Tricia Redeker-Hepner

Dr. Tricia Redeker Hepner is a political and legal anthropologist with a regional focus on Northeast Africa and the Great Lakes Region of Eastern Africa, and thematic interests in migration and displacement, transnationalism, human rights, transitional justice, militarism, and conflict and peace. She has conducted research in the Horn of Africa and with refugees and asylum seekers from Eritrea/Ethiopia in North America, Europe, and Africa for over twenty years. This long-term work has informed her participation in hundreds of asylum and refugee cases, and her testimony has been influential in immigration rulings in the US, Canada, Europe, and Israel. In a separate project, she collaborates with forensic anthropologists and archaeologists to examine the meanings and material impacts of the missing and unidentified dead in post-war Northern Uganda’s post-war transitional justice process and to document improper burials in mass graves and former displacement camps. She has published five books and more than twenty peer-reviewed journal articles or book chapters to date. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Social Science Research Council, and the US Fulbright Scholars Program in Germany. Prior to joining ASU in August 2020, she held positions in the Africana Studies Program and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, where she co-founded and directed the Disasters, Displacement, and Human Rights (DDHR) Program. Since has served in voluntary leadership roles in the American Anthropological Association and on the editorial boards of the African Studies Review and the African Conflict and Peacebuilding Review.

Dr. Hepner is currently Senior Associate Director of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. From 2020-2023 she directed the MA Program in Social Justice and Human Rights.