Hilary Chart

Fall 2024 Courses
Cultural Anthropology

Spring 2024 Courses
Cultural Anthropology
Dynamic Africa

Hilary Chart is a Visiting Instructor of Anthropology at Macalester College and a doctoral candidate in Stanford University’s Department of Anthropology. She earned her MA in international education and applied policy analysis at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and her BA in cognitive neuroscience from Harvard College.

As a socio-cultural anthropologist, Hilary approaches what are ostensibly economic categories of being and doing as part of broader social processes. Drawing on substantivist and feminist approaches, she is concerned with the ways that economic inequalities and insecurities exploit and refigure relations across other differences, including those of gender, race and generation. More particularly, her research focuses on questions related to shifting forms of labor and livelihood strategies in Southern Africa. She is interested in the ways that work lives illuminate connections between transnational processes of global capitalism and economic development on the one hand, and intimate relationships of obligation and dependence on the other. Hilary’s current project, which is the basis for her doctoral dissertation, explores the rise of entrepreneurship in urban Botswana. Drawing on fieldwork with those promoting and pursuing micro-enterprise in the capital city of Gaborone, she examines how the valorization of business is generating new modes of labor and economic hope, new social ties and exclusions, and new claims on the financial resources of the state, partners, and families.