Announcing the Winners of the Inaugural Erve Chambers Tourism and Heritage Student Paper

By Melissa Stevens

The Erve Chambers Tourism and Heritage Student Paper Award Committee is pleased to announce the winners of the inaugural 2024 award! We received many quality submissions from students across the globe and selected the top five papers for inclusion in a special invited session at the SfAA Annual Meeting this March. The top three papers were then chosen to receive the inaugural award. 

First Prize:

Emma Satterfield
University of Maryland 
Perversion or Immersion: Interpreting Slavery through Living History

Honorable Mentions:

Bianca Bellafiore
University of Aberdeen
The Angus Folk Collection Comes to Dun: Design and Interpretation of a Re-homed Local Heritage Collection

Jonathan Geyer
St. Mary's College of Maryland
Metro Dragons, Iced Americanos, and Warehouses for Sale: The Linguistic Landscape of Bangkok's Chinatowns

Join us on Thursday, March 28^th, 9:00 AM - 10:45 AM, in Eldorado A (El Dorado Hotel) to hear the students present their innovative research in the session “Transforming the Field: The Inaugural Erve Chambers Tourism and Heritage Student Paper Award.” 

This session features the top five selections from the inaugural competition. The papers include an exploration of how tourists contribute to the practice of Holocaust memory when the voice of the survivor is lost; research on how the production of atmosphere influences visitor experiences at a Scottish heritage site; a linguistic landscape analysis of Bangkok’s Chinatowns exploring how language is used to appeal to tourists; the utilization of reciprocal ethnography to investigate the co-performance of heritage in ecomuseums in rural Newfoundland; and an examination of living history as a strategy for interpreting chattel slavery in the US.

Erve Chambers Tourism and Heritage Student Paper Award

The SfAA has established the Erve Chambers Tourism and Heritage Student Paper Award to honor the legacy of Dr. Erve Chambers and encourage new and innovative avenues of inquiry within the anthropology of tourism and heritage. Each year, students are invited to submit paper abstracts that entail original research on the themes of “tourism” and/or “heritage” broadly defined. Top papers will be selected for inclusion in a featured session at the Annual SfAA Meetings and qualify for the Erve Chambers Tourism and Heritage Student Paper Award. The next abstract deadline is September 15, 2024. For more details and the submission form, visit the Award’s website. For questions, contact Melissa Stevens at melissa.stevens7@gmail.com.

Support the Chambers Award Endowment Fund: 

We were able to launch the competition this fall after meeting our fundraising goal of $10,000 to establish a permanent endowment for the annual award. Our goal is now to raise an additional $5,000 to match the amount of the other SfAA student awards, which have recently increased to $750. You can support this goal by donating online through the SfAA’s secure website at www.appliedanthro.org/donate and choosing “Chambers Tourism & Heritage Student Paper Award” from the drop-down list on the donation form.

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​About Dr. Erve Chambers: 

Dr. Chambers is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Maryland, College Park. His scholarly work and professional service has had an indelible impact on the anthropology of tourism and heritage as well as applied anthropology. Dr. Chambers served as president of the Society for Applied Anthropology from 1987 to 1989 and was a founding editor of the journal Practicing Anthropology. His publications within the field of tourism, heritage, and applied anthropology are considered seminal works, and include Native Tours: The Anthropology of Travel and Tourism (2010), Tourism and Culture: An Applied Perspective (1997), and Applied Anthropology: A Practical Guide (1985).