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Anthropology undergraduates among winners at 2014 MSU UURAF
Anthropology majors Kelsey Carpenter, Mari Isa, and Kyla Cools recently received honors for their research presentations at the annual MSU University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF), held at the MSU Student Union on April 4, 2014. Kelsey, Mari, and Kyla received First Place Awards in their respective sections within the Social Sciences division. Approximately 660 students presented at this year’s forum. Kelsey’s presentation, entitled Cranial Fracture Patterns in Pediatric Deaths: Homicides and Accidents (abstract on page 134) focused on differentiating between inflicted and accidental injuries in cases of infant deaths involving head trauma. Mari’s presentation, Fracture Initiation and Propagation in…
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Anthropology Graduate Student Participation at the Graduate Academic Conference
The 6th Annual Council of Graduate Students Graduate Academic Conference occurred on March 27th, 2014 at the Kellogg Center. The conference had over 150 graduate and professional students presenting at this year’s conference. Each presented in a format that conveyed complex disciplinary material to an educated but non-specialist audience, an important skill that should be developed and practiced. This year, presenters had the option of communicating their work through three different formats: ten-minute traditional presentations, poster presentations, or in the three-minute competition, an exciting new presentation format. This year, we had a record number of Anthropology graduate students participating and a…
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Anthropology Professor Chantal Tetreault Published Article in Language and Communication
We are very pleased to announce that an article by Dr Chantal Tetreault, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, has been published in Language and Culture (vol 33). Entitled “Cultural Citizenship in France and le Bled among Teens of Pan-southern Immigrant Heritage,” the article addresses discourse among French teenagers of pan-immigrant, peripheral, and specifically southern descent that evokes the widely circulating spatial concept called le bled, a French word of Arabic origin. Drawing upon theories of cultural citizenship, the paper explores the connections that teens broker through le bled in two, divergent discourses that link French citizenship with modernity and race. The first discourse…
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MSU Anthropology Major Mariyam Isa Awarded Ellis R. Kerley Award
At the 66th Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Seattle in February 2014, the Ellis R. Kerley Foundation announced MSU anthropology major Mariyam (Mari) Isa as the youngest ever winner of the Ellis R. Kerley award. The Kerley Award recognizes “the paper or poster which best demonstrates originality, creativity, depth of research, innovation, new methodologies, research design, significance to the field, and/or potential impact on the practices of forensic anthropology.” Mari’s paper, titled “Fracture Initiation and Propagation in Pediatric Blunt Cranial Trauma” focused on the importance of the accurate interpretation of skull fractures, especially in cases of suspected…
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Department of Anthropology Announces 2014 Fieldwork Photo Contest Winners
The Department of Anthropology is very happy to announce the winners of the 2014 Fieldwork Photo Contest. The Fieldwork Photo Contest is intended to spread the message about the department and anthropology in general through the fieldwork photographs of faculty, students, and alumni. This year’s Fieldwork Photo Contest is particularly exciting because all of the winners are either students or alumni – a real testament to how active and engaged our students are. The winner’s photographs are posted on the department website, distributed over department social media, and displayed in the main department offices (in Baker Hall) And without further…
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Talus Released on Android
The Department of Anthropology is very happy to announce that the native Android version of Talus is now available for free from the Google Play Store. Created originally as a mobile website by Emily Niespodziewanski (PhD student in the MSU Department of Anthropology) as part of her Cultural Heritage Informatics Grad Fellowship, Talus aggregates dozens of the most commonly used bioprofiling methodologies into one easy-to-navigate mobile application. The app is designed to help forensic anthropologists, bioarchaeologists, and paleoanthropologists analyze human skeletal material without having to rely upon dozens of physical articles and books. All materials used in Talus are clearly and simply cited so that users know…
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Fredy Rodriguez-Mejia wins SfAA Tourism and Heritage Student Paper Competition
The Department of Anthropology is pleased to announce that PhD Candidate Fredy Rodriquez-Mejia has won the Society for Applied Anthropology’s Tourism and Heritage Student Paper Competition for his paper titled “Exploring New Paths Toward Indigenous Identity Formation: Heritage Teaching among the Ch’orti’ Maya of Copan, Honduras.” Co-Authored with Kristin Landau (archaeologist, Ph.D. Candidate, Northwestern University), the paper discusses the collaborative effort (anthropology/archaeology) of the two authors to co-teach an introductory anthropology class at the only indigenous high school in the region of Copan. The goal of the project (as outlined in the award winning paper) was to teach a majority of indigenous students (n=20),…
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Department of Anthropology Featured in American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology TV
The Department of Anthropology is very pleased to announce that it was one of fourteen institutions featured on the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology TV. Launched at the 2013 AAA annual meeting in Chicago, the profile on the Department of Anthropology featured on Anthropology TV focused on our unique experiential learning opportunities for both graduate and undergraduate students.
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Department Alumna A.R. Vasavi Receives Prestigious Infosys Science Foundation Prize
Department of Anthropology Alumna A.R. Vasavi has been awarded the Infosys Science Foundation’s Prize in Social Sciences. Vasavi, who received her PhD in 1996, is currently Senior Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. As noted in the award announcement, Vasavi received the award for her distinctive and pioneering research that spans a remarkable range covering four main areas: Agrarian society at the intersection of economy, culture and environment; school education in varied regional contexts; globalization and its impact on the moral economy of urban occupations; and social science as seen from the vantage point of Indian languages and regional cultures.
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Ethan Watrall gives Keynote at Network Detroit Conference
Ethan Watrall (Assistant Professor; Director, Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative, Associate Director, MATRIX: Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences) delivered the keynote for the Network Detroit: Digital Humanities Theory and Practice conference. Bringing together the universities and museums of Southeast Michigan, Network Detroit is a conference aimed at sharing and promoting cutting-edge digital work in the humanities. The conference was held at Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, Michigan on September 27-28. Titled “Towards a Model of Openness in Digital Cultural Heritage,” the keynote parsed the idea of openness, exploring the issue both broadly and within the unique context of praxis in digital…