Peter Kong-ming New Award

Eligibility

Submission

Topic

Timetable

Criteria/Judging

Prizes

Published Papers

Previous Recipients

2022

1st Place Winner

Jordan Thomas

University of California, Santa Barbara

I am a socio-cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara researching the intersections of people, environments, and wildfires in California. I am particularly interested in tracking the history and culture of fire suppression to better understand unprecedented socio-environmental shifts. My imminent doctoral research will use multi-sited, multi-scalar methods to document how wildfire knowledge is created, predictions formed, and uncertainties managed in contexts of increasing environmental instability.

2nd Place Winner

Dalton Price

University of Oxford

Dalton Price is a DPhil candidate in anthropology at the University of Oxford. Based in La Guajira, a Colombian state bordering Venezuela, his doctoral research focuses broadly on the experiences of Venezuelan migrants in these borderlands. Dalton's previous research looked at global health bureaucracies like the World Health Organization, and his Peter K. New paper builds on his time working as a contact tracer at the Florida Department of Health. He has published in Medicine Anthropology Theory, HuffPost, Common Dreams, Global Health NOW, and the Daytona Beach News-Journal and contributed to pieces in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The New Humanitarian, and ABC Action News.

3rd Place Winner

Zihao Lin

University of Chicago

Zihao Lin is a doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. He is interested in anthropological inquiries of urban life, access, and design, and extends them to engage with questions of disability citizenship in contemporary China. Following state officials, tech entrepreneurs, and disability rights activists, he explores the ethical and material transformations brought by the concepts of “barrier-free” and “access” and related objects (i.e., screen readers, remote sign language interpreting, or voice recognition applications), investigates what visions are enacted by the state and market when such concepts are claimed and articulated, and how a pan-Chinese network of disability activists negotiate meanings of “barrier-free city” in generative ways. He is also an editor of TyingKnots (结绳志), an open-access anthropology platform run by young academics dedicated to spreading progressive scholarship to Chinese readers.

2021

1st Place Winner

Halle Young

Barnard College

Halle Young is a recent graduate of Barnard College, where she received her Bachelors of Arts degree in anthropology. Her research examines how young, prenatal women negotiate, articulate, and manage their experiences of chronic pelvic pain. Her paper explicates the critical differences between prompted, recurrent pain and constant bodily pain in terms of the subjectivity of chronic pelvic pain, the problematic insistence on vaginal penetration as evidence of cure, and the dilemmas of treating pain with doubly painful therapies.  Currently, she serves as an Avodah Corps Member in New Orleans, where she leads the institutional memory project at Ashé Cultural Arts Center. 

2nd Place Winner

Emily Wilson

University of Chicago

Emily Wilson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. She holds a Master’s degree in Social Work (MSW) from the University of Michigan where she specialized in social policy, organizational management, and housing and homelessness. Her dissertation research analyzes experimentations in volunteerism and charitable social care services in Northern England, a region impacted by ongoing austerity measures. Her research tracks the experiences of charity staff, volunteers, and social care recipients as they negotiate relations of care amidst continuous budget cuts, program closures, and ideological suspicion of the state. She has been the recipient of multiple fellowships including a National Science Foundation (NSF) doctoral dissertation research grant, Society for Psychological Anthropology (SPA) Lemelson Fellowship, Center for International Social Science Research (CISSR) Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph field research award, and a Graduate Research Fellowship from the Nicholson Center for British Studies.

3rd Place Winner

Alisha Nguyen

Boston College

Alisha Nguyen is a doctoral candidate from the Department of Teaching, Curriculum, & Society at the Lynch School of Education & Human Development, Boston College. Her scholarship mostly focuses on the intersectionality of language, power, race, class, and gender in education. She is a recipient of the Kelsey A. Rennebohm Memorial Fellowship granted by the Center of Human Rights and International Justice, Boston College. Her scholarship has been supported by the NEA Foundation and the International Literacy Association. Her Peter K. New paper on Facebook community and food culture is a “homecoming” project in which she attempted to trace and connect with Vietnamese diasporic communities through digital food memories. 

2020

1st Place Winner

Kathy Trang

Emory University

Kathy Trang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Emory University. Her doctoral research examined the biological and psychosocial pathways contributing to HIV and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder comorbidity among young men who have sex with men in Hanoi, Vietnam. Integrating clinic-based measures with wearable and mobile technology, her work elucidated the ongoing impact of trauma exposure on the body and clarified the contextual and social conditions of everyday life that may contribute towards the development or maintenance of trauma-related psychopathology over time. Her work has been supported by the PHRMA Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, the UJMT NIH Fogarty Fellowship, the Robert Lemelson Foundation/Society for Psychological Anthropology Fellowship, and the Multidisciplinary Global Health Team Award and Pilot Grant from the Global Health Institute and Center for Mind, Brain, Culture at Emory University, among others.

2nd Place

Aberdeen McEvers

Macalester College

Aberdeen is a recent graduate of Macalester College, where she obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology and International Studies with a concentration in Human Rights. Her research interests include feminist anthropology, studies in intersectionality and systems of oppression. These interests are highlighted in her ethnographic research on the interaction between social service institutions and histories of oppression. Her research explores how and why social service institutions challenge the oppressive structures their beneficiaries face while simultaneously adopting the very ideology that upholds these structures, with a special focus on how the use of this ideology impacts beneficiaries' perception of self. Aberdeen is currently putting her research into practice through her direct service work with young people experiencing sex trafficking.

3rd Place Winner

Olivia Marcus

Columbia University

Olivia Marcus received her MPH in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University. She has co-authored articles on the 2014/15 Ebola epidemic, plant medicine in the Peruvian Amazon, and the mental health implications of the use of ayahuasca shamanism among diverse populations. Her doctoral fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon explores the use of Amazonian shamanism for mental wellness and the processes of professionalization and legitimization of traditional Amazonian medicine among locals and foreigners. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in San Martín and Loreto, her dissertation explains the ways in which intercultural dialogues effect changes in worldview among clientele and practitioners through the growing plurality of healing methods offered in these regions.

