Join us for discussion with Katharine Thompson, Ph.D. on “Labels That Mistranslate Lives: Law Enforcement, Global Aid, and Social Work in Northern Tanzania.” This event is hybrid. Food will be provided for those attending in person!

Katharine Thompson holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Stony Brook University (2022), and serves as an assistant research professor of anthropology of human health at Penn State, affiliated with African Studies and Geography. Thompson is an environmental anthropologist and community-based practitioner working primarily in northern Tanzania. There, she studies how parents make difficult choices in vulnerable and precarious ecosystems. Her work explores how families use both natural resources and social ties to navigate those challenges, and how institutions and public stories can limit people’s agency to do so. Her current research, supported by Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute through Community-Engaged Research, Action, and Partnerships and the Child Maltreatment Solutions Network, brings together Tanzanian practitioners, communities, and university researchers to investigate how ecological, economic, and institutional systems interact to shape child and family wellbeing.

In rural subsistence communities, livelihoods often depend on biodiversity and ecosystem health. However, the labels externally applied to people navigating these conditions often shape global attention to such dual conservation and humanitarian challenges. Built on fifteen years of community engagement in northern Tanzania, this talk examines how labels such as “poacher” and “orphan” make particular people, problems, and interventions legible to conservation law enforcement, global aid, and social welfare institutions. Drawing on recent ethnographic work with hunting communities around the Lake Manyara Biosphere Reserve, and ongoing family-preservation research with caregivers reunified with their children following orphanage-care placement, this talk considers what is mistranslated when people’s narratives enter institutional discourse through labels they do not claim for themselves. This erasure, in turn, obscures valuable community-driven insights. Ultimately, this shapes how even well-meaning efforts can misdefine problems, misallocate resources, and select unhelpful interventions. By exposing these contested narratives, we can consider the restorative power of co-produced research to support more inclusive causal models of the intertwined ecological, economic, and social problems facing families in northern Tanzania.