Kale Fajardo
Kale Bantigue Fajardo is an associate professor of American studies and Asian American studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His academic training is in cultural anthropology and feminist / gender / queer studies, Philippine studies, Filipino/a American studies, and Asian American studies. His PhD and MA are from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his bachelor’s degree is from Cornell University. Professor Fajardo’s first book, Filipino Crosscurrents: Oceanographies of Seafaring, Masculinities, and Globalization (University of Minnesota Press, 2011; University of the Philippines Press, 2013) is an interdisciplinary ethnography that analyzes the cultural politics of Filipinx migrant and maritime masculinities in the local/global shipping industry, in the context of local/global neoliberal capitalism. He uses Philippine postcolonial theory, queer theory, and feminist theory to analyze the above. In particular, his book is concerned with how the Philippine state uses seamen (or the figure of Filipinx seamen) to promote neoliberal economic policies and projects in Manila and the Philippine nation. Filipino Crosscurrents is based on fieldwork conducted in Manila and Oakland, as well as on board an industrial container ship that voyaged from Oakland to Hong Kong (via Osaka, Tokyo, and Kaohsiung). Professor Fajardo has also been working on a public anthropology project called “We Heart Malolos: Kapwa, Kasaysayan at Kalikasan (Unity, History, and the Environment),” funded by a Grant-In- Aid of Scholarship and Artistry from the University of Minnesota (summer 2012 to winter 2015). Through this project, he is conducting research in his hometown of Malolos, Bulacan, in the Philippines and is collaborating with the Center for Bulacan Studies at Bulacan State University to organize a series of Malolos-related and Malolos-based kapwa, kasaysayan, and kalikasan educational events and programs.