2019

1st Place Winner

Justin Raycraft

McGill University

"This is Allah’s Plan”: Local Perceptions of Environmental Change in Rural Tanzania

Justin Raycraft is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University, with specialization in environmental anthropology and photography. His graduate studies are supported by a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Justin’s ethnographic research focuses on the political ecology of marine and wildlife conservation in Tanzania, with attention to the lived experiences of people affected by protected areas. He is especially interested in the interplay between space, politics, and subjectivity in the context of conservation areas and landscapes. In support of his doctoral research, Justin was awarded the Richard Salisbury Award, a scholarship offered annually by the Canadian Anthropology Society to an exceptional doctoral student studying at a Canadian University. His field research is also supported by the McGill Institute for the Study of International Development. Justin’s photographs have been published by notable magazines and news platforms, including National Geographic, the Nature Conservancy, and Current Biology. His academic research has been published in well-known journals, including Marine Pollution Bulletin, Geoforum, Ethnobiology Letters, and Visual Ethnography. Justin is deeply humbled to receive the 2019 Peter K. Award First Prize.

2nd Place Winner

Carey DeMichelis

University of Toronto

Biomedical Refusal: Pediatric Decision Making and the Settler State

Carey is a PhD candidate in Applied Psychology and Human Development and the Joint Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on situations in which young people and their families resist or refuse forms of life-saving biomedical treatment for a variety of cultural, religious, and political reasons. Grounded in critical ethnographic case study, Carey's dissertation raises pressing questions about young people's capacity to make their own medical decisions, about who is empowered to determine the best interests of a medically fragile child, and about the limits of multicultural accommodation in a secular liberal democracy.

3rd Place Winner

Peter Lee

University of Cambridge

Caring without Curing: Parasites, Student Medical Brigades, and Transitory Care in Rural Nicaragua

2018

1st Place Winner

Rebecca M. Bedwell

University of Arizona

Diabetes Illness Narratives among Mexican Immigrants in the U.S.-Mexico Border Region.

Rebecca Bedwell is a Ph.D. student in sociocultural anthropology, with a concentration in medical anthropology, in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. Her research interests include medical anthropology, feminist anthropology, women’s health, migration, illness narratives, structural inequality, health disparities, and risk. She received her B.A. in Anthropology and Spanish at Indiana University – Bloomington in 2014, and her M.A. in Anthropology at the University of Arizona in 2017. Her M.A. thesis, entitled Diabetes Illness Narratives among Mexican Immigrants in the U.S.-Mexico Border Region, investigated experiences of type 2 diabetes among Mexican immigrants living in Tucson, Arizona, with a specific focus on conceptualizations of risk, heritability, individual responsibility, and experiences of emotion. She is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow (2017-2022).

2nd Place Winner

Nora Colleen Bridges

University of Pittsburgh

From “Biodiversity Hotspot” to “Socio-Environmental Hope Spot”: Making Wellbeing Central to Sustainable Development in Upper Amazonia.”

3rd Place Winner

Colleen Walsh Lang

Washington University in St. Louis

NGO Responsibilization: Landscapes of Need and Islands of Care for Children Living with HIV in Uganda.

Colleen Walsh Lang is currently enrolled in the MD/PhD program at Washington University in St. Louis.  For her doctoral dissertation, titled “Vulnerable Agents: Ugandan Children’s Experiences with HIV-Rehabilitation and Reintegration,” she conducted 15 months of fieldwork in east-central Uganda at a long-term residential treatment center for children living with HIV.  In this setting Colleen studied the ways the processes of medicalization and responsibilization interact in sometimes surprising ways. Her research emphasizes the tensions between children’s vulnerability and children’s (at times destructive) agency, between sustainable development paradigms which emphasize responsibility and patronage networks of interdependence, and between the biomedical and social meanings of food and health. Overall, in sharing children’s experiences living with HIV in Uganda, she seeks to emphasize the complexity of their lives, to write against sustainable development rhetoric which privileges independence over interdependence, and to hold both children’s vulnerability and their agency in frame simultaneously.  Her research has been funded by the Fulbright Student Fellowship, the Lambda Alpha Graduate Research Grant, the Medical Student Award from the HIV Medical Association, and the Center for the Humanities Graduate Student Fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis.  She is currently completing her clinical rotations at Washington University School of Medicine.  In 2018-2019 she will complete a fellowship in clinical medical ethics at the MacLean Center for Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago.

2017

1st Place Winner

Amanda McMillan Lequieu

University of Wisconsin - Madison

“We made the choice to stick it out”: Negotiating a stable home in the rural, American Rust Belt

Amanda is scholar of home, place, and economic change.  She is a PhD candidate in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s joint departments of Sociology and Community and Environmental Sociology, advised by Michael Bell.  Her research interrogates the relationship between structural, environmental, and economic change and lived experiences of home and community.  Specifically, she is interested in how low-income communities adapt to globalizing economies and changing environments over time, through the lens of land tenure, environmental history, and economic development/post-development.  Her qualitative field work has taken her from homesteads in Swaziland, to kitchen tables in dairyland Wisconsin, to red-dirt roads post-war northern Uganda, and most recently, to urban and rural Rust Belt communities. Amanda’s research situates the stories people tell about their places and their people within patterns of macroeconomic transformation.

McMillan Lequieu Interview

2nd Place Winner

Amy Kennemore

University of California - San Diego

In Search of Indigenous Justice in the Bolivian Highlands: Legal Pluralism and Critically Engaged Collaborative Research from below the “Thresholds of Visibility”

Amy Kennemore is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. Her dissertation research considers emerging forms of governance and politics in Bolivia through examination of the practices of knowledge production around legal pluralism, understood as both a legal mechanism to strengthen indigenous autonomy and a platform for critically engaged collaborative research. She has been an affiliated researcher of the La Paz Departmental Association of Anthropologists since August of 2015, conducting collaborative research with social science researchers, non-governmental workers, activists, and indigenous community members in the highland region of Bolivia to implement new forms of legal pluralism that are advanced in the 2009 constitution, which officially “re-founded” the country as a “plurinational, communitarian” state. In addition to conducting collaborative research in Bolivia, she currently serves as Editorial Assistant for the journal Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies. 

Amy Kennemore Interview

3rd Place Winner

Adrienne Strong

Washington University in St. Louis and Universteit van Amsterdam

"We Swim In Blood:" Exposure to risk and forms of care on the maternity ward of a Tanzanian hospital

Adrienne Strong is a joint Ph.D. candidate at Washington University in St. Louis in the Department of Anthropology and the Universiteit van Amsterdam’s Health, Care, and the Body group in the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research. Her Ph.D. dissertation is entitled The Maternity Ward as Mirror: Maternal Death, Biobureaucracy, and Institutional Care in the Tanzanian Health Sector. She conducted approximately two years of fieldwork in the Rukwa region of Tanzania, predominantly based at the regional government referral hospital’s maternity ward. In this setting, Adrienne studied the ways in which biomedical healthcare facilities as both institutions and social environments influence forms of caring and, ultimately, whether a pregnant mother lives or dies during an obstetric emergency. She also explored the ways in which regional history and political economics have shaped biomedicine in contemporary Tanzania. Adrienne has a recently published article in Social Science & Medicine entitled “Working in Scarcity: Effects on social interactions and biomedical care in a Tanzanian hospital.” Her research has been funded by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad grant, NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement grant, and a Scholar Award from the international P.E.O. Sisterhood. Adrienne will graduate in May 2017 and plans to accept a postdoctoral research fellowship at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in the School’s Averting Maternal Death and Disability (AMDD) group. 

