Browse
Recent Submissions
Item Teaching Urban Anthropology in a Time of COVID(2021) Hyatt, Susan B.; Anthropology, School of Liberal ArtsItem Black Lives Matter and the Public Rediscovery of Structural Racism(2021) Hyatt, Susan B.; Anthropology, School of Liberal ArtsAsset-Based Community Development promises to empower local communities while failing to address racialized disparities. We must look to broad-based social movements such as Black Lives Matter if we wish to create a genuinely more equitable and anti-racist worldItem Applying Students' Perspectives on Different Teaching Strategies: A Holistic View of Service-Learning Community Engagement(Michigan Publishing, 2021-11) Ricke, Audrey; Anthropology, School of Liberal ArtsFrom a university perspective, service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) has been identified as a high-impact practice that offers advantages over traditional lecture and assignments, yet students do not always embrace SLCE courses. While most studies of undergraduate students’ perceptions of SLCE focus on particular experiences or on SLCE in general, contextualizing these findings within students’ perceptions of various teaching strategies and knowledge can better assist faculty in engaging students. Drawing on cognitive anthropology, this article is one of the first to conduct a cultural domain analysis to provide insights into how undergraduates conceptualize SLCE in relation to other teaching strategies. This broader analysis of the associations undergraduates make with SLCE reveals how these can carry ramifications for quality engagement with the project and community partners. The results include how faculty can design and scaffold SLCE into their courses in the absence of a centralized agency or formal campus-wide process for regulating SLCE experiences.Item Pivoting to Virtual Reality, Fostering Holistic Perspectives: How to Create Anthropological 360° Video Exercises and Lectures(eScholarship, 2021-07) Ricke, Audrey; Anthropology, School of Liberal ArtsThis paper addresses two challenges in higher education that increased with the shift to online learning due to COVID-19: translating experiential learning online and supporting student engagement.While virtual reality can be mobilized to address both of these challenges,finding or creating virtual reality that fits a course’s learning objective is a common barrier. This paper illustrates how instructors can integrate anthropological readings with freely available 360°videos or Google Earth to create their own virtual reality-like experiences and class activities. Such immersive experiences can support students in applying anthropology to real-world issues from any location with a smart device and internet connection and lead to a more holistic understanding of social issues. They also present an alternative to narrated PowerPoints or videos in online and in-person learning that can foster student engagement with the content.Item Exploring University-Community Collaborations(2021-10) Kryder-Reid, Elizabeth; Fillipelli, Gabriel; Boyd, Phyllis; Brooks, Paula; Nadaraj, Aghilah; Sangsuwangul, Alvin; Humphrey, Leah; Anthropology, School of Liberal ArtsThe Riverside neighborhood bears multiple burdens of environmental harm. Running the gamut from groundwater contamination in subsurface waters to lead in soils and dust and paint to particulate matter in the air from highways and industry, these environmental insults harm the physical, mental, and economic well-being of the community. The community has also faced an information gap where data was scarce, hard to locate, and sometimes wrong. Activists have long worked to improve the quality of life in the neighborhood, but faced barriers in the form of policies (e.g. Red Lining, zoning variances, disinvestment in public services such as street lights and sidewalks) and practices (e.g. absentee landlords, illegal dumping). Features such as the Central Canal that were developed into recreational amenities in other parts of the city were minimally maintained or restricted from use by residents. In the face of these challenges, IUPUI faculty, students, and community members have partnered on multiple projects to document the history of environmental harms, assess exposure and risk of residents’ exposomes, and share information in ways that are accessible and relevant for residents. The work supports the agency and activism of the community, particularly as it faces pressures of gentrification and university encroachment with the prospect of 16 Tech project expansion. The work also takes place in the context of contested interests and harmful legacies as representatives of an urban university that displaced longtime residents work to partner ethically and transparently with those same communities. As a result, current faculty-community collaborations operate within a space complicated by the problematic legacy of harm and ongoing structural racism. However well-intentioned, faculty, students and community members have to navigate that history and enduring power dynamics