Bio
Deborah Akers, Ph.D., JD.,is an assistant professor of Cultural Applied Anthropology at Miami University (Oxford , OH). She was one of the first students at The Ohio State University to receive her BA in Arabic. She followed this degree with an MA and Ph.D. in Anthropology. She studied for her law degree while writing her Ph.D. dissertation and graduated with her Juris Doctorate one year later. She moved to Washington , DC after graduation and worked as liaison officer with the U.S. Congress Foreign Affairs Committee on Bosnia and Iran and staff attorney and then director for oversight with the Committee on House Administration for the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress. Following September 11, 2001, her family encouraged her to move back to her home state of Ohio and take a position at a university. This has given Dr. Akers the opportunity to pursue her research interests in conflict zones.
Among the countries where Dr. Akers has lived and conducted fieldwork are Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; as well as Tibetan monasteries in Dharamsala, India, and Kathmandu, Nepal. The geographical areas of her research include the Middle East (Saudi Arabia and Arabian Gulf) and Central Asia (Afghanistan, Nepal and Tibet).
Her research in the Middle East since 1990 has focused on Political Tribal Systems and Political Islam in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. In her dissertation on The Tribal Concept in Urban Saudi Arabia , Dr. Akers examines the social and symbolic manifestations of clans, their psychological self-definition, and the consequences of modernization. Dr. Akers argues that understanding the clan concept as a form of group identification is essential to understanding Saudi sociocultural dynamics. She is currently conducting research in the Kingdom for her book on the social anthropology of Saudi Arabia. Dr. Akers has also co-translated into English and published short stories from the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf states , with social commentary.
Dr. Akers established the field school in the Tibetan refugee community in exile in northern India for her students at Miami University in the summer of 2005. Since then, she has been leading and directing field schools for groups of twenty in Dharamsala , India each summer. Here, students have an opportunity to study political issues and the non-violence doctrine espoused by the Dalai Lama.