Adrienne Strong Interview

2016

1st Place Winner

Yen Le

Australian National University

An Incomplete Cure: The Limits of Medical Normalization

The first prize in the annual Peter Kong-ming New Student Research Award was presented to Ms. Yen Le, a doctoral student at the Australian National University.  Ms. Le won the Award with her paper, “An incomplete cure: The limits of medical normalization.”   

Ms. Le grew up in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. She was awarded a scholarship to study in Japan at the Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University where she completed the B.A. and M.A. degrees.   This also allowed her the opportunity to learn another language (Japanese) along with Vietnamese and English.  Following the M.A. degree, she was awarded a scholarship to enter the highly respected doctoral program in the Department of Anthropology at the Australian National University (ANU).  There she was able to work with Dr. Philip Taylor, one of the top Asian scholars in the world.  She has completed her dissertation and was awarded the Ph.D. degree in Anthropology.

Yen’s decision to focus her research on the leprosy village of Quy Hoa was quite serendipitous.  She was traveling in 2009 with a group of friends who were lecturers at the Vietnam National University.  The group visited orphanages, rehab centers, and the leprosy village, distributing charity gifts to the residents. 

This was her first exposure to the community and to the idea that leprosy patients live in an isolated and homogeneous world.   She was intrigued at the time and her interest increased as she progressed with her graduate education.  As a doctoral student at ANU and under Dr. Taylor’s guidance, she was able to develop that initial interest into a PhD research project.  The paper that she submitted to the P. K. New Competition was drawn from that research.

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in communities for leprosy-affected people, Yen's PhD dissertation journeys into the world of people with leprosy in Vietnam. Relating the stories of the Vietnamese who live with this disease it offers an ethnographic rendering of their experiences of affliction and of care. Attentive to the cultural meanings of leprosy, the research guides the reader through the heterogeneous epistemic grounds that constitute this disease in Vietnam, investigating folk aetiologies, religious and state ideologies, scientific and public health discourses, and the performative displays of entitlement and abjection deployed by those with leprosy. 

Yen has also previously lectured at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University - Ho Chi Minh City. She is very interested in anthropology and public health and plans to pursue those areas in the near future.

2nd Place Winner

Elena S. Becker

University of Puget Sound

Malagasy Cookstove Use and the Potential for Alternative Models: A Case Study in Madagascar’s Vakinankaratra region

Elena Becker is an undergraduate at the University of Puget Sound, where she is obtaining a degree in Sociology and Anthropology. She is interested in social change and development, and has conducted independent ethnographic research on generational change in durable intentional communities, on cultural authenticity and the impacts of cultural tourism in Malaysian Borneo, and on the effects of wood-fuel burning cookstoves in rural Madagascar. The latter forms the content of her Peter K. New paper, which outlines the cultural and material characteristics that make these traditional stoves popular, and how those attributes can be applied to alternative stoves to increase their adoption and retention. She will receive her Bachelor of Arts in May 2017.

3rd Place Winner

Lina Stepick

University of California - Los Angeles

You lose something, you know?” Environmental Gentrification, Displacement, andPerceptions of Neighborhood Instability around Light-Rail Public Transit

Lina Stepick is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to graduate school she worked as a community organizer in the East L.A. neighborhood of Boyle Heights on issues of gentrification, displacement, and environmental justice. Her current research focuses on the politics of the urban growth machine and social equity organizing efforts around the current $9 billion investment in L.A. public transit, as well as the impacts of this investment on gentrification and displacement in historically disinvested neighborhoods.

Honorable Mention

Jennifer Zwillenberg

University of Pennsylvania

School And Self: The Alignment and Misalignment of Literacy Practices

2015

1st Place Winner

Robin Valenzuela

Indiana University

The Nashville John School:  Risk Deterrence and the Reintegrative Shaming Approach

Robin Valenzuela is a PhD student in the Anthropology program at Indiana University.  She is originally from Louisville, Kentucky, where she attended the University of Louisville and received her BA in Spanish, her MA in Spanish, a Graduate Certificate in Latin American Studies, and her MA in Anthropology.  Her current research interests include citizenship (namely for Latin American immigrants in the United States), Family Law and Child Protective Services, and motherhood.

2nd Place Winner

Colin Forsyth

University of South Florida

Garlic, Tapir Claws, and Tranquilidad: Structural Constraints and Ethnomedical Solutions…

Colin Forsyth recently completed a Ph.D. in Applied Anthropology at the University of South Florida. He also has an M.P.H in Epidemiology from the University of South Florida (2011) and an M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of New Mexico (1997). He first became aware of Chagas disease while living in Bolivia in the late 1990’s. After losing a brother-in-law to Chagas, a man with three children still in the prime of his life, Colin decided to devote his dissertation research to understanding how people in Bolivia cope with the disease. The research for his paper, “Garlic, Tapir Claws and Tranquilidad: Structural Constraints and Ethnomedical Solutions to Chagas Disease in Tropical Bolivia” took place in a rural area where the majority of the population has the disease. The research was greatly facilitated by the collaboration of the Centro Medico Humberto Parra (CMHP), a nonprofit clinic established by two Chicago endocrinologists.

After completing his first master’s degree in 1997, Colin worked as an English teacher in Bolivia and later as an ESL teacher back in the U.S. He spent several years at a Tampa HR consulting company, but after a decade out of the classroom he decided to change his career path and pursue his academic interests. Colin lives in the Tampa area with his wife and two youngest children; the eldest is at college in New York. He hopes to return to Bolivia and conduct further research on ethnomedical practices. 

3rd Place Winner

Tara Fannon

National University of Ireland - Galway

Out of Sight, Still in Mind: Visually Impaired Women’s Embodied Accounts of Ideal Femininity

Tara Fannon is a PhD candidate at NUI, Galway Ireland. Her dissertation research investigates if, how and to what extent masculinity and disability discourses shape blind and visually impaired men's individual subjectivities and embodied experiences, and whether or not this is empowered or disempowered by the absence of sight- with sight being a primary and privileged informant of social and cultural knowledge. Tara is an adjunct sociology lecturer in NYC where she lives. There, she also enjoys her roles as a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities, a board member of Endangered Bodies NYC and a co-editor of Masculinities 101. Other teaching and research interests include feminist disability theory, culture, health and morality. Links to some of her work can found on Tumblr.

