Benita Menezes received her PhD from the Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University. Her dissertation, The Politics of Dispossession: Land Law, Kinship conflicts, and Collective action in rural India examines how agrarian families navigate administrative processes, mobilize collective action and engage kinship related disputes surrounding land acquisition for industrialization. Prior to this training, she received her Bachelor of Architecture, from the University of Mumbai, India, and a Master of Arts in Urban Planning, from the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her methodological training in anthropology, urban planning and architecture informs her teaching philosophy and pedagogical approach. As a Graduate Teaching fellow, she has contributed to the new writing culture at Hopkins through teaching Reintroduction courses - Architectures of Writing (Spring 2024), Dogs, Plants, Fungi and the Anthropocene (Spring 2025) and served as a tutor at the Writing Centre (Fall 2024). She was the recipient of the Dean’s Teaching Fellowship in 2023 and taught The Politics of Land Rights. Before coming to Baltimore, she worked for a decade with nonprofit organizations, an urban design think tank and an architecture school in Mumbai and Vancouver. This academic year, Benita will serve as a postdoctoral teaching fellow and assistant director at the Writing Centre.

Spring 2025: Reintroduction to Writing: Dogs, Plants, Fungi and the Anthropocene (Instructor, Undergraduate Course) 3 credits: Defined as the geological age in which human activity is the dominant influence on the environment, the Anthropocene is the age of climate change. In this Reintroduction class we take a step back. Our entry point into the question of climate change is reoriented by drawing daily observations, reading ethnography, and watching movies. We ponder how a focus on the more than human, i.e., animals, plants and fungi expand our understanding of the Anthropocene as a multi-species phenomenon. Thinking with anthropologists we learn three techniques into the production of scientific knowledge that integrates natural and human history. We delve into human and more-than-human entanglements to stumble upon the ‘patchy Anthropocene’ (Tsing et.al) that teaches us the art of seeing environmental phenomenon, introducing new vantage points beyond the human and mapping relationships that enable us to attend to environmental challenges and justice differently.

Fall 2024: Tutor, Writing Centre.

Spring 2024: Reintroduction to Writing: Architectures of Writing (Instructor, Undergraduate Course) 3 credits: Architecture, the word conjures images of built forms. And yet the etymology or the root of the word itself can mean conceptual structure. Can there be a relationship, an interplay, between built form and conceptual structure? This first-year course titled Reintroduction to Writing: Architectures of Writing invites you to a series of weekly experiments in understanding architecture (space) as a literary genre (text). Where the starting point for both acts of designing is the dreaded blank page. We will make two analytical moves. First, we will examine and analyze the ‘language of space’ to understand the elements of spatial thought. Second, we will shortlist from these elements a few to develop a personalized toolkit for our writing purposes. By drawing on architectural methods of ‘reading’ space we as writers will ‘design’ texts in a peer community. These texts (memoir, short

story, ethnography, design brief/proposal) will take multiple forms and might flourish to have afterlives of their own.

Fall 2023: The Politics of Land Rights (Instructor, Undergraduate Course) 3 credits: This course invites students to examine how the neoliberal state’s aspirations of development and economic growth are fueled by mega infrastructure and industrial projects. Built through large scale agrarian land acquisitions, these projects disrupt the rhythms of everyday life at several levels leading to displacement, migration, loss of livelihoods, pollution of ecological resources and fracturing of communities. Critical scholars see dispossession as the dominant outcome of land acquisition for local communities. However, while popular resistance (NGO activism, public protests) and organized collective action (public-interest litigation, sit-ins, and public campaigns) have been important modalities of protest, these kinds of mobilization occur intermittently, and wax and wane in intensity. Focusing ethnographic attention on the ‘production of space’ across state and society, in diverse cultural contexts, this course asks, what is the political economy of economic growth? How does the transition from the rural to the urban unfold in everyday life? How do communities respond to the threat of the taking away of their property, livelihood, cultural artifacts, and ecological resources? What forms of grassroots political action emerge from these dynamics?

Intersession 2023: Talking Pictures (Instructor, Undergraduate Course) 1 credit: This course views visual media through ethnographic eyes and the translation of ethnographic sensibility into media. It focuses on how forms of “talking” are structured in visual representations of everyday life. Using films, comics and texts as thought-companions, we ask: What are the political implications of different forms of representation? Can the image have a voice? Drawing on our ethnographic eyes, we will work through (de)constructing storytelling and the politics of image production.

Fall 2017: On Brokers, Middlemen and Fixers (Instructor, Undergraduate Course) 3 credits: The Hollywood agent, the matchmaker, the political fixer, the pawnbroker- middlemen are always in the middle of another person’s business. They juggle circuits of money, people, crime and power often in exchange for a fee and hence are viewed as parasitical figures in the social landscape. A classical figure in anthropological studies, the middleman appeared as a parasite, disappeared, and reappeared more recently as a mediator although still shrouded in moral ambiguity. This anthropological course rethinks the category of the middleman, by focusing on how specific social milieus shape practices, politics and networks of mediation that exceed the physical figure itself. Thinking with ethnography and film, this course will cut the middleman “out” of everyday life and draw mediation into our field of vision. The readings and films will explore the work of mediation in a range of everyday activities such as trade, marriage, employment, land deals, and local politics across the US, Africa and Asia.

Fall 2016: Africa as Laboratory (Teaching Assistant, Undergraduate Course).

Fall 2015: Invitation to Anthropology (Teaching Assistant, Undergraduate Course).

Spring 2015: Maps and Mapping (Teaching Assistant, Undergraduate Course).

(In progress) Saunsaar: Householding in the Shadow of Land Dispossession for the project Universe of Terms, for the Henry Luce Foundation. https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/system/resource/5/a/0/5a0906c7-ba32-47ee-912a ec4eae7bd1c8/attachment/06b34b829ee8382e9181e266c0ab9540.pdf by Naveeda

Menezes, Benita. 2023. “Multifarious Land, Contesting Claims” In “data/Big Data in the field” edited Khan, American Ethnologist website, December 22, 2023, [https://americanethnologist.org/data-big-data-in-the-field/multifarious-land-contesting-claims/]

Mujumdar, Rohit., and Benita Menezes. 2014. “Maharashtra: Institutional Politics and the Framing of Resistance”, in Power Policy and Protest: The Politics of India’s Special Economic Zones in India edited by Rob Jenkins, Lorraine Kennedy and Partha Mukhopadhyay. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. (Book Chapter).

Architecture, Urban Planning, Anthropology.

Political economy of land, ethnography, visual methodologies, data visualization, mapping, kinship, land disputes, collective action, bureaucracy, compensation litigation, social mobilization, land acquisition law, environmental impact assessment, urban politics, urban governance, planning cultures, climate change, multi-species ethnography.