Keitlyn Alcantara would love to share information about the workshops that she has organized throughout the year. This year, the Healing Garden received funding support from the Bloomington Symposia to host a series of Embodied Learning Workshops. These workshops sought to create spaces of learning that empower us to tap into the multiple ways of knowing the world inherent to our bodies. Centering experiences of multicultural, immigrant, and diasporic being, these workshops aligned with the seasons to learn about each other’s knowledge of the world. The fall equinox workshop centered on the close of summer, seed and herb collecting, preparing for the dark of winter, and exploring rituals of rest. On a full moon in November, our second workshop allowed participants to prepare cozy foods for winter (pickling, freezing, fermenting) and discuss cultural practices of winter retreat. The third workshop, held on a new moon in March, centered on the contradictory excitement and grief of new beginnings, with participants using found materials in the garden to create Carnival masks, and cooking over a shared bonfire.

After six-and-a-half years serving as director at the IU First Nations Educational & Cultural Center, Nicky Belle was brought over to the IU Division of Student Affairs to serve as the associate director of student engagement in the Student Involvement and Leadership Center in October 2022. In this newly-created role, Nicky is tasked with examining IU retention data and developing strategies to increase student engagement on campus and to improve IU’s retention numbers. As part of his duties, Nicky is working to build a Second-Year Experience program that will focus on supporting students as they transition out of first-year and progress through their second year. This will connect with current FYE efforts and will work to provide students with high-impact college experiences.

In late 2022, Eduardo S Brondizio and his colleagues concluded the AGENTS project, which involved developing a series of short-videos showcasing community initiatives in the Brazilian Amazon. An introductory video, available with English captions, can be viewed here. Additionally, a CASEL Interdisciplinary Forum was established, bringing together Anthropology and Geography faculty and students from across campus to share their work in a diverse and constructive environment. The forum has proven to be a productive space for scholars in progress to interact. Furthermore, photos and comments from the first field season of the “NSF-CNH2-L: Integrating Cross-scale Social-Ecological Feedbacks in Freshwater Fisheries” project were shared, including images of Eduardo and Anthropology graduate student Adriana Abreu. Eduardo was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences. Lastly, Anthropology faculty involved in the Sustainable Food System Science project (SFSS) were featured, with specific projects highlighted as examples of their work.

In Fall 2022, Christina Tekie Collins published an article, “The Meaning and Uses of Privatization: The Case of the Ethiopian Developmental State” as part of a special issue “Capitalizing Africa: High Finance from Below” in AFRICA.

Della Cook’s former grad students Marie Danforth and Gabe Wrobel organized a symposium in celebration of her career at the Paleopathology Association meetings in Reno, Nevada, April 19th.

Sara Friedman published two journal articles this year. One, co-authored with feminist legal scholar Chao-ju Chen and published in Law and Social Inquiry, examined how marriage equality laws may reduce some forms of LGBT family stigma while creating new stigma interactions that devalue diverse forms of LGBT parenthood. The second article examines quests for the “good life” among formerly urban, middle-class Chinese parents who pursue alternative education and family lifestyles by relocating to rural communities. It was published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Sara received a CAHI faculty research fellowship for Fall 2023 to work on her book project, “Diversifying Queer Families: Voices from Taiwan,” and she looks forward to spending two weeks in October at IU’s Eastman House on Martha’s Vineyard for a writing retreat. Together with Irit Dekel (Germanic Studies) and Jay Krishnan (Law), Sara received funding from the Institute for Advanced Study to organize the interdisciplinary workshop, “When Justice Migrates: How Mobility across Borders Reconfigures Rights, Equity, and Belonging,” successfully held at IU in February 2023.

Kate Graber has been on sabbatical in 2022-23 in (not-so-sunny) Scotland. She is working on a new book on how value is transformed through interactions in the global cashmere commodity chain, thanks to a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This project began with goats in Mongolia and has most recently taken her to Scottish textile mills and photo shoots in Milan, Italy. Her most recent publications—not about cashmere but still to do with language, materiality, and political economy—are a book chapter, “Affect, Emotion, and Linguistic Shift,” in A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, and “A Cline of Enregisterment and Its Erasure: Intersections of Ideology and Technology in Minority-Language News” in Language in Society (available Open Access).

Shane Greene has been awarded a faculty fellowship for the Spring of 2023 from the Institute for Advanced Study. He will use the fellowship to work on his new book, “Homo Terminus: 11 Sketches of Human Extinction.”

Over the last year, Jason Jackson published a string of research articles, with work appearing in Asian Ethnology, the Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics, Studia Vernacular, Museum Anthropology Review, and the Journal of American Folklore.

