. The ways that information or data is observed or produced from everyday life are called methods. This is a course that surveys field methods in Cultural Anthropology.

  • Ethnographic Discourse Analysis (ANTH 507)

    A graduate-level course focusing on analyzing discourse using methodologies from the subfields of linguistic anthropology and cultural anthropology. The objective of the course is to explore analytic constructs to understand discourse found “in the wild” (in the field) to link it to larger sociocultural and/or anthropological-linguistic theoretical projects.