L. June Bloch

Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Pronouns: they/she

EDUCATION

  • PhD - University of Virginia - Anthropology - 2018
  • MA - University of Virginia  - Anthropology - 2014
  • BA - New College of Florida - Anthropology/Gender Studies - 2011

RESEARCH INTERESTS

  • Indigenous landscapes
  • Anti-transgender legislation
  • Decolonial and community-based research methods
  • Archaeological ethnography
  • Environmental justice
  • Social memory

My work on these diverse issues is united by underlying questions about power and violence, landscape and materiality, the production of knowledge, and how people imagine ethically desirable futures.  

My first project recenters the study of earthwork mound landscapes built across eastern North America since circa 5500 BP from the perspectives of living Indigenous ways of knowing and being. This community-based project works in collaboration with members of Pvlvcekolv, a small Native American community whose members claim Mvskoke (Creek) identity. I argue that mounds are animate, sentient beings in their own right who enroll descendants into circulations of physically small or intangible but spiritually and emotionally heavy things: A story, a pinch of soil, a glass bead, or a dream given by an ancestor. These material and affective entanglements generate nonlinear temporalities and specifically Indigenous futures, which exceed colonial preconceptions that mounds are abandoned sites fixed in bounded chronological periods within a terminal, prehistoric past. My most recent work in this area shifts focus to the politics of who claims Indigenous identity and how these dynamics complicate decolonial and community-based participatory research methods.

I have conducted research on the Defend the Weelaunee Forest movement, which protests the building of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, a multi-million-dollar police facility dubbed “Cop City.” This project asks how people envision ethically desirable futures at the intersections of environmental justice, abolitionism, and Indigenous relations to land. Of particular interest is the development of land-based spiritualities, the tensions inherent in anti-racist and anti-colonial coalition building, and the role of ritualized grief in shaping protest.

My scholarship also applies international law on genocide to the wave of anti-transgender laws sweeping across the US. While many people think of genocide purely in terms of the outright killing of populations, the UN framework also encompasses more subtle mechanisms such as inflicting of conditions calculated to bring about the destruction of a group. Transgender youth are amongst the highest risk groups in the US for suicide and gender affirming care is one of the three most effective evidence-based interventions (along with family and social acceptance) for reducing suicidality. As such, legal restrictions of gender affirming care are genocidal in that they create a statistically predictable death toll, particularly among youth. However, UN definitions arbitrarily restrict genocide law to national, ethnic, racial, and religious groups—a framing that responds 1950s understandings of the Holocaust that erased the systemic killing of LGBTQ+ peoples in Nazi Germany.

My book project integrates these topics—as well as my experience as an anti-racist activist in the 2017 Charlottesville riots—by developing an analytic for investigating the social production of violence and care through concepts of recognition, abandonment, and sentience. This framework centers on questions of who and what is believed to have the capacity to feel pain and pleasure. I ask how the recognition, misrecognition, and non-recognition of others—including the terms and limits in which recognition is extended by dominant institutions—pattern acts of violence and abandonment. 

COURSES TAUGHT

  • Introduction to Archaeology 
  • Perspectives on Deep Histories of Native North America

PUBLICATIONS

  • In Press  “Contested Identity Claims in Community-Based Research: Indigenous Knowledge when Sovereignty is a Scarce Resource.” Current Anthropology.
  • 2024    “Anti-Trans Laws, the UN Genocide Convention and the Legal Calculation of Acceptable Suicide Rates.” Anthropology Now 15 (2-3): 146-161
  • 2021    “No Gods, No Masters: Indigenous Environmental Knowledge as a Paradigm for the Interpretation of Mississippian Art.” Southeastern Archaeology 40 (4): 248-265.
  • 2020    “Animate Earth, Settler Ruins: Mound Landscapes and Decolonial Futures in the Native South.” Cultural Anthropology 35 (4): 516-545.
  • 2020    “Academic Precarity and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Utopian Hope in a Moment of Crisis.” Anthropology Now 12 (1): 76-83.
  • 2019    “Past as Prophecy: Indigenous Diplomacies Beyond Liberal Settler Regimes of Recognition, as Told in Shell.” Special issue: “Interfaith, Intercultural, International.” Religions 10 (9): 510.
  • 2019    “Oral Traditions and Mounds, Owls and Movement: An Archaeological Ethnography of Multispecies Embodiments and Everyday Life at Poverty Point.” Journal of Social Archaeology 19 (3): 356–378.
  • 2018    "Tales of Esnesv: Indigenous Oral Traditions about Trader-Diplomats in Ancient Southeastern North America.” American Anthropologist 120 (4): 781-794.
  • 2017    (editor, with Macario Garcia) Songs of a Secret Country: The Stephen and Agatha Luczo Gift. Charlottesville, VA: Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia (second author). (Museum catalog).
  • 2014    “The Unthinkable and the Unseen: Community Archaeology and Decolonizing Social Imagination at Okeeheepkee, or the Lake Jackson Site.” Archaeologies 10 (1): 70–106.