Dr. Tricia Redeker Hepner earned her PhD in Anthropology and a Certificate in African Studies from Michigan State University. She is a political and legal anthropologist with a regional focus on Northeast Africa and the Great Lakes Region of Eastern Africa, and thematic interests in migration and displacement, transnationalism, human rights, transitional justice, militarism, and conflict and peace. She collaborates with forensic anthropologists and archaeologists to examine the meanings and impacts of the missing and unidentified dead in post-war Northern Uganda’s post-war transitional justice process and to document improper burials in mass graves and former displacement camps. She has also conducted research in the Horn of Africa and with refugees and asylum seekers from Eritrea/Ethiopia in North America, Europe, and Africa for over twenty-five years. This long-term work has informed her participation in hundreds of asylum and refugee cases, and her testimony has been influential in immigration rulings in the US, Canada, Europe, and Israel. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Social Science Research Council, and the US Fulbright Scholars Program in Germany.
Prior to joining Arizona State University in August 2020, she held positions in the Africana Studies Program and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, where she co-founded and directed the Disasters, Displacement, and Human Rights (DDHR) Program. She has also served in voluntary leadership roles in the American Anthropological Association and on the editorial boards of the African Studies Review and the African Conflict and Peacebuilding Review.
She is Professor of Anthropology and Social Justice and Human Rights and serves as Senior Associate Director of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at ASU.
Relevant Publications:
The following pieces, co-authored with Uganda research team members, represent several of our key findings from our long-term research with Acholi survivors of the civil war. In addition to sharing our ethnographic findings regarding the multiple ways that the spiritual and physical presence of the dead continues to impact the living, we also advance theoretical arguments about the importance of integrating forensic anthropological methods and practice with local cultural contexts, ecologies, and cosmologies. Following our Acholi interlocutors, we also make a case for the centrality of seeking justice for the dead in achieving reconciliation among the living.
Hepner, Tricia Redeker and Dawnie Wolfe Steadman. 2023. “Bedeviling Binaries: An Integrated and Dialectical Approach to Forensic Anthropology in Northern Uganda.” In Anthropology of Violent Death: Theoretical Foundations for Forensic Humanitarian Action, edited by Roberto C. Parra and Douglas H. Ubelaker. West Sussex, UK: Wiley & Sons, Limited. [Online book, no page numbers]
Kim, Jaymelee and Tricia Redeker Hepner. 2019. “Of Justice and the Grave: The Role of the Dead in Post-Conflict Uganda.” International Criminal Law Review 19(5): 1-26.
Hepner, Tricia Redeker, Dawnie Wolfe Steadman, and Julia R. Hanebrink. 2018. “Sowing the Dead: Massacres and the Missing in Northern Uganda.” In Massacres: Bioarchaeological Interpretations of the Human Past: Local, Regional, and Global Perspectives, edited by Cheryl P. Anderson and Debra L. Martin, 136-154. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
The following two pieces represent efforts to integrate the insights from the project in northern Uganda with my research among Eritrean refugees, asylum seekers, and transnational human rights activists.
Hepner, Tricia Redeker and Daniel Rezene Mekonnen. 2022. “Justice Futures: Forensic Investigation and the Potential for Transformation in Eritrea.” Special Edition, “Eritrea’s Uneasy Future,” Modern Africa: Politics, History, and Society 10(1): 117-144.
Hepner, Tricia Redeker. 2020. “At the Boundaries of Life and Death: Notes on Eritrea and Northern Uganda.” African Conflict and Peacebuilding Review 10(1): 127-142.
Burial at homestead, northern Uganda; Improper burial in a farmer's field, northern Uganda; Memorial to massacre victims, northen Uganda.
Photos from northern Uganda
Cemented grave in a former displacement camp, northern Uganda; Tricia Hepner and Jaymelee Kim learn about a massacre event; Locating a cemented grave in a former displacement camp, northern Uganda.
