About Me:
Dr. Ajirotutu is currently the Associate Director of the Cultures and Communities Program and Associate Professor of Anthropology. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. She has to her credit several years of research experience in both national and international settings. A focal point of her research is the investigation of the influences of culture in public settings (e.g., schools, work settings and gender). Research areas include public school settings focusing on how educational institutions structure the content and context of schooling; informal learning situations; the culture of work traditions, particularly in the use of indigenous technology; and language in society issues.
Dr. Ajirotutu’s international experiences include the following countries within the African Diaspora; Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Haiti, Jamaica, Mali, Haiti, Jamaica, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania and Togo. A characteristic of Dr. Ajirotutu’s pedagogical practices has been her efforts to provide students with field experiences in diverse and culturally distinct social settings. To this extent she had developed and implemented courses in the Milwaukee community of Walnut Way (1999-present), Dakar, Senegal West Africa (2000-2006) and more recently in the city of New Orleans lower 9th Ward community (2007-present).
Dr. Ajirotutu, in collaboration with Dr. Diane Pollard co-authored an edited volume African Centered Schooling in Theory and Practice. This volume documents the longitudinal study of America’s first publicly funded schools to create an African centered schooling experience (1992-1997). This educational experiment received national attention and has been the center of an on-going controversy since its inception.
A second local research project has been her collaboration with the Walnut Way community, one of Milwaukee’s oldest culturally diverse communities. The collaboration began with a min-grant award, in 1999, from the Cultures and Communities Program. Over the years, Dr. Ajirotutu’s university/community partnership has been the gateway to include collaborating faculty from the Schools of Architecture and Urban, Planning, Social Work, Nursing and Peck School of the Arts. Within the College of Letters and Science: geography, history and English departments.
Dr. Ajirotutu’s research in the Walnut Way community has also served as the basis for numerous other curricular and research endeavors. Outcomes from this research have been transformative in the Walnut Way community. Of particular mention are two arts project. The first, involved the Dance Department and the choreographic works of Prof. Simone Ferro. She and her students read the oral narrative and developed a performance. A second art project with Prof Raoul Deal, a visual artist, is in was in two parts. First student developed background scenes to correspond to the dance performance. The second part is a series of installed art pieces which are based on the collective works of oral narratives.
Currently , Dr Ajirotutu is the lead on a campus wide initiative to develop a UWM consortium in New Orleans. Starting in 2008, Dr Ajirotutu has taken classes to New Orleans to work with returning residents in the New Orleans Lower 9th Ward.
Area(s) of Training
anthropology, applied anthropology, cultural anthropology
Area(s) of Expertise
linguistic anthroplology, applied anthropology, Africa and the African diaspora
Current Area of Employment
Anthropology
