Graduate Student
Cultural
Social Networks, Research Collaborations, Translational Science, Team Science, Organizational Culture, Conflict Management, Innovation and Diffusion
Graduate Student
Cultural Anthropology
Medical Anthropology
Race and Racism, Food security, Food sovereignty, Community-based participatory research, Social Network Analysis, Adolescents
Johnson been active in research projects funded by Sea Grant and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for more than three decades. He has conducted extensive long-term research supported by the National Science Foundation comparing group dynamics of over-wintering crews at the American South Pole Station, with those at the Polish, Russian, Chinese, and Indian Antarctic Stations. In addition, he is interested in network models of complex biological systems and has been working on the application of continuous time Markov chain and exponential random graph models to the study of trophic dynamics in food webs. His most recent work, funded by the Office of Naval Research, involves the development of methods for the reliable tagging, coding and network modeling of large corpora of related texts. He has published extensively in anthropological, sociological, biological and marine science journals and was the founding editor of the Journal of Quantitative Anthropology, and co-editor of the journal Human Organization. He is currently an associate editor for the Journal of Social Structure and the journal Social Networks. Johnson is the Director of the Summer Institute for Research Design in Cultural Anthropology funded by the National Science Foundation and is the author of Selecting Ethnographic Informants, Sage, 1990 and is co-author (with Borgatti and Everett) of the book Analyzing Social Networks, Sage, 2013.
My research interest lies in cultural anthropology of social networks and transnational social spaces in the historical context of globalization. With a focus on Senegal and the Senegalese diaspora in the US, Europe and elsewhere in Africa I am interested in how individuals, households, and communities react to structural economic and political constraints at the local, national and global level. My research covers three main areas of inquiry regarding social change in Senegalese communities abroad and at home: Informal finance and economic life, Transnational Social Spaces and the Culture of Migration; Pilgrimage, Muslim Religious Practice and Village Based Social Networks.
Medical anthropology; social inequalities in health; ethnicity, race, and racism; human biological variation; cultural dimensions of psychosocial stress; social network analysis; cognitive anthropology; qualitative and quantitative research methods