Session Abstracts

A-B-C | D-E-F | G-H-I | J-K-L | M-N-O | P-Q-R  | S-T-U-V | W-X-Y-Z

ALEXANDER, Sara (Baylor U) Human Rights and the Environment in the Context of Climate Change. Climate change threatens the fundamental interdependence that exists between human rights and environmental quality. Humanity’s reliance on a healthy environment makes such a right a prerequisite to the enjoyment of other human rights. Local populations not technically indigenous are most vulnerable because they have received less entitlement to natural resources through international law. Climate change exacerbates challenges to populations who are unable to claim basic rights such as self-determination, autonomy, or traditional land rights. These papers explore human responses to climate change in terms of shifting value systems, changing worldviews, adjustments in how certain human rights are conceptualized, and redefining goals for the future. sara_alexander@baylor.edu (TH-05)
 
ALEXANDER, William (UNCW) The Future of Forever Chemicals?: Citizen Participation and Rising Awareness of Toxic Contamination in a Time of Deregulation. There is growing public awareness of the health effects of exposure to Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) – often called “Forever Chemicals” because they do not degrade in the environment and persistently remain in the body. Exposure has been linked to kidney and liver disease, cancers, and numerous other conditions. Many states are enacting strict standards limiting PFAS contamination. How is public awareness translating into action? What strategies are organizers using to form effective coalitions? How are they engaging policy-makers to hold polluting industries accountable? What challenges do groups face in this period of deregulation of environmental protection and science? alexanderw@uncw.edu (TH-156)
 
ALTMAN, Heidi (GA Southern U) and FAYARD, Kelly (U Denver) Native American Cultural Resource Management: Sovereignty Over the Past. Cultural resource management (CRM) is a critical means for Native people who live in complex and diverse societies to enhance and defend their sovereignty and human rights. This roundtable discussion, with participants who are citizens of and who work in Native American communities, focuses on how CRM and other applied anthropological methods provide mechanisms for communities to explore, document and analyze their own pasts, as well as to develop interpretations in keeping with community standards. The navigation of this complex terrain is discussed by participants in the panel and based in their own research and applied work in this field. heidi.altman@gmail.com (W-154)
 
ANDREATTA, Susan (UNCG) and MARKOWITZ, Lisa (U Louisville) Teaching Food Politics in Trumpian Times: Reflections and Strategies. Over the years we have seen an increase in food-related degree programs and courses in Anthropology and sister-disciplines. Food offers an avenue for experiential learning on many fronts and in the proposed roundtable we focus on course work which explicitly promotes engagement in political and social activism. University faculty will describe efforts to incorporate active learning in such arenas as electoral politics, climate change, food security, food justice, and migrant labor into their courses. Presenters are asked to recount successes, challenges and their resolution or lack thereof. We invite audience participation in applying anthropology in the agrifood system. s_andrea@uncg.edu (W-61)
 
ARTZ, Matt (Azimuth Labs) Less Common Applications of Business Anthropology. Historically when people discussed business anthropology, organizational and consumer research roles were at the forefront of the conversation. Today, that conversation has shifted to user experience (UX). While these are all critical applications of business anthropology, there are other roles that students and practitioners should consider. This panel explores less common applications of business anthropology through the work of five early-career business anthropologists working in digital product management, social impact storytelling, thought leadership insights, strategic operations management, and architecture. The panelists will share their experiences with applying the theories and methods of the discipline at the frontier of business anthropology. ma@mattartz.me (S-13)
 
AUSTIN, Diane (U Arizona) Can Household Solar Technologies Help Us Achieve Energy Justice? Southwestern U.S. and northwestern Mexico are characterized by hot, arid conditions expected to become more extreme in coming years. Tucson, AZ is already the U.S.’s third fastest-warming city. Such conditions may favor adoption of solar technologies, but lack of knowledge and pre-existing vulnerabilities including inadequate housing and economic instability prevent many households from participating. Collaborators from the University of Arizona Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology and Climate Assessment for the Southwest, Sonora Environmental Research Institute, and Universidad Tecnológico de Nogales will guide discussion of environmental and social issues affecting accessibility of solar technologies and efforts to achieve energy justice. daustin@email.arizona.edu (W-96)
 
BAILEY, Eric (ECU) Human Rights and Social Justice: Setting Our Vision for the Future. The Human Rights and Social Justice committee plays a pivotal role for SfAA in building collaborative relationships with human rights and professional associations, develops and provides resources to its members, and creates a community of people dedicated to social justice issues. Establishing our specific areas of interests and action items for the immediate future is critical to the continual growth of our committee. This open discussion provides members to re-examine and debate HRSJ issues such as global health inequities, immigration, political conflicts with indigenous rights, homelessness, gender, activism, race and ethnic relations. baileye@ecu.edu (W-62)
 