as they design their research, identify relevant questions, and share results in ways that are accessible and meaningful to community members.Item Dirty Work, Dangerous Others: The Politics of Outsourced Immigration Enforcement in Mexico(Berghahn, 2020) Vogt, Wendy; Anthropology, School of Liberal ArtsWhile Mexico has been openly critical of US immigration enforcement policies, it has also served as a strategic partner in US efforts to externalize its immigration enforcement strategy. In 2016, Mexico returned twice as many Central Americans as did the United States, calling many to criticize Mexico for doing the United States’ “dirty work.” Based on ethnographic research and discourse analysis, this article unpacks and complicates the idea that Mexico is simply doing the “dirty work” of the United States. It examines how, through the construction of “dirty others”—as vectors of disease, criminals, smugglers, and workers—Central Americans come to embody “matter out of place,” thus threatening order, security, and the nation itself. Dirt and dirtiness, in both symbolic and material forms, emerge as crucial organizing factors in the politics of Central American transit migration, providing an important case study in the dynamics between transit and destination states.Item The Late Medieval Church and Graveyard at Ii Hamina, Northern Ostrobothnia, Finland – Pollen and macro remains from graves(Universtiy of Helsinki, 2020) Trandberg, Annemari; Alenius, Teija Helena; Kallio-Seppä, T.; Philip, Buckland; Mullins, P. R.; Ylimaunu, Timo; Anthropology, School of Liberal ArtsThe historical Ostrobothnian (Finland) burial tradition is poorly known, particularly when discussed from the environmental archaeological viewpoint. This article examines Late Medieval burial methods in Ii Hamina village using both micro- and macrofossil analyses incorporated into archaeological work. This research provides information on the continuity of burial methods that were sustained through the medieval period and into modern times. Burial tradition patterns in the Northern Ostrobothnia region exhibit widely recognised characteristics, but also contain some local features.Item Race and the Water: Swimming, Sewers, and Structural Violence in African America(University of New Mexico Press, 2020) Mullins, Paul R.; Huskins, Kyle; Hyatt, Susan B.; Anthropology, School of Liberal ArtsViolence is rampant in today’s society. From state-sanctioned violence and the brutality of war and genocide to interpersonal fighting and the ways in which social lives are structured and symbolized by and through violence, people enact terrible things on other human beings almost every day. In Archaeologies of Violence and Privilege, archaeologists Christopher N. Matthews and Bradley D. Phillippi bring together a collection of authors who document the ways in which past social formations rested on violent acts and reproduced violent social and cultural structures. The contributors present a series of archaeological case studies that range from the mercury mines of colonial Huancavelica (AD 1564–1824) to the polluted waterways of Indianapolis, Indiana, at the turn of the twentieth century—a problem that disproportionally impacted African American neighborhoods. The individual chapters in this volume collectively argue that positions of power and privilege are fully dependent on forms of violence for their existence and sustenance.Item Community-Based Archaeology: Research with, by, and for Indigenous and Local Communities (review)(Great Plains Research, 2014) Cusack-McVeigh, HollyCommunity-Based Archaeology lays a foundation for future anthropological and archaeological research, and thus should be required reading for any student considering a career in archaeology or cultural anthropology. [...]it may serve as a model for tribal communities, people in museology, academicians, and those in other natural and social sciences.Item Public Memory, National Heritage, and Memorialization of the 1918 Finnish Civil War(Taylor & Francis, 2019) Seitsonen, Oula; Mullins, Paul R.; Ylimaunu, Timo; Anthropology, School of Liberal ArtsThe Finnish Civil War in 1918 left the newly independent country (1917) scarred for decades. In this paper, we assess the difficult public memory, national narrative and memorialization of the war. We take as our starting point a public crowdsourcing organized by the State-broadcasting company about the material traces of conflicts in Finland. Themes raised by the public in the crowdsourcing are used as foundation to map heritage perspectives. Special attention is paid to the memorial landscapes of the war. In the past century, the remembrance of the war has gone through several stages, from the complete denial of memorializing the defeated side and the associated clandestine remembrance practices based on folk religion, to today’s situation where the war is largely seen as a shared national tragedy. We outline the current status and importance of Civil War heritage based on public perceptions and stake out some directions for future research.