09/29/2026
JOIN US and the Program in Science and Technology Studies for a Brown Bag Talk “Taking Dinosaurs Off The Pedestal: An Anthropologist Explores Vertebrate Paleontology in the United States Today” with Elana Shever, Professor of Anthropology, Colgate University.
🕤 Oct. 2 (Friday), 12 pm
📍 Sewall 570 & Zoom
🔗 Register for Zoom here: https://riceuniversity.zoom.us/meeting/register/vFVn8QpaRlK5Nu4DfyNLrA?_x_zm_rtaid=VRIfip1rR2iJ2mp_LrumIQ.1790695914494.c253de5e6d5ec3b88d77cecd6fe4d2b6&_x_zm_rhtaid=934 #/registration
Cultural Anthropologist Elana Shever will share insights into the role that vertebrate paleontology plays in the contemporary United States, and the meanings we attach to dinosaur fossils, which she gained from 5 years of shadowing paleontologists at work, joining museum tours, exploring paleontology parks, and trying her hand at fossil excavation and preparation, including pedestalling a dinosaur femur. This talk re-thinks the popular conception of dinosaurs as vicious beasts and explores other ways of relating to prehistoric animals.
Elana Shever is a cultural anthropologist with interests in natural resources and materiality; science, technology and corporations in society; neoliberalism; globalization; and capitalism. She has conducted research in Argentina, Colombia, and the United States.
Dr. Shever's first book, Resources for Reform: Oil and Neoliberalism in Argentina (Stanford University Press, 2012) explores how people’s lives intersect with the increasingly globalized and concentrated oil industry through a close look at Argentina’s experiment with privatizing its national oil company in the name of neoliberal reform. Examining Argentina’s conversion of its state-controlled oil market to a private market, the book reveals interconnections between large-scale transformations in society and small-scale shifts in everyday practice, intimate relationships, and identity. It offers a window into the experiences of middle-class oil workers and their families, impoverished residents of shanty settlements bordering refineries, and affluent employees of transnational corporations as they struggle with rapid changes in the global economy, their country, and their lives. Resources for Reform reverberates far beyond the Argentine oil fields and offers a fresh approach to the critical study of neoliberalism, kinship, citizenship, and corporations.
This study has led to Dr. Shever's continued involvement in developing the critical anthropology of corporations. She wrote a review of the scholarship on transnational and multinational corporations for the International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. She is also the author of the chapter "Corporations" in The Anthropology of Resource Extraction.
Dr. Shever's latest book is Making Our Beasts: Paleontology in the United States (University of California Press, forthcoming December 2025). It is an ethnography of science-in-action that uses a familiar topic—dinosaurs—to lead readers to understand science and its objects in new ways. Through fieldwork and interviews conducted at laboratories, dig sites, museums, and entertainment sites, Elana Shever explores vertebrate paleontology in the United States, showing how the practices of scientists and the materiality of fossils together shape the social world and also are shaped by it. The book foregrounds elements of scientific inquiry that have been sidelined: affect, touch, material agency, and the labor of volunteers, technicians, and other nonscientists. It also reveals how paleontology continues to be structured by race, gender, and colonialism.
Dr. Shever's scholarship has been published in American Ethnologist, Anthropological Quarterly, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, among other venues.
