Robin Turner, Butler University
The scholarship of Lee Ann Fujii illuminated the historical, political, and performative construction of identity and political violence in Rwanda, Bosnia, and the United States. “Identity amounts to the repeated and public actions, activities, and practices — some calculated, some spontaneous, some scripted, some improvised — that make them real” she contended in 2010.[1]
Lee Ann Fujii combined an interpretivist emphasis on the intersubjective, contextual, power-laden character of identity categories with consistent support for marginalized scholars throughout her career. She showed up for graduate students and junior faculty of color, those without top ten graduate credentials or R1 jobs, those whose “pathway to academia was roundabout, non-traditional, and unexpected” like her own, and for a host of others.[2] How? Lee Ann did a lot of nearly invisible, underappreciated labor. She provided career counseling and connections, read multiple drafts of our work and cheered on the discouraged even as she dealt with loss and disappointment.
Lee Ann also challenged disciplinary norms and practices in her department and in public. Her gently phrased 2010 call for broader consideration of research ethics was followed in 2016 by a thorough critique of the dishonest nature of DA-RT (Data Access and Research Transparency) discussions. “Who can say that transparency is a more pressing problem than the entrenched forms of structural and agentic power that shape who and what gets published, who gets hired and promoted, and which methods and methodologies become anointed as the new ‘gold’ standard?” she asked.[3] “The discipline tolerates white mediocrity very well,” she observed, but does not similarly hire and celebrate non-white mediocrity.”[4] Far from mediocre, Lee Ann Fujii was a brilliant, accomplished scholar, and wonderful human being whose death is an immense loss to political science as well as to those of us who cherished her.
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[1] Fujii, Lee Ann. 2010. “Performances of identity and violence.” RIGS paper seminar series, Irvine, CA, January 8.
[2] Fujii, Lee Ann. 2016. “Keynote Address: Changing Disciplines.” International Studies Association- Northeast, Baltimore, MD, November 4.
[3] Fujii, Lee Ann. 2016. “The dark side of DA-RT.” Comparative Politics newsletter 26 (1):25-28.
[4] Fujii, Lee Ann. 2016. “Keynote Address: Changing Disciplines.”