Joanne Rappaport’s current research interests include:

* The evolution of proto-racial categories in the Bogota region of what is today Colombia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This research was undertaken in archives in Colombia and Spain in collaboration with Marta Zambrano, an anthropologist from the National University of Colombia, funded by an international collaborative grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; further archival work by Rappaport was funded by a Fulbright Fellowship. A fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study has provided the time and resources for Rappaport to work through her archival materials.

* Collaborative research in Latin America. This is a new project, which will involve ethnographic research on collaborative teams in various Latin American countries. Rappaport has begun the project with archival work on La Rosca de Investigacion y Accion Social, a precursor to participatory action research, which worked with peasants on Colombia's Atlantic coast and indigenous organizations in the departments of Cauca and Tolima in the late-1970s.

In conjunction with her research interests, she is has taught in the Ethnoeducation Program of the Universidad del Cauca (Colombia) and in the Community Pedagogy Program of the Autonomous Indigenous Intercultural University sponsored by the Consejo Regional Indigena del Cauca (CRIC), both of which are geared toward the training of indigenous students and bilingual teachers, as well as teaching in the M.A. and Ph.D. programs in Anthropology at the Universidad del Cauca and the M.A. programs in Anthropology and in Cultural Studies at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.