Matthew Durington, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Tel: 410-704-5256
Website
Bio
I received my B.A. in Humanities specializing in Film, Anthropology and African and African American Studies at the University of Texas in 1994. I completed my M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Temple University in 2003 specializing in urban and visual anthropology. I am proud to be a graduate of one of the few programs dealing with the anthropology of visual communication in the country. I recently completed a post-doctorate at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa in 2004. I arrived at Towson University in the fall of 2004.
I have several research interests that fall under the fields of urban, visual and cultural anthropology respectively. My doctoral thesis, “Discourses of Racialized Moral Panic in a Suburban Community: Teenagers, Heroin and Media in Plano, Texas”, was the result of ethnographic research on a phenomenon of suburban teenage heroin overdose deaths in this suburb from 1998-2000 and various institutional and media responses during this time. Follow up work has studied the lingering effects of media participation by suburban residents and the shifting nature of illicit drugs in the suburb. I consider this study a ‘media ethnography’ and I am currently working on a manuscript based on this fieldwork forthcoming on Duke University Press.
My current research in South Africa explores suburban development and racial identity in the post-Apartheid era. I am focusing on ‘gated community’ development in the suburbs north of Durban having conducted participant-observation in one estate during my post-doctorate. This research has been published as part of a special issue of GeoJournal focusing on gated community development globally.
I am also working with Keyan Tomaselli and students from the CCMS program at the University of KwaZulu-Natal on an ongoing research project exploring issues of San identity and Indigenous rights in the Kalahari. I spent parts of the summers of 2003, 2004 and 2006 conducting participatory video work with the !Xo of Ngwatle in Botswana exploring land and water rights issues. I am currently translating and editing footage from this fieldwork for a project entitled The Hunters Redux.
My ethnographic film work is currently focused on completing a long-term fieldwork project entitled Record Store which is a result of 4 years of video work on youth subcultures and issues of collection/addiction in a Philadelphia record store. I recently screened this at the Sixth Annual Festival of Visual Culture.
I teach courses on a variety of topics at Towson University including Visual Anthropology, Drugs in Global Perspective, The Anthropology of African Media, Moral Panics and Life in the City. I am a faculty member of the African and African American Studies Committee, Cultural Studies Committee, International Studies Committee and Metropolitan Studies Committee in the College of Liberal Arts. I am also a faculty fellows representative for Men's Soccer at Towson. I have also served as the chair of the Towson University AAUP Junior Faculty Committee for 2006-2007.