BAKER, Beth (CSULA) Belonging beyond Citizenship: Mobility and Exclusion in an Era of Hate. Human mobility is central for survival as violence, racism, and climate change make it impossible for people to stay put. Governing institutions are inadequate to address human crises related to mobility. Border walls, concentration camps, and migrant exclusion are key fulcrums of violence around the world. This panel explores conflicts around citizenship, belonging, and rights, including Central Americans on the Mexico-U.S. border, the immigrants’ rights movement in the U.S, public opinion of ICE, and women in the U.S.-Mexico border zone fighting for healthcare. We are interested in discourses of belonging and exclusion and emergent forms of collectivity and resistance. bbakerc@calstatela.edu (W-153)
 
BARGIELSKI, Richard (USF) More-Than-Human Approaches to Environmental Learning, Part I: More-Than-Human Approaches to Risk. Multispecies ethnographies, seeking to understand the important role of non-humans in human social life, have gained traction as a novel approach among anthropologists and related fields. Drawing on post-humanist philosophy, multispecies frameworks have not been readily integrated by many applied anthropologists to date. This session asks: What are the possible opportunities and limitations for more-than-human ethnography among applied anthropologists? How do notions of non-human agency contribute to the ability of environmental anthropologists to produce meaningful applied work? Papers in this session will develop operational examples of applied multispecies ethnography through community engagement and environmental education. bargielski@mail.usf.edu (TH-96)
 
BARGIELSKI, Richard (USF) More-Than-Human Approaches to Environmental Learning, Part II: Imagining More-Than-Human Futures. Multispecies ethnographies, seeking to understand the important role of non-humans in human social life, have gained traction as a novel approach among anthropologists and related fields. Drawing on post-humanist philosophy, multispecies frameworks have not been readily integrated by many applied anthropologists to date. This session asks: What are the possible opportunities and limitations for more-than-human ethnography among applied anthropologists? How do notions of non-human agency contribute to the ability of environmental anthropologists to produce meaningful applied work? Papers in this session will develop operational examples of applied multispecies ethnography through community engagement and environmental education. bargielski@mail.usf.edu (TH-126)
 
BARNES, Kathrine (Marshfield Clinic Rsch Inst) Risky Childhoods: Conceptualizing Risk Taking as a Part of Childhood and Human Development. Traumatic injury is the leading cause of death in children after infancy (Dowd). Yet, some research extolls the benefits of risky play for its ability to teach children how to regulate fear and anger (LaFreniere). Lack of play, such researchers say, results in neuroticism and psychopathology (Gray). Then, how can adults (i.e., parents, guardians, teachers, researchers, etc.) balance risks with benefits and reach consensus with experts on this contentious issue? What can anthropology teach us of risk conceptualization to guide the public’s decision-making? What examples exist in other related fields and other societies (past or current) that help shed light on different perspectives? barnes.kate@marshfieldresearch.org (S-15)
 
BERNSTEIN, Bruce (Pueblo of Pojoaque) and MARKS, Jamie-Lee (NPS) New Mexico’s Tribal Historic Preservation Offices and Tribal Heritage Outreach and Education: Successes and Challenges. This roundtable discusses the crucial work that Tribal Historic Preservation Offices (THPOs) in New Mexico do to sustain programs connecting tribal members/youth to history and heritage. Case studies presented by four Tribal Historic Preservation Officers explore how place-based programs, partnerships, and wisdom garnered through landscape, ethnographic, and oral history research help THPOs meaningfully engage about tribal values and history. This roundtable allows THPOs protecting tribal historic/cultural resources in New Mexico share successes and challenges faced in education and outreach initiatives, as well as about the role of THPOs in engaging the next generation of historic preservation and heritage professionals. (T-37)
 
BOCHNIAK, Victoria (UMass) Intimate Epistemologies: Making and Remaking Knowledge in Graduate School. Graduate students often have personal experiences outside academia that have profound impacts on their research, academic careers, and livelihoods. These sometimes publicly known and intimate encounters— that are frequently structured through systems of oppression, exploitation, and alienation at the university and beyond— affect students’ abilities to meet markers of success in graduate school, impact mental health and overall well-being, and can affect personal and professional relationships. This session aims to share stories that are all too often under-discussed in graduate school and that are even less discussed as being important and integral to research and knowledge production. vbochniak@umass.edu (F-75)
 
