Biography

Dr. Gurr is an applied cultural anthropologist who has lived and worked in Brazil, Chile, Pakistan, and the United States.

Gurr received her B.S. degrees (economics, anthropology) from the University of Utah, where she grew enthusiastic about using the methods and insights of social science to make a positive impact. After graduating, she worked for Community Action as an advocate and community organizer in Salt Lake City.

Gurr then pursued graduate studies at Syracuse University. There, she earned the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, which supported two years of immersive ethnographic fieldwork alongside second-generation members Brazil's Landless Rural Workers' Movement (MST). Gurr's doctoral thesis examined the ways this movement appeals to young people, providing a fresh perspective on the roles of rituals, symbols, and subcultural practices. Her youth-centered perspective demonstrates the ways ordinary people have collectively reinvented a movement to effectively responded to ever-evolving difficulties and dangers, keeping hopes of a more equal and socially just society alive.

Thereafter, building on her interests in Brazilian social movements, Gurr completed a post-doctoral research fellowship, where she joined a large, interdisciplinary, international research team (funded by the NSF and ERC) to examine grassroots alternatives to peripheralization in Rio de Janeiro.

Gurr developed a passion for collaborative, applied work. This resulted in a longitudinal study on rural youth, agrarian change, and alternatives to deforestation in Araucanía, Chile in partnership with a Chilean scientist.

In 2018, Dr. Gurr received an offer to join one of South Asia's top research institutions, Lahore University of Management Sciences, in Pakistan, where she spent four years developing a comparative understanding of environmental politics, gender and sexuality, social movements, and pedagogy.

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