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Janine R. Wedel writes about corruption and the state, the privatization of public policy, and development and foreign aid through the unique lens of a social anthropologist. She is the first anthropologist to win the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order (previous award recipients include Mikhail Gorbachev and Samuel Huntington). A professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University and fellow at the New America Foundation, Wedel has contributed articles and opinion pieces to more than a dozen major outlets, including The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Nation, The National Interest, The Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and the Boston Globe.
Wedel has been a pioneer in applying anthropological insights to topics that are typically the terrain of political scientists, economists, or sociologists. After 25 years studying the role of informal systems in shaping communist and post-communist societies, Wedel has also turned her attention to the privatization of public policy in the United States. In a new book, Shadow Elite: The Privatization of Power (forthcoming, Basic Books), she explores the ways in which today’s movers and shakers brandish power and influence, the new rules they are writing themselves, and the implications for democracy. Her work assesses the extent to which the new rules take us beyond traditional corruption and conflict-of-interest—and into an accountability-challenged era.
A four-time Fulbright fellow, Wedel has also won awards from the National Science Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the United States Institute of Peace, the German Marshall Fund, the Eurasia Foundation, and the National Institute of Justice, among others. The Foreign Policy Association selected Wedel’s prize-winning Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe (Palgrave 2001), as an "Editor’s Pick." Other books include The Unplanned Society (edited, annotated, and introductions, Columbia University Press, 1992) and The Private Poland: An Anthropologist Looks at Everyday Life (1986), which was likened by the Christian Science Monitor to Hedrick Smith's The Russians.
Wedel is co-founder and co-convener of the Interest Group for the Anthropology of Public Policy (IGAPP). She led the development of two new core courses in her school: Culture, Organization, and Technology; and Advanced Field Research for Policy: Theory and Method. She was recognized as one of a handful of "Distinguished Alumni" Ph.D.s chosen to speak at the Berkeley anthropology department’s centennial celebration.
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