SfAA Student Endowed Award

Eligibility

Application and Deadline

Previous Recipients

2023

Paige Dawson

Paige Dawson is a master's student at San Diego State University. Prior to pursuing a master's in Anthropology, Paige received a B.A. in Sustainability with a minor in Political Science at SDSU. With support from the National Science Foundation and the US NSF Moorea Coral Reef Long Term Ecological Research project, her research explores the socio-cultural and political dynamics of community-based marine management of a small-scale fishery in Moorea, French Polynesia. Providing an account of how management is put into practice, her research analyzes how different stakeholder groups tie together heterogeneous elements to compose their versions of “success” and “failure” in marine management under the marine management framework known as the Plan de Gestion de l'Espace Maritime.

Having a passion for sustainability from a young age, Paige also has extensive experience working in the environmental non-profit sector. From 2019-2020, she served with AmeriCorps as a Sustainability Outreach Coordinator with the Tennessee Environmental Council in Nashville, Tennessee. Paige also holds a position on the Board of Directors of The Sprout Experience, an environmental education non-profit organization focused on providing immersive learning experiences for K-12 students. She also works as the Internship Coordinator for the organization, working closely with undergraduate students pursuing a degree in the field of sustainability. Paige's experience has allowed her to work with people from around the world, including scientists and members of the Maasai tribe participating in community-based carnivore conservation in Kenya, local Tennessee residents participating in environmental restoration projects during her service with AmeriCorps, scientists focusing on indigenous knowledge in Trinidad & Tobago, as well as fishers in a small-scale fishery during her master’s research in French Polynesia.

2022

DaNaysia Ross

DaNaysia is a master’s student concentrating in Medical Anthropology at The University of Memphis. She earned her B.A. in Anthropology at The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2018. Her research interest includes Black maternal health disparities, reproductive justice, kinship, and knowledge production. Her anthropological work is rooted in Black feminist theory and praxis through community-based participatory research methodologies. After completing her M.A program, She plans to continue her work in medical school where she aspires to become a Family Physician specializing in Obstetrics in an underserved community.

2020

Victoria Bochniak

Victoria Bochniak is a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her dissertation research, in partnership with the Apsáalooke (Crow) people of Southcentral Montana, investigates Apsáalooke survivance during the establishment of the Crow Reservation through the analysis of archaeological, archival, and ethnographic research. Bochniak has been involved with the Apsáalooke community on numerous archaeological and oral history projects since 2010 and is completing her dissertation within a community-based participatory research (CBPR) framework. She believes that CBPR with a survivance theoretical lens can create meaningful outcomes with and for Indigenous and descendant communities. 

Additionally, Bochniak is in the beginning stages of a project that examines experiences many graduate students have that affect their research and successes in graduate school, but that too often go under-discussed. These experiences may be traumatic or positive events in students’ personal lives or unexpected encounters while conducting fieldwork. Although these experiences may be different for each graduate student, we often share similar outcomes. For instance, our abilities to conduct research, structure what we write, and the ways we understand the world may all be altered in the aftermath of these personal events. Bochniak is dedicated to building a platform that will allow graduate students to reflect and share their graduate experiences to ultimately create a resource for students to consult before, during, and after fieldwork or graduate school. The goal of this project is to share graduate student stories, especially as they relate to research and knowledge production in anthropology, and to let current and future graduate students know that they are not alone. 

2019

Noémie Gonzalez Bautista

PhD candidate, Université Laval, Québec, Canada

I am a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Université Laval in Québec, Canada. For my PhD project, I am working with the Atikamekw community of Wemotaci in the Nitaskinan territory (Quebec province) and the SOPFEU (the forest fire protection agency of the province). I am analyzing the social interactions between these two entities them and with the fire, the territory and other non-humans during 3 forest fires that burnt near Wemotaci in 1977, 1997 and 2010. The project’s main applied goal is to contribute to the improvement of the relationship between these groups for potential future collaborations in a context of cyclical wildfire.

I hold a Master's degree in Environmental Science from National Polytechnic Institute of Lorraine (France) and after a few years working in environmental education I went back to the university to obtain a Master's degree in Ecological Anthropology from Museum national d’Histoire naturelle of Paris which led me to my present PhD in Anthropology. This path encourages me to build bridges between social science and environmental science in my research, and my interest in studying disasters allows me to do that.

As a white immigrant settler in Canada I also try to use my privileges in and out of academia to pursue social justice. In my research projects, I am working at creating more space for marginalized people in places dominated by more privileged people. I also include a feminist perspective and a reflection on decolonization in my research. 

