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 an anthropologist. I use many adjectives to describe the kind of anthropology I work in: sociocultural, linguistic, environmental, historical.

I study cultures, systems of symbols and meanings shared by groups of humans. Much of my work focuses on the effects of climate change on human sociability. 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 recent 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, Haiti and French Guiana, since 2009. I survived the earthquake in Port-au-Prince in January 2010.

Research Interests: social differentiation and distinction; ideology; property and land assessment; climate change; political ecology and human ecology; political economy; connections between minds, bodies, and environments; historical ethnography; the role of historicity in social change; systems of symbols and meanings.

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

Forthcoming    Yarrington, J. “The Poetics of Denial: Epistemic Politics and the Climate Stereotype on Tangier Island, USA.” Signs and Society 14(2). (Accepted 8 February 2026.)

2026    Yarrington, J. “That Sinkin’ Feeling: Environmentally-Induced Distress on a Disappearing Island.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly. http://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70064

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

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

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

Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters

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

Book Reviews

2026    Yarrington, J. Saving the Chesapeake: The History of a Movement, A.S. Ramey. Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. [In progress]

2024    Yarrington, J. Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation, S. Vaughn. Transforming Anthropology 32(1). https://doi.org/10.1086/730089

2013    Yarrington, J. Tectonic Shifts: Haiti Since the Earthquake, M. Schuller and P. Morales, eds., New West Indian Guide (NWIG) 88 (1/2). https://www.jstor.org/stable/24713507

2012    Yarrington, J. Haiti Rising: Haitian History, Culture and the Earthquake of 2010, M. Munro, ed., New West Indian Guide (NWIG) 86 (3/4). https://www.jstor.org/stable/24713430

Technical Reports

2023    Yarrington, J. “Environmental Justice Project Manual for Practitioners: From Idea to Intervention.” Manual for the EJ Policy Clinic, University of Virginia, 2023. https://arizona.app.box.com/file/1299171901986?s=s1upszlqk4op26qnrwkt7avqpq46tezv

2023    Yarrington, J. “Life Lessons: Teaching Water Safety to Address Environmental Injustice and Health Inequity in Norfolk, Virginia.” Report for the EJ Policy Clinic, University of Virginia, 2023. https://arizona.app.box.com/file/1282619150380?s=380mr9usp7a7ote1daqz7b9dtgqkw8r7

Media

2024    Yarrington, J. “Gentrification as Coastal Planning in the Mermaid City.” Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights (Society for Cultural Anthropology), January. Edited by Theo Hilton, Sheehan Moore, and Amelia Moore. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/gentrification-as-coastal-planning-in-the-mermaid-city

2023    Yarrington, J. “Land Trusts May Be Solution to Climate-Driven Housing Squeeze.” The Virginian-Pilot Guest Opinion (Op Ed), 18 February. https://sustainability.virginia.edu/land-trusts-may-be-solution-climate-driven-housing-shortage

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.