2014

1st Place Winner

Isabella Chan

University of South Florida

Translating International Health Policies into Lived Realities: Restricted Maternal Autonomy in the Peruvian Highlands

Isabella Chan is a PhD student in Global Health at the University of South Florida where she also completed her MA in Applied Anthropology and MPH in Global Health Practice in December of 2013.  She received her BA in Anthropology in 2008 from Georgia State University.  Her research interests include maternal health, health-related decision-making, the political economy of health, health disparities, intimate partner violence, the Peruvian Andes, participatory action research, and social justice. 

Her Peter K New paper, “Translating International Health Policies into Lived Realities: Restricted Maternal Autonomy in the Peruvian Highlands,” examines maternal decision-making regarding prenatal care and childbirth in three rural Andean communities in an effort to understand how women are experiencing and negotiating the shifting landscape of maternal care practices and providers.  Ultimately, this research found that women’s decision-making regarding their bodies and their babies is shaped by their socioeconomic status, gender, and ethnicity. Issues of financial and social coercion as well as ethnic and gender discrimination arose as significant factors structuring risk and constraining maternal agency.  

Alongside the academic endeavors of this research were also several applied outcomes, including a community deliverable, aimed at facilitating open conversation between participating communities and care providers, and the formation of a grassroots women’s group that continues to target some of the issues uncovered during Isabella’s field work as well as other concerns regarding community violence, child nutrition, and reproductive health education. 

Honorable Mention

Maria Carabello

University of Vermont

Starting with a Clean Plate: An Exploration of Healthy Eating and Dietary Adherence

Maria Carabello is a MS student in Food Systems at the University of Vermont, where she also earned her BS in Nutrition and Food Sciences with a minor in Anthropology in May 2013. Her research takes a transdisciplinary approach to complex food and nutritional issues, with an emphasis on integrating classic and novel ethnographic methods. Current research interests include cooking, health, dietary adherence, and pedagogy. 

Her Peter K. New paper, “Starting with a Clean Plate: An Exploration of Healthy Eating and Dietary Adherence,” is an adaptation of her senior honors thesis. The paper explores the behavior of home-cooks in the Northeast and the work of nutrition educators in Vermont, with the aim of identifying ways to improve dietary health through nutritional education. The vantages of the home-cooks and educators reveal that healthy eating and dietary adherence are complex behaviors that require a mindful negotiation of options, choices, and competing priorities. These results suggest that future strategies to improve dietary habits ought to approach the task of adherence as a multi-stage process, rather than a singular pass/fail effort. Maria is currently designing her Master’s thesis, which branches from her past work to focus on cooking as a pedagogical technique with implications as to students’ long-term involvement and relationship with various aspects of food preparation.

2013

1st Place Winner

Brian J. Burke

University of Arizona

Alternative Economies as Development Alternatives: Lessons from the Barter Systems of Medellín, Colombia.

Brian J. Burke received his PhD in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, where he participated in a variety of applied research including projects to study: grassroots environmentalism on the US-Mexico border (with Dr. Diane E. Austin), the strategies of Latin American rural cooperatives in the context of economic globalization (with Drs. Timothy J. Finan and Marcela Vasquez-Leon), ecovillages and fair trade coffee production in Colombia, and his dissertation work on activism for barter systems and alternative currencies in Medellin, Colombia (with Dr. James B. Greenberg). His Peter K New paper on the social and economic impacts of alternative economies grows out of this dissertation work. Since graduating, Brian has been working as a post-doc with the Coweeta Listening Project, a collective of anthropologists and geographers who are studying and promoting the democratization of ecological science in Southern Appalachia.

2nd Place Winner

Amanda Overgaard

University of Nebraska - Omaha

Breast or Bottle: Perceptions of Breastfeeding and their Influence on Breastfeeding Rates in the United States.

Amanda Overgaard completed her Bachelor of Science in Sociology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha with a minor in Psychology in May 2012. Her academic interest is in medical anthropology, particularly maternal child health. Her winning paper, “Breast or Bottle: Perceptions of Breastfeeding and their Influence on Breastfeeding Rates in the United States” is a product of her senior thesis. She hopes to attend graduate school in the fall of 2013.

Honorable Mention

Susan W. Woolley

University of California - Berkeley

Speech that Silences, Silences that Speak: “That’s so Gay,” “That’s so Ghetto,” and “Safe Space” in High School.

Susan W. Woolley received her B.A. in Anthropology from Wesleyan University and an M.A. in Education from U.C. Berkeley. She is completing her Ph.D. in Education with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality at U.C. Berkeley. Her research and teaching interests intersect in the following areas: anthropology of education; language, discourse, and power; gender and sexuality studies; and ethnographic and qualitative research methodology. Susan’s training in socio-cultural and linguistic anthropology and discourse analysis informs her study of the ways heteronormative discourses are reproduced and re-signified through everyday social interactions in school. In her research, she focuses on student-led peer education and teachers’ curricular and pedagogical interventions targeting gender, sexuality, and LGBTQ issues in their school. Examining everyday linguistic and social practices, Susan questions what happens to social constructions of “safe space” when students and teachers both contest and reproduce notions of binary gender and heteronormativity. Her paper “Speech that Silences, Silences that Speak: ‘That’s so Gay,’ ‘That’s so Ghetto,’ and ‘Safe Space’ in High School” focuses on the ways such linguistic expressions interpellate subjects’ identities and social positions and serve as conduits for power and the reproduction of ideology through their injury.

2012

1st Place Winner

David Lawrence

University of Liverpool

The Importance of Education in a Changing Sexual Landscape.

David Lawrence is currently a final year Medical Student at the University of Liverpool, UK and spent 2010/11 completing a Masters in Medical Anthropology at Durham University. Building on extensive experience in the field of Sex and Relationships Education he has conducted research in East Africa into the needs of young people alongside the barriers that prevent them from receiving high quality education. David is also on the Board of the Family Planning Association of the UK, a member association of the International Planned Parenthood Foundation and works closely with an NGO in Eastern Uganda.

