Shannon Novak, professor of anthropology, has contributed to “The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Anthropology” (Routledge, 2025). Her chapter, “Blood, mud, and mucking around with waste,” examines the materiality and logic of separation practices involved in the gendering of landscapes, bodies and subjectivities at a mother goddess (Mariamma) temple in the industrial outskirts of Toronto, Canada.

The handbook offers a survey of feminist anthropological research that has relevance for anthropology, gender studies, queer studies, economics, science and technology studies, and other fields. Its 34 chapters explore the complexities of intersectionality, advances in decolonial work and the importance of compassion and care, working across a range of methods and scales. Novak’s chapter draws on her ethnographic research with an Indo-Guyanese community in Brampton, Canada, whose cultural and healing practices challenge normative binaries and hierarchies of difference by empowering (un)becoming associations with waste.

Novak recently contributed to another edited volume, “Embodying Biodiversity: Sensory Conservation as Refuge and Sovereignty” (University of Arizona Press, 2024). Her chapter traces how indentured laborers from India carried subaltern practices to plantations in British Guiana and later to North American cities.

Novak is also the author of “House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre” (University of Utah Press, 2008) and co-editor of “An Archaeology of Desperation: Exploring the Donner Party’s Alder Creek Camp” (University of Oklahoma, 2011). She is co-editor of two forthcoming books on archives, bodies and materiality.

Novak is a senior research associate and advisory committee member in the Moynihan Institute’s South Asia Center. Her areas of expertise are body and society, new materialisms, anthropology of knowledge, historical bioarchaeology, gender, ritual, necropolitics, North America and the Indo-Caribbean diaspora.

From the publisher:

“The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Anthropology is a comprehensive inter- and intradisciplinary survey of the field of feminist anthropology. It has at its core a focus on raising consciousness and communicating information about gender inequities, suffering, and precarity, as well as furthering a praxis informed by intersectionality, decolonial intent, and compassion.

Divided into three clear parts and comprising 34 chapters by an international team of contributors, the Handbook addresses topics in the following key areas:

• resisting violence
• communicating creatively
• labor
• migration and displacement
• health and disease
• reproduction
• intersectionality
• decolonial work

 The collection assesses the field at an interesting moment in time―one defined by social justice and populist movements gone global; once and future pandemics; extreme environmental disasters; and neoliberalism interrupted. How do gender, sex, and sexuality intersect with these phenomena? In answer, contributors to this volume put a heterogeneous anthropological approach in place; they advance interdisciplinary conversations, as well as renew a commitment to intradisciplinary dialogue.

The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Anthropology is essential reading for students, researchers, and instructors in anthropology, and will also be of interest to those in related disciplines such as gender studies, queer studies, economics, biomedicine, political science, sociology, geography, and science and technology studies.”