BY SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS
“I 26
used to think that I could plan for things,” Professor Krista Billingsley says ruefully. She was pregnant when the pandemic first made landfall in Vermont, and by June, when their daughter was born, she and her husband were “really isolated.” Her husband’s father was taken by COVID, and the couple, both from rural Tennessee, focused even more on taking care of their family. “We started really living in the now,” she says. Billingsley’s research was also at a critical point. Her work on transitional justice in Nepal, or justice processes implemented after Nepal’s armed conflict, had her interviewing people who had experienced gross human rights violations as children. With the aid of a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship and Wenner-Gren Grant, she spent 14 months conducting research in Nepal. After the state-led truth commissions stopped accepting victims’ statements describing their experiences of human rights violations, victims’ statements were hidden away in filing cabinets. The work became increasingly urgent. While much of her research was conducted pre-pandemic in person, post-pandemic Billingsley received a Wenner-Gren Engaged Anthropology Grant to conduct an engaged research project with children of the disap-
peared in Bardiya District, Nepal. Through the project, victims told their stories to memorialize their loved ones who remain missing more than a decade after the cessation of Nepal’s armed conflict. The research has taken the form of a film project, which Billingsley is now editing. Pre-COVID, she says, she would not have done a film, but in the remote, virtual world, she has found a whole new way to present her work. “I am proud of this film,” she says, “and there is something powerful about being able to produce something in the midst of chaos.” Visual anthropologist can now be added to her considerable resume. Although she had to work harder to keep her students engaged, Billingsley enjoyed remote teaching. She appreciated the additional context and insight into students’ lives. “I’ve had to be more flexible to accommodate student absences.” On the plus side, she has found that student projects have become more introspective; there has been more sharing, perhaps inspired by the lived realities of COVID. “It’s like my home life,” she laughs. “I can make a plan, but it doesn’t always work out.”
The Best Laid Krista Billingsley, director of criminology and assistant professor of anthropology and criminology
