Caitrin Lynch
Background and Description
Caitrin Lynch is a cultural anthropologist whose research interests are gender, labor, nationalism, globalization, and aging. Her area focus is South Asia and the United States. She is the author of Juki Girls, Good Girls: Gender and Cultural Politics in Sri Lanka’s Global Garment Industry (Cornell, 2007), which examines a government program that brought garment factories to rural Sri Lanka in 1992. The women workers in this program found themselves caught between the pressures of a globalizing economy and societal expectations that villages are sanctuaries of tradition. Lynch describes how these women learned quickly to resist the characterization of “Juki girls”—female garment workers already established in the urban sector—as vulgar and deracinated, instead asserting that they were “good girls” who could embody the nation's highest ideals of femininity. Lynch shows how contemporary Sri Lankan women navigate a complex web of political, cultural, and socioeconomic forces. For more information on Juki Girls, Good Girls, see http://www.olin.edu/about_olin/news/pr_single.asp?id=188 and http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4663
Lynch’s current research builds on her interest in factory labor, gender, and cultural norms, but adds a new dimension: cultural norms about and social policies on aging. She is conducting research on a small Massachusetts factory with an average employee age of 75 years. In the Sri Lankan and American cases, factory work offers not only financial support but also a great deal of meaning, social interaction, and a changed sense of identity. While these Massachusetts workers do the production tasks assigned to them by management, they share advice on Medicare and Social Security, investments and income tax, family dynamics, and health care. Their rich shop-floor interactions allow them to collectively make sense of the contradictions of being highly productive during a life stage when many people in American society expect and assume them to be unproductive.
Dr. Lynch is an Assistant Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Massachusetts. She was previously an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Drew University, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Lynch received her Ph.D. and M.A. in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago and her B.A. in anthropology from Bates College.