2011

1st Place Winner

George Karandinos

University of Pennsylvania

“You Ridin’?”: The Moral Economy of Violence in North Philadelphia

George Karandinos received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania, Health and Societies department in 2010.  He is continuing research begun as an undergraduate around issues of urban poverty, violence, the illicit drug economy and police brutality as a resident ethnographer in a socioeconomically depressed predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood in North Philadelphia.  His research interests include social inequality, health disparities, violence, urban poverty, incarceration, medical anthropology and health care as a human right.  George’s eventual goal is to enter an MD/PhD program in Medical Anthropology and pursue a combined clinical-research career.  His winning paper, entitled “You ridin’?: The Moral Economy of Violence in North Philadelphia” explores the way street violence circulates as a resource, producing and reinforcing durable relationships of mutual obligations and reproducing violence in the inner-city context of imposed ghettoization, public service breakdown and historical and continuing socioeconomic and ethnic marginalization.  The paper draws on Maussian exchange theory, Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and field and an expansion of E.P. Thompson’s moral economy concept.

2010

1st Place Winner

Karen Dyer

University of South Florida

From Cancer to Sexually Transmitted Infection.

Karen Dyer is a PhD student in applied anthropology at the University of South Florida.  She received a dual Masters degree in anthropology and public health from USF in 2008, and her BA in psychology from Connecticut College. Her research interests include experiences of cancer survivorship, health disparities, health-related NGOs, and reproductive and sexual health. Her paper investigated the underlying factors and intricacies of cervical cancer-related stigma through in-depth interviews with cervical cancer survivors. Women’s experiences of stigma were often tied to interacting and interdependent beliefs surrounding causation: cervical cancer’s connection to sexual behavior, its perception as a disease that is caused by individual lifestyle choices and behaviors, and its new recognition as a preventable condition through regular screening and the new HPV vaccine. Beliefs about all of these characteristics have combined to generate untold consequences from the perspective of the survivors—guilt, shame, and embarrassment; fear of others’ beliefs, perceptions and behavior; lack of support services, financial assistance and cutting-edge treatment; and structural discrimination in funding and research policy.  

2009

1st Place Winner

Sheena Nahmn

University of California - Irvine

Between Stigma and Demand

In June 2009, Sheena Nahm received her PhD from the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine with an emphasis in Critical Theory. For her dissertation research, she focused on the implementation of play therapy programs in South Korea for children diagnosed with attachment disorders. In addition to issues of transnational knowledge production and regulation of medical programs across borders, she investigated how the adaptation of a play therapy program affects local caretakers' and practitioners' perceptions of categories such as nature-culture, normal-abnormal, and work-play. Prior to receiving her PhD, Sheena received Bachelor of Arts degrees in Biological Basis of Behavior (biopsychology) and Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001. She went on to receive her Masters in Public Health from Drexel University, with an emphasis in Community Health and Prevention in 2004. There, she was involved in several research projects ranging from health issues among refugees and asylum seekers to food insecurity among urban African American women. Her master's thesis evaluated the effectiveness of hepatitis B multi-media education among Asian immigrant youth in Philadelphia. She is now the Research Program Specialist for the Hollywood, Health & Society (HH&S) program at the University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg Norman Lear Center. She conducts original research, evaluates program activities, assists in data collection and analysis, and presents findings through articles in peer reviewed journals and conferences. She also coordinates research agenda-setting conferences and assists the Program Director with expansion of the research component of the program in the US and overseas.

2008

1st Place Winner

Christina Chauvenet

Wake Forest University

First Line of Defense: Health Care Agents and Childhood Cancer in Recife, Brazil.

Christina Chauvenet will graduate in May 2008 with a B.A. in Political Science and a minor in Latin American Studies, /summa cum laude/ from Wake Forest University with honors in Political Science. Her academic interests include public health and human rights in Latin America, particularly Argentina and Brazil. Her winning paper, entitled "First Line of Defense: Health Care Agents and Childhood Cancer in Recife, Brazil" was the product of her trip to Brazil in the summer of 2007 through a university student research grant. She also recently completed a senior thesis entitled "Exploring Institutional Reform: Combating Police Brutality in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro during the 1990s". Next year, she will begin graduate studies in Latin American Politics at The Institute for the Study of the Americas at the University of London, with an eventual goal of academia. 

2007

1st Place Winner

Jennifer R. Wies

University of Kentucky

Professionalizing Carework: A Case Study of Domestic Violence Shelter Advocates in the United States.

Jennifer R. Wies completed her doctoral education in Anthropology at the University of Kentucky, focusing on applied and medical anthropology.  Her research efforts center on examining structural inequalities that prevent individuals from establishing and maintaining a high quality of life and well-being.  To date, she has focused on social movement advocates and activists working in human service non-profit organizations to capture the grassroots perspectives of human service care work as they articulate with multiple power structures.  Jennifer has taught undergraduate courses at the University of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, and Bluegrass Community and Technical College.  In addition, she has provided intimate partner violence intervention services and prevention programming at the University of Kentucky Women's Place.  

Honorable Mention

Peter C. Little

Oregon State University

"Studying Up” in the Environmental Public Health Sector.

Peter C. Little is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon. He is broadly interested in the role of anthropology in environmental public health debates and advocating for communities impacted by toxic chemical contamination. This research focus has also sparked his interests in science and technology studies and political ecology. He earned his BA in Anthropology at Binghamton University and completed an honors thesis, which received high honors, entitled “Political Ecology, Health, and Environment: Groundwater Contamination in Upstate New York and Its Surfacing Narratives”. The research focused on community and scientific framings of environmental contamination in Endicott, New York, which is home to International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). The relationship between chipboard manufacturing, pollution, and public health is an area of research that informs his current PhD research. He intends to revisit Endicott for his dissertation field research to work closely with a grassroots organization made up of many former IBM workers concerned about occupational and environmental health issues.  

2006

1st Place Winner

Xianghong Feng

Washinton State University

Evaluating the Ecological and Socio-cultural Impacts of Tourism Development in Human Province, China.

Xianghong Feng is a doctoral student in cultural anthropology at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, where her faculty advisor is Prof. John H. Bodley. Her research interests are in Chinese minorities, rural development, and contemporary issues. She worked as an intern journalist covering the reporting of China’s minority areas development at People’s Daily, Beijing, in 2000 and 2002. She received a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 2000 and a master’s degree in folklore in 2003 at Central University of Nationalities, Beijing, P. R. China, Her preliminary dissertation research in 2005 on the impact of tourism development on ethnic minorities in Hunan Province was funded by a Summer Doctoral Fellowship from the Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service, and by an International Research Award from the Department of Anthropology, Washington State University.

Honorable Mention

Colin T. West

University of Arizona

Misreading the Arizona Landscape: Challenging Received Wisdom on Ecological Destruction in Southeastern Arizona.