BRIODY, Elizabeth (Cultural Keys LLC) What We Can Learn from COPAA’s ‘Business Anthropology on the Road.’ Business Anthropology on the Road is a COPAA-sponsored initiative that travels to anthropology programs for a two-day series of workshops, interactive discussions, and seminars. It is designed to assist anthropology programs with professionalization skills for students and provide content knowledge in major domains of business anthropology (i.e., marketing and advertising, design, and organizational culture and change). Conceptualized in spring 2018, it has been one model for filling gaps or supplementing departmental offerings. Participants describe their experiences with the “road show,” summarize lessons from the on-site evaluation data, and discuss its future potential within the discipline. elizabeth.briody@gmail.com (W-43)
 
BROOKS, Benjamin (ECU) and IRONS, Rebecca (U Coll London) Anthropological Perspectives on Women’s Health: Explorations of Latin American Populations in Peru and the United States. Andean Highland populations in Peru and Hispanic migrants from Latin America face difficulties related to access to adequate housing and healthcare. This research focuses on women in Latin America who are often a marginalized group facing particular kinds of hardships. This panel will explore health, stress, and trauma through the varied but interrelated experiences of women in the Andes and in the Southern United States. Ethnographic accounts from the field will be used to demonstrate how cultural data can be applied to address community level problems. This research will aim to foment discussion on how Latin American experiences of health and marginality connect. brooksb@ecu.edu (W-08)
 
BROWN, Brenda (Independent) Cultural Citizenship, Post-migration, and Trauma, Part I. How do refugees, immigrants, or those marginalized cope with the challenges they face in culturally foreign settings or in institutions? How can health care providers ease the suffering and trauma of refugees, immigrants and those who are marginalized? What are the obstacles in crossing borders both literally and figuratively? How can health care professionals facilitate this transition? How do bonds form between people from different nation-states, cultures, and experiences? The papers in this session explore these questions and others involving language translation and interpretation. Furthermore, cultural citizenship and socio-political concerns are also explored and some possible solutions offered. rnksu2015@gmail.com (TH-04)
 
CALAMIA, Mark (NPS) Representing Diversity and Minority Voices throughout Our National Parks: Some Examples from the NPS Cultural Anthropology Program, Parts I-II. Engaging contemporary cultural communities in planning and public programming continues to be an emphasis of the NPS Cultural Anthropology Program. In a double roundtable session, NPS anthropologists and a superintendent will present case studies and examples, from across the country, on the influence of decolonization on NPS work with Mexican-Americans, African-Americans, Native Americans, and Alaskan Natives. The roundtable will discuss how cultural beliefs, values, knowledge, and practices are incorporated into planning and shared with the public. Examples will include storytelling, ethnographic overviews, interpretative programs, museum exhibits, and resource management and use. mark_calamia@nps.gov (S-08, S-38)
 
CANNON, Terry (Inst of Dev Studies), WILKINSON, Olivia (Joint Learning Initiative on Faith & Local Communities)  and HOFFMAN, Susanna (Hoffman Consulting) Sense and Nonsense: Bogus Categories and Saying What We Mean in Disaster Research, Part I. Disaster research and practice is laden with terminology that is partly determined by funding mechanisms and priorities of the institutions that dominate disaster risk reduction. Concepts that we use in academic research have become tainted by the problem that many of these institutions want to avoid looking at disaster (especially vulnerability and poverty) causation. The panel will discuss a range of these concepts, including “community,” “resilience,” “network,” “localized,” “stakeholder,” “vulnerability,” “sympathy” in humanitarian activities. Can they be considered as ‘bogus’ – are these concepts co-opted by systems of power that prefer to ignore or play down causation in analysing disaster risk and climate change? t.cannon@ids.ac.uk (W-04)
 
CANNON, Terry (Inst of Dev Studies) and OLIVER-SMITH, Tony (UFL) Sense and Nonsense: Bogus Categories and Saying What We Mean in Disaster Research, Part II. Disaster research and practice is laden with terminology that is partly determined by funding mechanisms and priorities of the institutions that dominate disaster risk reduction. Concepts that we use in academic research have become tainted by the problem that many of these institutions want to avoid looking at disaster (especially vulnerability and poverty) causation. The panel will follow up on the papers from Part I and are going to introduce their ‘favourite’ concepts that need deconstructing. These will include: community, resilience, network, localized stakeholder, vulnerability, sympathy. Can they be considered as ‘bogus’ through being co-opted by systems of power that prefer to ignore or play down causation in analysing disaster risk and climate change? t.cannon@ids.ac.uk (W-34)
 