Stephanie Kane published a new book with McGill-Queen’s Press entitled: Just One Rain Away: The Ethnography of River-City Flood Control (December 2022). She’s been awarded a Fulbright for a new research project in Lisbon (Fall 2023): “Port City as Avian Habitat: Ethnography at the Interface of Infrastructure and Environment.” Before leaving for Portugal, she’ll be doing a short port-city water project in the Great Lake and city of Erie with partial funding from The Tobias Center. Last but not least, she is officially retiring from IU on May 31.

The zooarchaeology lab, with Jess Miller-Camp as one of its contributors, just wrapped up a year-long exhibit on shells and reefs in collaboration with the paleontology collection. The exhibit focused on the Stotter Shell Collection, which is mostly marine Australasian molluscs and corals. The displays included topics such as animal behavior, evolution, appearance, and human use. Jess worked on the exhibit’s copy and design and assisted with specimen selection, while Sam Couch contributed through archive research, loans, and specimen selection. It was one of the inaugural exhibits in the new IU Collections exhibit space at McCalla. Feedback from McCalla visitors is that it was a frequent favorite! A new collaborative exhibit on dentition is currently being installed in that room, and will feature a wall of animal skulls from the zooarchaeology lab.

Furthermore, Jess finished the first draft of a dual inventory workflow/identification guide last summer with turtle skeletons as the test case. The goal is to make the process of object element inventory in collections as efficient and understandable as possible for students new to the task. Students have been testing it all year to provide feedback for improvement. The process of creating this type of dual document to encourage active learning, minimize error, and free up some of the initial supervisor time normally required was presented as a poster at the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) meeting last fall. By the time the newsletter publishes, it will have been run as a workshop at the Association for Materials & Methods in Paleontology (AMMP) meeting. Jess intends to submit it to Collective Access, the flagship journal of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC).

Cheryl Ann Munson, who retired in 2021, received the 2022 State Archaeology Award from the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology. Her latest publication is a book chapter on Early Mississippian in the Ohio Valley, co-authored with Robert McCullough (former IU student) in the volume “Falls of the Ohio River: Archaeology of Native American Settlement” (University of Florida Press, 2021).

Valerie O’Loughlin, PhD (1995), earned the American Association for Anatomy Outstanding Mentor Award in 2023. She is Professor of Anatomy, Cell Biology & Physiology at Indiana University School of Medicine - Bloomington (IUSM-B), where she teaches human gross anatomy to medical students, basic human anatomy to undergraduates, and human anatomy for medical imaging evaluation to undergraduate and graduate students. She also teaches a pedagogical methods course and mentors MS and PhD students pursuing anatomy education research. Information about the AAA mentor award can be found here.

On June 30, 2023 Sarah D. Phillips will step down as director of the R.F. Byrnes REEI, after 8.5 years in the director’s seat (minus a one-year sabbatical in 2019/20). She is looking forward to getting back to writing her book, Kurt Vonnegut in the Soviet Union, for which she has a writing residency at IU’s Max Eastman House for 3 weeks in late May and early June. The war in Ukraine has kept her busy as a Ukrainianist, and she has two co-authored articles in press for a special issue of Women’s Studies International Forum on “Women and the War in Ukraine,” and several more articles on War and Citizenship, and “otherwise” disability studies in conditions of war, in the works.

In late June she will travel to the IU European Gateway in Berlin for a conference on “Towards a History of Disability in Eastern Europe,” organized by HIST colleague Maria Bucur. She is looking forward to teaching a new course for HUBI in the Fall entitled “Who Cares? Social Science Perspectives on Care,” and a revised version of her Anthropology of Russia and E Europe seminar in spring 2024, on decolonizing perspectives in REE and Slavic Studies.

Jennifer Robinson’s new book Teaching as if Learning Matters: Pedagogies of Becoming by Next-Generation Faculty received the Outstanding Book Award by the Society of Professors of Education at their annual meeting in Chicago this spring. The book features chapters by former or current graduate students in anthropology including Dr. Lauren Miller Griffith, Dr. Carol Subiño Sullivan, Leslie E. Drane, Dr. J. Christopher Upton, and Jennifer’s former students from other departments including Dr. Mack Hagood, Dr. Jonathan P. Rossing, Dr. Juliane Wuensch, Dr. Sarah Socorro Hurtado, Dr. Kristen Hengtgen, Dr. Silja Weber, Dr. Polly A. Graham, Javier Ramirez, and Tyler B. Christensen.

