Congratulations to Kehli Henry on winning one of the two very competitive Bea Medicine Awards from the Society for Applied Anthropology. “The scholarship celebrates the life and legacy of Beatrice Medicine, an internationally prominent anthropologist who passed away in December 2005. Dr. Medicine was a descendant on both sides of her family from the Lakota, and an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. This heritage found reflection in her life’s work — an impressive record of teaching, research, and service, which focused on understanding and tolerance within the broader human condition and particularly toward Native peoples” (http://www.sfaa.net/about/prizes/student-awards/bea-medicine/)
Kehli will be presenting her paper “Engagement Between & Across: Working with an American Indian Community while Working through Academia” in a panel highlighting the work of the Anthropology Department’s doctoral students at the SfAA’s annual meeting in Pittsburgh in March. The panel, titled, “Researcher and Community Engagement: The Politics of Doing Research” is organized by Adam Haviland and Meenakshi Narayan and also includes papers by Ying-Jen Lin, Fredy Rodriguez-Mejia, and Marie Schaeffer.
The panel was selected by popular vote to be one of the twenty podcast “by the SfAA Podcast Project during the 75th Annual Society for Applied Anthropology conference, and will be made available free to the public online” (SfAAPodcasts.net). This panel will explore aspects of research that mediate researcher-community interactions with a focus on reflexively examining the roles of positionality, power, and subjectivity in our encounters with communities. Through consideration of issues including researcher positionality, community perceptions of research, and what researchers can really offer communities, this panel probes the politics of doing research. Drawing on experiences with communities in Taiwan, Honduras, India, and the United States, panel members will highlight parallels and divergences in the politics of doing research in their respective locations.