Rate My Professor Jon Carter

Jon Carter serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Appalachian State University. He holds a PhD from Columbia University, obtained in 2012, with a dissertation titled "Splendor of Ruins: Gangs, State, and Crime in Honduras." His research specializes in political anthropology, the anthropology of violence, borders and immigration, incarceration and surveillance, media theory, fictocriticism, and ethnographic writing, primarily focused on Honduras and Latin America. As a sociocultural anthropologist, Carter investigates themes of criminality, aesthetics, sovereignty, youth gangs, street gangs, and urban marginality, drawing from fieldwork in Honduras since 1997.

Carter is the author of the book Gothic Sovereignty: Street Gangs and Statecraft in Honduras (University of Texas Press, 2022), which examines gang survival amid state violence and mass incarceration. His scholarly articles include "Gothic Sovereignty: Gangs and Criminal Community in a Honduran Prison" (South Atlantic Quarterly, 2014), "Neoliberal Penology and Criminal Finance in Honduras" (Prison Service Journal, 2017), "Carceral Kinship: Future Families of the Late Leviathan" (Journal of Historical Sociology, 2019), and "Ludic Negation: Thrasher's The Gang and the Creative Foundations of Gang Sociality" (Critical Criminology, 2022). He has contributed chapters to edited volumes such as "States of Emergency: Gangs, Benjamin, and the Challenge to Modern Sovereignty" (Routledge International Handbook of Critical Gang Studies, 2021) and "Sonic Agitation" in Punk! Las Américas Edition (2021). Carter co-edited a special journal edition on "Informal Dynamics of Survival in Latin American Prisons." Among his honors are the Dr. Cheryl Claassen Research Enhancement Award (Claassen Fellow, 2018-2019) for the project "The Art of Fieldwork," intended as a core text for ethnographic methods courses and the inaugural publication of the AppState Ethnography Lab, where he serves as codirector. He also received the College of Arts and Sciences Humanities Fellowship (2017-2018) for "Ethnographic Surrealism in the Americas, 1928-Present." Carter is a member of the Faculty Senate and has presented guest lectures at Princeton University, University of Tennessee, and Rollins College. His work has contributed to public exhibits like Hostile Terrain 94 at Appalachian State University.