CARATTINI, Amy and SPREHN, Maria (Montgomery Coll) Teaching Race and Ethnicity. For over a century, anthropologists have examined the concepts of race and ethnicity, however, an understanding of how these categories are socially and culturally constructed is not always visible in the public purview or at institutional levels. In this arena, anthropology needs more visibility. To continue the educational goals of the RACE Project, this panel explores possibilities and new methods for teaching students and the general public about anthropological knowledge on race and ethnicity. The end goal is to impact personal and public understandings so that the anthropological perspective is applied to policy at various levels and to community building. amy.carattini@montgomerycollege.edu (S-35)
 
CASAGRANDE, David (Lehigh U) From Passivity to Panic: Responding to Climate Change in the United States. A major challenge for anthropologists and policy makers working in the U.S. is to minimize the impacts of adaptation to climate change, especially for marginalized and vulnerable populations. Utilizing ethnographic methods, we examine how people talk about and make decisions about climate change. Researchers in this session analyze topics such as relocation, climate panic, discourse framing and ethnoecological models of climate change with the goal of promoting social justice, climate action, conflict resolution and practical solutions. dac511@lehigh.edu (TH-95)
 
CHAIKEN, Miriam (NMSU) and COMPANION, Michele (UCCS) How Do Indigenous Scholars Apply Anthropology? This panel brings together Indigenous scholars who share a common academic history of studying anthropology. This panel brings Native American scholars and activists for a discussion about the ways in which their anthropological studies influence their post-university professional lives, and the ways in which Native perspectives can in turn influence the discipline as a whole. We will foster conversations about the present and future of the discipline of anthropology, how this has been shaped by the historical roots of the discipline, and how a more inclusive perspective will shape future anthropological praxis. mchaiken@nmsu.edu (T-127)
 
CHRISTIE, Jessica (ECU) Cultural Citizenship and Tourism: Changing Encounters in Colonial and Post-Colonial Contexts. In many tourism encounters, the worlds of the Euroamerican, white and upper middle-class tourist and Native, low-income hosts clash in a Colonial structure that has been chronologically conditioned and sanctified. This session interrogates: why have Native hosts been perceived as parallel to native flora and fauna? in eco-tourism, what happens if the tourist is not white? is “exotic” the same as “authentic”? can indigenous hosts have cultural citizenship in two worlds? can anthropologists intervene toward de-colonizing tourism encounters? The session invites diverse case scenarios to test for common threads which might be used as applied lessons. christiej@ecu.edu (W-12)
 
CHRISTIE, Jessica (ECU) Cultural Citizenship and Tourism: Colonial and De-Colonial Encounters on the Reservations in the Southwest. Since approximately the 1920s, travel into the Southwest has steadily increased and turned into a multi-million dollar tourism business. Native Americans have been viewed as part of the grandiose desert landscape. When they refused to be annihilated or assimilated, they began to be perceived with an aura of exoticism, as people who must have something “authentic” which eludes Western colonial efforts to possess. Most tourists come to experience such things “exotic” and “authentic.” christiej@ecu.edu (T-94)
 
CLAY, Patricia M. (NOAA Fisheries) and FISKE, Shirley (UMD) Climate Change in the Coastal and Marine Environment: Impacts and Adaptation, Parts I-II. For decades the oceans have absorbed heat and CO2, contributing to stability for coastal zones with relatively small impacts to the marine environment. That is no longer the case. As a result, both communities in the coastal zone and those who make their living at sea are being impacted in new and more challenging ways. Reactions of those impacted have been diverse, ranging from unbelief to active adaptation. This session explores specific examples of some of those reactions and their implications for the future coastal communities and marine-based occupations. Patricia.M.Clay@noaa.gov (F-97, F-127)
 
COLOM, Alejandra (Labetnografico/UVG) Corporate and Urban Anthropology in Guatemala: Methods, Challenges, and Opportunities. This session presents new fields of applied research and engagement in Guatemala, from corporate banking to recycling entrepreneurship and the creative methods to engage reluctant stakeholders like retailers and engineers. The discussion will focus on how to successfully present anthropology as a tool for creative corporate re-thinking. ale@labetnografico.com (W-13)
 
CONCHA-HOLMES, Amanda and OLIVER-SMITH, Anthony (UFL) Disasters in Paradise: Natural Hazards, Social Vulnerability, and Development Decisions. Long considered ground zero for global climate change in the United States, Florida presents the perfect case study for disaster risk and prevention. Building on the idea that disasters are produced by historical and contemporary social processes as well as natural phenomena, Amanda D. Concha-Holmes and Anthony Oliver-Smith present a collection of ethnographic case studies that examine the social and environmental effects of Florida’s public and private sector development policies. Contributors to Disasters in Paradise explore how these practices have increased the vulnerability of Floridians to hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, frosts, and forest fires. amanda.d.concha.holmes@gmail.com (W-71)