Keitlyn Alcantara would love to share information about the Restorative Foodways project and Healing Garden (both projects can be found online here). Specifically, Dr. Alcantara would like to draw attention to the curriculum zine, “The Soil” co-authored with Dana Vanderburgh (Anthropology), Dr. Olga Kalentzidou (Geography) as well as Lauren McCallister and Francisco Ormaza from the Bloomington community. The curriculum development team (Lauren McCallister, Olga Kalentzidou, Dana Vanderburgh, Francisco Ormaza, Keitlyn Alcantara) successfully designed, published and implemented our first curriculum, “The Soil”, within which students learn about the biology of healthy soil, global Indigenous concepts of reciprocity between humans and nature, and consider how their own histories and identities require routine rebalancing for healthy social ecology. Dr. Alcantara and her colleagues were able to share this curriculum with 5 different classes (GEOG G357 Urban Alternative Agriculture; ANTH A525 Community Based Research; THTR T472 Development of Dramatic Arts III Revolution and Drama and GEOG 352 Food and Poverty in America), and teens from the Banneker Community Center for a total engagement with approximately 90 individuals in the fall semester. Through the Restorative Foodways project, funded by the Platform Indiana Studied grant, Dr. Alcantara and her colleagues made up of Beatriz Lima Ribeiro (Anthropology), Daniel Fobi (Geography), and Tamara Brown (undergrad) assembled a collection of food stories that speak to the ways identity is adapted and negotiated in Bloomington. The cookbook is a living project, which can be viewed online here.

Beth Buggenhagen will take up fellowship for Smithsonian Institute in Museum Anthropology this summer after a two-year delay related to COVID. Moreover, she will be conducting research in the photographic collections of the Smithsonian Museums of Natural History and African Art for a book, “The Future in in Your Hands. Portrait Photography from Senegal.” Dr. Buggenhagen has a chapter in a recently published book, Buggenhagen, Beth. 2022. Fabric in the Fashion Photography of Omar Victor Diop. In Creating African Fashion Histories: Politics, Museums, and Sartorial Practice. JoAnn McGregor, Heather Akou, and Nicola Stylianou, eds. Dr. Buggenhagen has a contribution for the blog, Digital Fieldwork, “Can there be a Digital Museum Anthropology?” based on research she conducted in 2020 when she was unable to travel to Senegal for fieldwork. This contribution emerged from a 2021 African Studies Association roundtable on digital fieldwork. Dr. Buggenhagen was awarded an NEH/SSRC Sustain Humanities Infrastructure (SHIP) grant with co-PIs Tavy Ahern, Colton Ames, Sonia Manriquez for the Digital Toolbox Project, aiming to provide access to museum objects to teachers across the state of Indiana.

Christina Tekie Collins has her article “The Meaning and Uses of Privatization: The Case of the Ethiopian Development State” published in AFRICA. This article will be part of a forthcoming special issue, which brings together several anthropologists working on issues of development, capitalization, and finance in Africa.

Ilana Gershon celebrates CaMP anthropology blog which posted its 300th blogpost this year. Started in 2016, interviews have been posted with recent authors in linguist anthropology, media anthropology, and performance studies, as well as page 99 accounts for recent dissertations. Dr. Gershon also created a podcast, Hiring Rituals, on how academic hiring works in different countries, which will begin to be released in June. She started her term as President of the Association of Political and Legal Anthropology.

Jane Goodman received awards from the American Institute for Maghrib Studies and CAHI to support her new project, “Theater and Transformation: Discovering the Alloula Archive,” which she plans to undertake in Algeria during her upcoming sabbatical in Spring 2023. The project entails conducting research in a brand new archive devoted to the works of the renowned playwright Abdelkader Alloula. Closer to home, Goodman was selected as one of the chairs for her project “Can Art Change the World? New Perspectives on the Problems and Possibilities of Cultural Exchange,” sponsored by the Center for Cultural Affairs at the O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs; Goodman’s project is part of a series of workshops that will bring scholars to the Bloomington campus to explore the intersection of the humanities and cultural affairs during the 2022-23 academic year.

Shane Greene published a book: “PUNK! Las Américas Edition” (2021). Intellect Books, coedited by Olga Rodriguez Ulloa, Rodrigo Quijano, and Shane Greene. Dr. Greene won an Institute of Advanced Studies Fellowship for Spring of 2023.

Stacie King was promoted to Full Professor as of last summer (July 1, 2021).