Colin West is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology and graduate research associate in the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA) at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. He is broadly interested in the human dimensions of global environmental change. Colin has conducted fieldwork in Burkina Faso, West Africa and also the Southwest United States. This research explores the sustainability of rural livelihoods undergoing processes of social and climatic change.

2005

1st Place Winner

Bryan Tilt

University of Washington

Modeling Community Perceptions of Risk from Industrial Pollution in Rural China: A Political-Ecological Approach.

When I began my graduate studies in anthropology at the University of Washington, I did so with the belief that social science should be engaged with real-world problems, and this belief has guided the course of my studies. Because I had lived for several years in South Korea and had a moderate grasp of the Korean language, my intention was to do fieldwork there. But after developing, in my first year, a keen interest in industrialization as a force of social, economic and environmental change, I realized that China would be a more appropriate field site, for several reasons. First, the scale of industrialization is unprecedented. China has transformed itself from an overwhelmingly agrarian nation into an industrial giant--all within the last two decades and with a population of more than 1.2 billion people. And second, the pace of this transformation has meant that the bureaucratic and legal framework for environmental protection and enforcement is lacking. This means that individuals and communities are often forced to cope with dangerous levels of industrial pollution, an unplanned public health experiment with an unknown outcome.

I chose Futian Township in China’s mountainous Sichuan province as my study site partly because, as a poor and under-developed region its reliance on local factories is so acute, and partly out of bureaucratic necessity. As a foreign researcher delving into a sensitive topic like pollution and health, collaboration with Chinese colleagues was a must. The University of Washington has long-standing ties with Sichuan University, and these ties proved invaluable as a way of gaining access to the research site and as a means of cooperating with exceedingly competent Chinese scholars. The study site proved fortuitous for me, since its high, arid mountain landscape reminded me daily of my home in Utah. My wife, Jenna, who participated actively in the fieldwork for this project and who now speaks Chinese with a decidedly Sichuanese accent, concurs. In keeping with my belief that anthropologists should be engaged with real-world problems, I am currently discussing, with colleagues at Sichuan University, the possibility of helping rural factories in Futian invest in environmental mitigation technologies to safe-guard the environment and promote community development.

In addition to my academic work, I have been working at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle for the past two years, collaborating with other anthropologists on a project to assess how Alaskan communities use and manage fishery resources. This experience has broadened my horizons tremendously and has underscored the need for more community-focused research in government agencies. 

I earned my Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Washington in August 2004, with a dissertation entitled “Risk, Pollution and Sustainability in Rural Sichuan, China.” In September 2005, I will begin a new job as Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department at Oregon State University. I am looking forward to packing up the family--which includes my wife Jenna, my seven month-old son Avery, and dog Alta--and exploring the wilds of Oregon.

2nd Place Winner

Jennifer Erickson

University of Oregon

Romani Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Reflections on Family and Violence.

Jennifer Erickson is a PhD student and graduate teaching fellow at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon. She has worked in Bosnia-Herzegovina and as a case manager with refugees in the U.S. She received her M.A. in Anthropology at the University of Oregon. Ms. Erickson is interested in the anthropology of violence and war, race/class/gender, and refugees in the U.S., the former Yugoslavia, and Sudan.

2004

1st Place Winner

Heide Castañeda

University of Arizona

Engaging 'Risk' as a Central Concern for Applied Medical Anthropology:  Prenatal Genetic Counseling with Latina Women.

In contemporary health care settings, the concept of “risk status” is a central feature of patient care and is fundamental to preventative approaches. However, while the clinical concept of “risk” appears to be rather unambiguous, how it becomes interpreted may involve many layers of complex and even contradictory meanings.  Thus, one of the most fruitful applications for contemporary medical anthropology is the critical examination of risk discourse as socially contingent and culturally embedded. On a practical level, understanding ideas about “risk” is an important factor in assuring the equitable provision of health care technology. 

This paper investigates the role of risk discourse in the field of prenatal genetic counseling, using 23 cases from a larger study of Latina women in South Texas* to investigate how patients and clinicians interpret the clinical construct of “risk.” It appears that differential perceptions of risk are not simply a problem of information transfer in the clinic, but are rooted in the various meanings and values each party brings with them into the consult. These concerns become obscured within shifting personal, clinical, and epidemiological concepts of risk. I argue that the concept of “risk “ -- especially as it is invoked when making judgments about patient care -- is not a neutral, objective construct, but carries important implications for equality in the clinical setting.

Heide Castañeda is a PhD student and research associate at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. She received her M.A. degree in Anthropology at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and an M.P.H. at the University of Texas -- Houston Health Science Center. Ms. Castañeda is interested in health disparities and migrant health in the U.S. and Europe.

*The project from which this data was drawn was funded by the National Institutes of Health Center for Human Genome Research. The co-investigators of the project are Carole H. Browner (University of California Los Angeles) and Linda M. Hunt (Michigan State University). In addition, some patient interviews were collected through a separate project funded by the San Antonio Area Foundation.

2003

1st Place Winner

Erin Dean

University of Arizona

Environmental Discourse and Cultural Contradiction.

While Indian tribes are encouraged to pursue tribal autonomy, particularly in managing natural resources on reservations, that undertaking is often overwhelming for small tribes. Using the case study of watershed management on the reservation of the Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians in northern Arizona, this paper challenges the notion that tribal autonomy, or even legal authority, are necessarily the most effective means for securing control of natural resources.

First, I locate the watershed management attempts of the Kaibab reservation in the historical and contemporary context of water issues in the Southwest. While water is always a volatile issue in the Southwest, current over-allocation of water rights, artificial separations between surface and groundwater, and unwieldy bureaucracy have created a near-incomprehensible labyrinth for tribes seeking to manage their water resources.

Next, I address water management on the local level of the Kaibab Paiute reservation. Using the linguistic methodology of critical discourse analysis, I examine how the three major stakeholder groups in the region—scientists, Mormans, and the Kaibab Paiutes—articulate views of the environment in forums of public discourse. These discourses, I propose, reflect variable understandings of the natural world in general, and water in particular. However, these competing worldviews are abstractions only; they do not exist in bounded isolation, but are consistently challenged and adapted at an individual level. Not only must Kaibab managers address water issues within a difficult historical and institutional environment, but in a social environment where fundamental disagreements exist regarding the relationship between humans and nature.

I conclude that the Kaibab Paiutes, with a history of enforced inclusion in both Mormon and scientific communities, are better positioned to work with the various stakeholders than anyone else. Their strength regarding resource management, I argue, lies not in autonomy, but in connectivity.

