Sara Busdiecker holds a joint appointment in the Department of Anthropology and the Africana Studies Program. She defended her dissertation in 2006. Entitled, " We Are Bolivians Too: The Experience and Meaning of Blackness in Bolivia ," it examines the contemporary culture and identity of Bolivia 's small and overlooked black population, descended from enslaved Africans. More broadly, it deals with the experiences and meanings associated with blackness and race within Bolivia's overwhelmingly indigenous/ mestizo socio-cultural landscape and the roles of three intervening forces in these meanings and experiences, these being: a dominant Indian/ mestizo -centric paradigm for organizing difference and Bolivian national identity; expressive culture and its public performance and discursive life; and the nature and circulation of political, scholarly, and popular representations of blacks and race within Bolivia . The dissertation was based largely on two years of research and ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Bolivia 's capital city, La Paz, and in a small rural Afro-Bolivian community in the Yungas region. Busdiecker plans to continue her research in Bolivia well into the future.

She is also developing a separate project that looks comparatively at grassroots black identity organizations elsewhere in the Andes and the geographical and scholarly periphery of the African Diaspora in Latin America . Central to this project is the question of how travel, communication technology (especially the internet), and media are employed at local, national, and transnational levels by organization participants in such a way that a sense of citizenship in a contemporary global African Diaspora community is cultivated in defiance of spatial separation and despite divergent local histories, experiences, and racial systems. Her first field efforts for this new project will be in northern Chile .