The book collects first-person narratives from graduate students and PhDs that explore how the skills required to teach at a college level are developed. It examines the challenges and linchpin moments that graduate students navigate as they learn to teach effectively when in fact they are still learning and being taught. Each chapter reflects on the importance of teaching to the authors personally and professionally, their stories telling of both successes and struggles as they learn and embrace teaching for the first time in higher education. Jennifer edited the book with Anthropology Department PhD Dr. Valerie Dean O’Loughlin, who is now Professor in the IU School of Medicine, Dr. Katherine Kearns, and Dr. Laura Plummer.

Updates about Jennifer Robinson’s research in collaboration with other IU researchers can be found here. 

Anya Peterson Royce has been working on three research projects, two in Ireland and one in Juchitan, Oaxaca. All involve photography and mapping. Last year, she began mapping and photographing the historic cottages that were the homes of Irish who suffered through the potato famine in the mid-19th century. Many emigrated, leaving the cottages empty. The cottages, all up and down the counties of Clare and Kerry, have been mostly empty and uncared for and so have crumbled, disappearing into the bog and overgrown grasses. The counties are excited about having a photographic history of them before they disappear altogether. She has photographed forty of them and will photograph the remaining ones this July. The second Ireland project is a collaborative one with an Irish colleague. Both of them have been photographing the Burren, the large karst area covering much of the western counties of Clare and Connemara and forming the cliffs that line the Atlantic coast. He has been using black and white while she uses color. This summer, they will be choosing particular places and each photographing them, he in B&W and she in color to see the difference that makes in presentation. He has a publisher who has agreed to produce a book of the photos. The project in Juchitan where she has worked since 1968 has to do with three of the most rural (and probably oldest) sections of the city—the 7th (fishermen mostly and poets), the 5th, agricultural and the site of one of the oldest remaining pilgrimages, and the 8th, across the river and occupied by craftspeople and livestock raisers. She has begun mapping the sections and has a large photograph collection (40, 000) taken over the years. With Alex Badillo and Guillermo Ramon Celis, she will be finishing 3D mapping and story boards for the communities.

She has also published (or has in press) four chapters in edited volumes (one on performance, one on Oaxaca food, one in a festschrift for Micheal O’Suilleabhain, and one on Michael Fokine and the remaking of the Russian ballet in a volume on Russian music and dance).

She is on several boards: The board of Eriu, an Irish contemporary dance company based in Dublin; the board of the Sue-je Lee Gage Sunlit Residency, and holds an Adjunct Professor status at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance (unremunerated) that allows her to sit on PhD committees and serve on search committees.

Kaddee Vitelli has a new book in press with Archaeopress (UK), in their newish series “Archaeological Lives.” “Do I Really Want to be an Archaeologist? Letters from the Field 1968-74” consists of edited letters, with new commentary, written home from her early years as a graduate student in Greece and Turkey, developing a dissertation topic, researching it, and eventually finishing it during the 1974 coup in Athens. When it appears, it will be available in hard and electronic copy, and open access.

Andrea Wiley took her first trip to Brazil, to visit former visiting scholar Ana Eliza Port Lourenco, currently Professor of Nutrition at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Macae).  On this visit she discovered that the route they took from Niteroi (near Rio de Janeiro) to Macae was the same route that Darwin took on his visit to Brazil during the voyage of the Beagle.  Retracing his steps and reading his journals from that time was really enlightening, and renewed her interest in Darwin’s travels.  Also this year, Wiley is also the author of a forthcoming paper in Annual Review of Anthropology on Biological Normalcy (2023, Vol 52).

Richard Wilk published several articles and book chapters in 2022. A book chapter “Thrift and its Opposite” was published in Thrift and its Paradoxes: From Domestic to Political Economy, edited by Catherine Alexander and Daniel Sosna, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 213-239. He also published an article in the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies titled “The Caribbean: Following Connections Instead of Fitting Things in Boxes,” an article in Consumption and Society titled “Taking Fun Seriously in Envisioning Sustainable Consumption,” and a review in New West India Guide titled “On the Nervous Edge of an Impossible Paradise: Affect, Tourism, Belize.” Moreover, he co-authored an op-ed for NBC News with Beatriz Barros titled “Taylor Swift, Kylie Jenner and the Very Real Climate Consequences of Private Planes.” He is still actively researching, writing, and having fun.

Robert Girard is thrilled to announce that the hard work and collaboration of the department’s faculty, staff, and especially graduate students has led to the department lounge receiving a truly fantastic (and needed) lick of new paint! Our department lounge was remodeled in December 2022 in accordance with the feedback of department stakeholders. The department plans to imbue the lounge with the compassion of our community through new art and photography from the field. Robert thanks everyone for being a part of our growing anthro community!