Ms. Erin Dean is a PhD student at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, majoring in Anthropology and minoring in Renewable Natural Resource Management. She has also been a research assistant for the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology for the past four years, working predominantly on environmental anthropology projects in the Southwest.

2002

1st Place Winner

Miriam Williams Boeri

Georgia State University

"Hell, I'm an Addict, But I Ain't No Junkie": An Ethnographic Analysis of the Heroin Career.

This study applies sociological theories to ethnographic fieldnotes, survey data, and life histories of current baby boomer-age heroin users.* By analyzing the lived experience of active heroin users in the baby boomer cohort, which includes both short-term and long-term use, diverse trajectories in the heroin career can be examined. This study provides not only a description of today’s heroin addict but also a typology of drug users based on insights collected from the users’ own reports. A synthesis of symbolic interaction, social construction, and life course theories provide the framework for this analytical ethnography of the everyday lives of older heroin users. The grounded theory analysis of in-depth interviews and drug use surveys allowed a typology of the heroin career to emerge. The heroin-using career typology presented here is composed of nine categories that differ by maintenance of social roles and control of drug use. The typology also acts as an aide to promote changes for more humane drug policies and provides an additional tool for treatment, intervention, and law enforcement to help users maintain social roles and reduce the criminal element in drug-related activities.

Ms. Boeri is a doctoral candidate (ABD) at Georgia State University and a research coordinator in the Department of Sociology. She received her undergraduate degree from Kennesaw State University with a major in communications. Having spent 15 years in Europe and conversant in two foreign languages, Ms. Boeri is interested in cross-cultural research on drug use issues, with a focus on identity reconstruction and role exit.

*The project from which this data was drawn, Trends, was funded by a National Institute of Health/ National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) grant (RO1DA12639). Principal investigators are Dr. Kirk Elifson, Georgia State University, and Dr. Claire Sterk. Emory University, Rollins School of Public Health.

2nd Place Winner

Keri M. Walker

Agnes State College

Cajun Illness Narratives of Diabetes Type II.

3rd Place Winner

Warren Wylupski

University of New Mexico

Influencing the Quality of Police Service by Understanding How Police Attain Professional Status.

2001

1st Place Winner

Andrew Gardner

University of Arizona

Social Capital and Shifting Identity in the Louisiana Oil Patch

The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, experts typically gauge the impact of labor market deregulation in economic terms. In the course of this paper, I argue that in the Louisiana oilpatch, one can perceive a more significant and complex stratum of social impacts underlying those of an economic nature. Utilizing social capital as the fulcrum for analysis, I explore the shifting structure of relations resulting from the sudden deregulation of the trucking sector of the Louisiana oilpatch.

Second, I seek to demonstrate that as a conceptual tool, social capital merits a more nuanced application. While often touted as a panacea to a variety of social and economic ills, social capital is here conceptualized as a two-edged sword: the structure of the industry prior to deregulation built upon the social and familial networks that predominate in Acadiana, resulting in a more egalitarian set of power relations than those emerging since deregulation. At the same time, however, these networks of social capital served as systems of exclusion, promoting the welfare of some at the expense of others. Social capital and the networks in which it thrives, I argue, must be conceived as systems of power relations.

Finally, I argue that the exploration and analysis of identity represents a vital frontier to applied work. In the context of the oilpatch, the truckers have selectively and strategically configured an occupational identity by which they refuse the mold of industrial labor – instead promoting those entrepreneurial aspects of their occupation that were essential to the industry prior to deregulation. Through this process, previously inconceivable alternatives – including collective action – are now being considered.

Mr. Gardner is a doctoral student at the University of Arizona and a research assistant in the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA). His M.A. was completed under the guidance of Profs. Diane Austin, Thomas McGuire and Timothy Finan.

Previously, Mr. Gardner received his undergraduate degree from George Washington University with a major in philosophy.

2nd Place Winner

J. Paige MacDougall

Deafness and Sign Language in a Yucatec Maya Community-communication and Cultural Inclusion

3rd Place Winner

Roberto Porro

University of South Florida

Sensitive Sensing: Reflections on the Promises and Perils of Integrating Remote Sensing in Anthropological Research

2000

1st Place Winner

Melissa A. Checker

New York University

It's in the Air: Redefining the environment as a New Metaphor for Old Social Justice Struggles.

In cities across the United States, minority communities often bear the brunt of urban life's toxic burdens and host a disproportionate number of hazardous waste generating facilities. Over the past decade, a new grassroots movement, known as environmental justice, has begun to address these environmental inequalities. For environmental justice activists, their "rights" include access to toxin free air and water as well as to all of the urban resources to which they have historically been denied or had limited access.

This paper uses two cases to illustrate how minority activists are appropriating the discourses of the mainstream environmental movement and re-defining them as social justice issues. The first case stems from field research conducted between 1998 and 1999 with African American environmental justice activists in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Augusta, Georgia. These activists described their neighborhood as a "toxic donut" because at least nine factories, junkyards and other polluting industries surrounded it. In 1990, Hyde Park's neighborhood association, begun as a civil rights organization, added the struggle to remediate neighborhood contamination to their list of concerns. The second case is based on field research conducted in 1995 with Latino and Hasidic activists in Brooklyn, New York. For three decades, these two ethnic groups had engaged in fierce battles over the allocation of resources such as schools, housing and police protection. However, in the early 1990s, the groups joined forces to protest poor environmental quality in their neighborhood.

The paper demonstrates how in each case, activists quickly folded other social justice issues into environmental discourse. At times, activists expanded the meaning of "the environment" to include all of the resources to which they were denied access. In certain situations, the environment also symbolized common ground and became a basis for inter-racial and interethnic political cooperation. The ambiguous environmental narratives that activists constructed then became contexts for multiple organizing strategies as well as cross-cultural alliances.

The findings in this paper suggest that environmental discourse presented an alternative avenue for political opposition to problems of housing, schools, etc. Including the environment on their agendas for social change enabled activists to construct expansive organizing narratives. These narratives then allowed them to develop and sustain new strategies and alliances that strengthened their social justice struggles.

Ms. Checker is a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at New York University where her major professor is Owen M. Lynch. The data for Ms. Checker's paper were collected during a field research project involving a group of African American environmental justice activists in Georgia who were protesting the contamination of their community. She has a long-standing interest in this area, having completed earlier a master's thesis on an environmental justice group in Brooklyn.

Ms. Checker received her undergraduate degree (cum laude) from the University of Pennsylvania with majors in English literature and urban folklore. She matriculated at New York University after working for four years in Northern California with several non-profit groups.

