Andrew M. Gardner
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Andrew M. Gardner (born July 9, 1969) is an American anthropologist and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Puget Sound.[1] His research focuses on migration, labor,[2] and urbanization in the Arabian Peninsula, particularly the Gulf States.[3] He is the author of The Fragmentary City: Migration, Modernity, Difference in the Urban Landscape of Doha, Qatar,[4] City of Strangers and has edited collections on migration, labor, and applied anthropology.[5]
Gardner was born to Gordon and Janice Gardner. He received a BA from George Washington University in 1991 and an MA from the University of Arizona in 2000.[4] His M.A. thesis, titled "Good Old Boys in Crisis: Truck Drivers and Shifting Occupational Identity in the Louisiana Oilpatch," focused on the changing structure of the trucking sector that serves the American oil industry in Louisiana.[6] He received a PhD from the University of Arizona in 2005, where his doctoral research examined the experiences of Indian migrants in Bahrain.[7]
During his graduate studies at the University of Arizona, he worked with the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA), a research center within the School of Anthropology focused on applied and community-based anthropological research.[8]
Career
His academic career began with doctoral research at the University of Arizona, where he studied the contemporary livelihoods of Bedouin pastoral nomads in Saudi Arabia.[9] During this period, he observed how these pastoral economies had become intertwined with migrant labor from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, a realization that shifted the direction of his future scholarship toward migration and labor in the Gulf.[10]
In 2002–2003, Gardner conducted a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Bahrain, focusing on the Indian diaspora and the structures of labor migration that shape their lives.[11] This research became the basis of his dissertation and later his book City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain (2010).[12] In 2008, he joined Qatar University as a visiting faculty member while on leave from Puget Sound, where he examine the urban development of Gulf cities and the political ecologies of their rapid growth.[13]
He has served as program chair and has chaired or participated in committees of the American Anthropological Association, including the Margaret Mead Award Committee and the Sol Tax Distinguished Service Award Committee.[14]
He has served as program chair for the 2025 meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology.[15]