2018

Daina Stanley

PhD Candidate, McMaster University

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Medical Anthropology at McMaster University. My PhD research, entitled “Living and Dying With Dignity: An Ethnographic Study of Aging, End of Life and Palliative Care in Prison,” is rooted in my commitment to the health and well-being of incarcerated communities and community-centered praxis.  My current research is a community-engaged ethnographic study that explores the living and dying experiences of incarcerated men and women, as well as the experiences of prisoners engaged in hospice as volunteer providers of care in U.S. state prisons.  My research also examines community-based palliative and hospice care models and programs in prisons across the United States.  I will use my findings to suggest meaningful models of community-based end-of-life care in correctional settings that include prisoners in the process.   I hold an M.A. in Anthropology and a B.A. in Anthropology and Criminology from the University of Ottawa. 

2017

Bertha Mume

2016

Sonia Grant

PhD Candidate, University of Chicago

I am a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Chicago, where my dissertation research looks at the political ecologies of oil and gas development in the Four Corners region of the United States. I am particularly interested in the history of extraction technologies and technoscience; toxicity; property regimes; settler colonialism; nationalisms; knowledge production in the atmospheric and geophysical sciences; questions of scale in environmental politics; and affect. 

I completed a BA in International Development Studies from Dalhousie University in my hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and a MA in Geography from the University of Toronto, where my research looked at pipeline politics in the Great Lakes region, and specially, the psychosocial aftermath of a major pipeline oil spill in Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. My research and political work outside of academia has been grounded in a commitment to the principles of environmental justice. 

2015

Clarice Amorim

PhD Candidate, Oregon State University

My name is Clarice Amorim and I am currently a PhD student in Public Health (Health Promotion and Health Behavior) at Oregon State University. I have background in Anthropology – both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student at the University of Kansas – which is of great importance to my career. Being an anthropologist guides my research interests and allows me to contribute in a unique way to a very interdisciplinary field. As a student, I am in the process of conducting secondary data analysis for my independent research project, in which I use quantitative methods to explore a possible longitudinal association between acculturation levels and blood pressure trajectories in a sample of older Latinos. As a graduate research assistant, I use qualitative methods to analyze and better understand the dynamics of caregiving among Latino caregiver-care receiver dyads. As a future researcher, I am interested in understanding the role that culture plays in the health of Latinos living in the United States, and I hope to pursue projects that may have a direct impact in health of this aging population.

2014

Joeva Rock

PhD Candidate, American University

I'm a PhD student at American University where I focus on colonial legacies in West Africa, specifically in relation to globalization, identity, development, and social movements. Core to my interests are processes of contemporary coloniality, and my current research looks at responses and opposition to foreign development projects in Ghana, and asks how cultural logics and varying notions of sovereignty frame strategies of resistance. 

I received my BA and passion for interdisciplinary research from the University of California-San Diego, where I majored in International Studies with a minor in African Studies.

2013

Sam Schramski

PhD Candidate, University of Florida

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Interdisciplinary Ecology at the University of Florida and a visiting pre-doctoral scholar at the Anthropological Center for Training and Research on Global Environmental Change (ACT) at Indiana University-Bloomington. I am writing my dissertation on household adaptation and resilience to climate change in the rural Eastern Cape, South Africa. I assess the current socio-ecological situation of two regions in the province, and offers alternatives to the current measures for adaptive capacity in the region. I focus on two forms of social network analyses to examine household exchanges of a variety of goods and services. I am also interested in changing rural identities and how policies in rural South Africa may better address them. My research was supported by NSF, the Center for African Studies (UF), the Tropical Conservation and Development Program (UF), and the Association of American Geographers.

I received a B.A. in American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and an MA in Geography from the University of Florida.

2012

Zhiying Ma

PhD Candidate, University of Chicago

I am a joint Ph.D. student in the Departments of Comparative Human Development and Anthropology at the University of Chicago. My research has long been concerned with issues of biopolitics and ethics in medicine, in particular psychiatry. My Master research addressed the question of why many patients with mental disorders and their families preferred to explain their illnesses in non-biomedical terms and sought help from alternative approaches rather than psychiatric professionals. Through participant observation and in-depth interviews in a female schizophrenia ward, I discovered that Chinese Medicine and folk religion helped patients and families to recuperate the social person and to reconstruct a socio-moral-cosmic world where they granted their lives meaning, reconceived normality, reclaimed agency, and resisted the individualization and pharmaceutical control brought by psychiatry.