Sarah Phillips published several scholarly and public-facing articles about Russia's war on Ukraine, including “Refusal to Die” (Cultural Anthropology), an article about experiences of people with disabilities during the war, and an Op-Ed in USA Today (3/7/22) urging support for Ukraine. She presented “‘Kurt Vonnegut is one of us’: The social life of Vonnegut in translation in the Soviet 1970s” in February at the annual conference of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages in Philadelphia. In March, Phillips hosted a workshop, “Mapping Disability Studies in Eastern Europe” for the new research platform on disability studies, “Reconfigurations,” at Jagiellonian University in Poland. In July she will host a 2-day workshop at the IU European Gateway in Berlin for young researchers with disabilities, “Decolonising Disability Studies in Post-Soviet Spaces.” Wearing her REEI director’s hat, Phillips has been busy with initiatives to support IU students affected by the war in Ukraine as well as Ukrainian colleagues who are internally displaced or war refugees.

Jennifer Robinson has a new book coming out (five years in the making), and it will be published by Indiana University Press in June 2022. The title of the book is: “Teaching as if Learning Matters: Pedagogies of Becoming by Next-Generation Faculty,” edited by Jennifer Meta Robinson, Valerie Dean O’Loughlin, Katherine Kearns, Laura Plummer. The book features contributed chapters by numerous IU Anthropology current and former graduate students, including contributions by Valerie Dean O’Loughlin, Elizabeth Konwest, Lauren Miller Griffith, Carol Subiño Sullivan, Leslie E. Drane, and Christopher Upton.

The book acknowledges that teaching is an essential skill in becoming a faculty member in any institution of higher education. Yet how is that skill actually acquired by graduate students? Teaching as if Learning Matters collects first-person narratives from graduate students and new Ph.D.s that explore how the skills required to teach at a college level are developed. It examines the key issues that graduate students face as they learn to teach effectively when in fact they are still learning and being taught.

Featuring contributions from over thirty graduate students from a variety of disciplines at Indiana University, Teaching as if Learning Matters allows these students to explore this topic from their own unique perspectives. They reflect on the importance of teaching to them personally and professionally, telling of both successes and struggles as they learn and embrace teaching for the first time in higher education.

Reviewers have called this book a “new paradigm for graduate education.” Melissa McDaniels, University of Wisconsin-Madison notes “The editors of Teaching as if Learning Matters have convened a group of experts – who happen to be graduate students – to use their collective voice to both contextualize and challenge academic discourse about college teaching and graduate student development. These experts are at once teachers and learners. In these chapters, they generously make public their own processes of becoming – becoming not only postsecondary educators, but becoming the reflective scholar-leaders we need to tackle some of the most pressing cultural, social and environmental challenges facing communities around the world.” 

The last year for April Sievert has been one of great change! She retired from the directorship of the Glenn Black Laboratory in December of 2021, and from Anthropology in May, 2022. In March, the Society for American Archaeology recognized the work that Dr. Melody Pope, Curator of Archaeology, and Dr. Sievert spearheaded to rehouse the millions of objects from Angel Mounds, by awarding the SAA Award for Excellence in Curation and Collections Management to the Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology. Since the lab is now an integral part of the new IU Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, this is likely the last time the 50-year-old lab will be publicly recognized as such. The work done with the Angel Collection contributes to exciting exhibits currently under installation at IUMAA done in collaboration with Indiana’s removed tribes. Over the last twenty years of teaching, directing the archaeology lab, and being Director of Undergrad Studies for a time, Dr. Sievert has gotten to know and work with hundreds of fantastic students. The last semester of teaching got her and Anthropology students involved with the IU Research and Teaching Preserve, to figure out how to manage artifacts assembled by a presumed looter at a historic refuse deposit in the Griffy Preserve. This project will keep Dr. Sievert busy during the summer. Even though she is retired from teaching, archaeology will be a never-ending story.

Michael Wasserman graduated his first PhD student - Kathryn Michelle Benavidez Westrich and his first master’s student - Cathleen Steinbeiser. Dr. Wasserman’s first postdoc, Dr. Daniella Chusyd, went on to a tenure-track position. He advised two honors thesis projects in Human Biology and Biology, with three others currently in progress (Anthropology, Human Biology, Animal Behavior). Dr. Wasserman received promotion and tenure and was appointed to Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Animal Behavior Program. He published three articles in Biological Conservation, Integrative & Comparative Biology, and Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. He was the Keynote Speaker at the 2021 Animal Behavior Conference at IU.