Jennifer Patico

Jennifer Patico is a sociocultural anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic research in both Russia and the United States. Her work centers on how people in urban, capitalist settings use both material commodities and abstracted notions of value and sentiment to understand their social worlds and selves. Her 2008 book, Consumption and Social Change in a Post-Soviet Middle Class (Stanford University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press), examined how consumers who were once part of a Soviet professional middle class struggled to get along in a newly marketized – and often disheartening – Russian economy. Specifically, Patico details how St. Petersburg schoolteachers experienced radical consumer shifts and, in the process, came to question and to reimagine their own places in national and global hierarchies of value. Subsequently, she investigated the highly contested phenomenon of Russian-American internet matchmaking, a project for which she conducted fieldwork in St. Petersburg and U.S. cities as well as online. Drawing upon interviews and participant observation in all of these communities, she challenged assumptions frequently made about the industry and its clients by U.S. media and policy-makers, exploring instead the narratives of both female and male participants as well as industry advocates and critics to illuminate conflicting ideologies about gender, wealth, and inequality that emerge such debates.

More recently, Patico has focused her research in the United States and returned to the topic of consumption with a study of children’s food and parenting ideologies in urban Atlanta. Food for children has been cast in popular U.S. discourse as a “crisis” with various proposed solutions, and concern about children’s nutrition is doubly intense since it draws both upon Americans’ widespread tendency to imbue eating with moral meanings and on the anxieties surrounding the near-sacralized work of childrearing in the contemporary United States. Children’s food thus offers a valuable opportunity to examine U.S standards for parental care and how these are entangled with neoliberal understandings of selfhood, success, and social justice. Funded by the National Science Foundation, Patico’s latest project examines how, in a gentrifying, class- and race-diverse neighborhood, people constructed (and sometimes elided) social differences in the conversations and practices that surrounded children’s food – even as most respondents, who were part of a relatively left-leaning, urban middle class, explicitly valued diversity and social inclusion. If adults sought to direct their children towards proper forms of selfhood – ways of being healthy, self-regulating, and well-comported – through practices of food socialization and “engaged” parenting, Patico’s study also examines how these everyday material and consumer practices mediated and reinforced social inequalities in an urban community. The Trouble with Snack Time: Children’s Food and the Politics of Parenting will be released by NYU Press in August 2020.

At Georgia State, Patico teaches courses in anthropological theory, ethnographic methods, consumption and material culture, and gender, self and emotion. She is an affiliate of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Institute at GSU and is the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Anthropology.