Continuing to work on Chinese psychiatry, my dissertation research will focus on the national phenomenon that the family is sanctioned by law and psychiatric policies to be the foremost agent in hospitalizing a person against his/her will, but also in providing care to the patient. I will explore these practices’ influences on ethics of care, on human rights (rights to freedom and self-determination, as well as rights to appropriate healthcare), on intimacy and subjectivity, but also on the distribution of healthcare responsibilities among state, civil, and familial sectors.

I received my undergraduate degrees in Psychology and Philosophy from Peking University, China.

2011

Kathryn Ranhorn

My name is Kathryn Ranhorn and I am a recent graduate of the University of Florida where I finished a bachelor's degree magna cum laude  in Anthropology as well as a minor in African Studies.  My undergraduate honors thesis,  entitled "Homeless Where the Heart Is: An Ethnography of Illness, Structural Violence, and Homelessness in Gainesville " consisted of a year of ethnographic fieldwork including interviews and surveys with Gainesville's local homeless population.  This research was funded by the McNair Scholars Program as well as the University of Florida University Scholars Program. 

Prior to graduation, I spent one semester in Tanzania where I studied Anthropology and Swahili at the University of Dar es Salaam as a Gilman International Scholar; in Tanzania I worked with the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative (CHAI), took part in an archaeological excavation at Olduvai Gorge, and taught English at the local woodcarver's market where I helped lay the foundation for a microfinance non-profit.  I recently returned to Tanzania to continue my non-profit microfinance project with funding from Kathryn Wasserman Davis 100 Projects for Peace.  Here I am currently combining tourism with microfinance to fight poverty among the Makonde woodcarvers, while conducting some research and preparing for my next step in academia.  I plan to pursue a PhD in Anthropology blending evolutionary, cultural, and applied approaches to illuminate and alleviate inequality both in the United States and East Africa.

2010

Jennifer Hale-Gallardo

PhD Candidate, University of Florida

I am a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Florida in the Department of Anthropology. I am currently writing my dissertation on the institutional recognition of popular healing practices in Mexico. My study investigates what's at stake for indigenous healers under new articulations with state health institutions. In my dissertation, I approach official traditional medicine policy as an emerging cultural formation that can be studied through its everyday practice in order to trace its more elusive social effects. This research was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the American Philosophical Society.

I received a B.S. in Environmental Studies from Florida International University and a Master's in Forest Resources and Conservation from the University of Florida.

2009

Leila Sievanen

PhD, University of Washington

I recently received a PhD from the environmental anthropology department from the University of Washington. My dissertation “Social Seascapes, Political Landscapes: Conflict and Cooperation within an Indonesian Marine Park”, investigated social conflict in a well-known marine protected area. My research highlights the importance of considering a socio-ecological approach to marine management. I demonstrate the value of social science, and particularly anthropology, in its ability to theorize the social and cultural constraints that led to the arguable failure of social goals to be met in this park and ramification for its biological success.

I have worked on fisheries issues on the United States West Coast and Alaska through employment at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, Alaska Fisheries Science Center, and a California-based fisheries anthropology consulting firm.  

I received my undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences, with an Ecology and Evolution emphasis, from the University of California at Davis.

2008

Megan N. Prunty

PhD Candidate, Temple University

Broadly speaking, my research is located within the field of environmental anthropology and examines the relationships that people and communities develop to ‘the environment’.  More specifically, I look at how individuals come to see themselves as stewards for the environment.  I am interested in the ways in which these environmental subjectivities are then acted upon by association with activist organizations, non-profit organizations, community development corporations and government agencies. 

My local research in Philadelphia examines ‘greening projects’ throughout the city.  I look at the ways in which various projects, such as urban farms, community gardens and brownfield redevelopment, employ ideas about nature.  I am concerned with how discourses of nature and the environment, as aesthetic ideals, are further depicted as having the power to create ‘community’ and transform urban neighborhoods. 

I received my undergraduate degree in English Literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder and am currently pursuing my Ph.D. in Anthropology at Temple University.

2007

Andrea Frantz

PhD Candidate, Arizona State University

I am a senior anthropology major with minors in Latin American Studies, Ethnic Studies in the United States, and Spanish at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. I am native to this region having graduated from Berwick Area High School in 2003. Upon my arrival at Bloomsburg University, I chose anthropology as my major, and I did so with the intent of using anthropological knowledge to help people live better lives. I focused my studies around indigenous North Americans, as they are among the most neglected minorities in the world. I have worked with indigenous people in Mexico and the Northeastern United States though internships and ethnographic research. I plan to pursue my Ph.D. in ethnohistory with an applied anthropological perspective at Arizona State University, beginning in fall 2006.