2nd Place Winner

Karen Schifferdecker

University of Connecticut

Poison in the Honey: Gender Ideologies and Sexual Relations Among Youth in Dar es Salaam.

1999

1st Place Winner

Pierre Minn

Yale University

Water in Their Eyes, Dust on Their Land: Heat, Illness and Suffering in a Haitian Town.

Rural Haitians experience a great deal of physical suffering as part of their daily lives. Extreme poverty, land degradation and lack of infrastructure have created an environment in which even simple tasks require a great deal of energy. This paper, based on two summers of feildwork in Haiti, is about the illness condition chale (heat) as it is described by the residents of a small coastal town. The illness is thought to be caused by overexposure to heat and exacerbated by physical labor, such as working in fields or carrying water.In addition to describing the ways in which the condition affects single individuals, Haitians also incorporate the larger themes of poverty and environmental damage into their discourses on chale. Their narratives provide a useful way of re-examining current conceptualizations of "folk illnesses" and also show the ways in which environmental conditions can shape illness experiences.

Mr. Minn's interest in Haiti grew from a research assistantship with the Yale Global Migration project. Subsequently, he spent the summers of 1997 and 1998 in Haiti conducting research on health conditions and beliefs. He has presented the initial results of his work at meetings of the Haitian Studies Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology. Mr. Minn received his BA in anthropology from Yale University in May of 1999, and was awarded a Fulbright Grant to South Korea. He plans to pursue graduate study in medical anthropology and development.

2nd Place Winner

Johanna Crane

San Fransico State University

HIV and the Economy of Poverty

1998

1st Place Winner

Devah Pager

University of Wisconsin

The Interaction of Structure and Culture in South Africa's Post-apartheid Schools.

The interaction between structure and culture has been the focus of social science research for many decades. Given the relatively invariant nature of the economic structure in most societies, however, it is difficult to adequately measure the impact of these structural factors on other related social forces. South Africa represents one nation where the recent dramatic political transformation has created an ideal context in which to examine cultural responsiveness to structural change. While these processes are manifested in all social, political, and economic sectors, the education system is one institution in which this relationship between structure and culture is particularly clear.

In this paper, I examine the interaction between structure and culture in black township schools, with a focus on teachers' perspectives for rebuilding a culture of learning in post-apartheid South African schools. My findings are based on interviews and questionnaires administered to teachers and principals from four secondary schools in Khayelitsha, the largest black township in Cape Town.

Despite the massive transformation in economic opportunities now available to black South Africans, teachers continue to display feelings of apathy or antipathy towards their work and students remain indifferent to the learning process. A culture seems to be firmly entrenched among the school community which perpetuates the lack of enthusiasm, interest and effort.

While it is premature to claim that structural transformation has had no impact on school cultures, the initial evidence suggests that cultures are far more resistant to change than popular sociological theory may predict. While material/structural concerns were often the first to be brought up as salient indicators of the school's decay, when probed deeper, teachers consistently shifted focus to the more intangible components of the school's culture of learning. Stressing issues of discipline, training, and support, respondents emphasized the importance of interventions which go beyond structural repairs to directly address the human resource needs of the school.

Ms. Devah Pager is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin. In 1993, she earned a B.A. degree (with highest honors) from U.C.L.A., where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She earned the M.A. degree from Stanford University. The research for her paper was conducted while she was a graduate student at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Her faculty advisor is Prof. David Grusky.

1997

1st Place Winner 

Timothy J. Hoff

SUNY - Albany

Prof. & Organ. Deviance Physician Managers HMO

2nd Place Winner 

Kofi B. Effah

Texas A&M

Reformulation of the Polygyny-Fertility Hypothesis

3rd Place Winner

Aminur Rahman

University of Manitoba

Micro-lending Initiatives for Equitable and Sustainable Development 

1996

1st Place Winner

Sandy Smith-Nonini

University of North Carolina

Primary Health Care and its Unfulfilled Promise of Community Participation

Honorable Mentions

Suchada Thaweesit

University of Washington

Participatory Research in Thailand

Dee Mack Williams


Columbia University

Patchwork, Pastoralists, and Perception: Dune Sand in Mongolia

1995

1st Place Winner

Nancy E. Schoenberg

University of Florida

A Convergence of Health Beliefs: An Ethnography of Adherence 

2nd Place Winners

Robin B. Devin 

University of Connecticut

Women's Work and Child Health in Rural Haiti


Kathryn B. Held

University of Oklahoma

An Historical Case of Hunter's Syndrome with Analysis of Implications

Honorable Mentions

Laurie Schaffner-Montes

Smith College

Runaway Teenagers

Laurie Fields DeRose


Brown University

Women's Work, Household Characteristics, and Breastfeeding in Ghana

1994

1st Place Winner

Arona Ragins

University of California - Berkeley

Implementing Self Care: The Transformation of Policy at a Sickle Cell Clinic


Honorable Mentions

Mary Virnoche 

University of Colorado - Boulder

Embodiment and Integration: Midwife-Assisted Home Birth

Zibin Guo

University of Connecticut

Health, Medicine, and Belief: Chinese-American Elderly in a Developing Multicultural Urban Community

Zach Lewton

Patients' Perceptions of Physicians and Intentional Non-adherence to Prescription Regimens Among the Elderly

1993

1st Place Winner

Nancy Romero-Daza


SUNY - Buffalo

Multiple Sexual Partners, Migrant Labor, and the Making of an Epidemic

Honorable Mentions

Teresa Woods-Hunt

University of Washington

Latah: Disease Created Through Discourse

Margaret M. Connors


University of Massachusetts - Amhest

The Role of Subculture in the Transmission of HIV Among IV Drug Users

1992

1st Place Winner

Gery W. Ryan

University of Florida

Can We Predict What Mothers Do

2nd Place Winner

Peter Hessler


Princeton

Sikestown: An Ethnography of a Town and Its Youth

Honorable Mentions

Janie L. Canty

University of Miami

The Health Needs of Black Male Offenders

Jerry Kimery

University of California - Los Angeles

Labor Process and Race Relations

Lisa Maher


Rutgers

Women on the Edge: Gender and Crack Cocaine

1991

1st Place Winner

Devon Brewer

University of California - Irvine

Hip Hop Graffiti Writers’ Evaluations of Strategies to Control Illegal Graffiti

2nd Place Winner

Elizabeth L. Krause

Oregon State

The Looking Glass of Historic Preservation in Micronesia: A Reflection of Modernization and Changing Values