Your Contributions at Work
Your contributions to the department are used to support activities that facilitate training, research, and teaching in anthropology. The most important of these are the awards that the department gives to undergraduate and graduate students.
Undergraduate Students
Each year we recognize the Best Undergraduate Honor's Thesis and Best Anthropology Essay with financial awards. A faculty committee selects the papers for each award. We give out three awards for Best Anthropology Essay - one each for archaeology, biocultural anthropology, and sociocultural anthropology.
********************************************
Best Honors Theses in Anthropology 2010-2011
Winner: Graham Pruss
Thesis Title:
"(In)visible moburbia: identity, spatial use, perceptions
and realities of vehicular residency in Seattle"
Advisor: Dr. Rachel Chapman
Winner: Marie Spiker
Thesis Title:
"Food, family, & health: intergenerational dietary change
in Chinese immigrants in Seattle"
Advisor: Dr. Rachel Chapman
********************************************
Best Anthropology Essay Awards 2010-2011
Sociocultural Winners
“Waka waka Tanzania”
Kendra Droppers
Professor: Dr. Rachel Chapman
“The lingering spirit of nihonjinron: a challenge
of securing
Japanese identity amongst the face of the other"
Nicholas Sweet
Professor: Dr. Sasha Welland
Archaeology Winners
"The relationship of hearths to Precambrian
quartzite deposits
at Olympic Dam"
Kaylee Abbott & Paulina Przystupa
Professor: Dr. Benjamin Marwick
********************************************
The department helps to support pre-dissertation pilot research projects and travel to national academic conferences for graduate students. The awards provide graduate students with critical support that is not typically available from any other source of funding.
Each year we fund as many graduate students as possible to conduct pre-dissertation pilot research. This research is used to identify a field site, make important connections at the field site, and undertake preliminary data collection. These awards were made in amounts ranging from $500 to $1,200 each. The students and projects funded for the 2011-2012 academic year are:
- Hsi-wen Chang
Taiwan and China have been separate political entities since the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. Since 2011, however, Taiwanese universities have begun to recruit students from China. This pilot research funding allows me to visit Taiwan on spot. I will explore how the first wave of Chinese students undergo the process of national-identity (trans) formation, which may influence their states of mental health when studying in Taiwan, a society with a similar culture and language but a very different political and social orientation. This pilot research will provide a window onto my future dissertation plans concerning identity theory by focusing on the relationship between discourses of nationalism and Chinese students’ daily practices during an era of political transition between Taiwan and China.
- Adam Freeburg
Human survival on Arctic coasts depends to a large degree on the abundance of natural resources –sea mammals, land mammals, fish, and birds– that are tied directly to the marine environment. In the western Arctic, relatively few studies have rigorously compared archaeological data to environmental proxies of appropriate geographic and temporal resolution. Despite this, interpretations of changes in marine mammal-based subsistence strategies based on temporally correlated ecological conditions are common to interpretations of culture change in the western Arctic. If climate variability is related to human cultural response, it will most likely be evident in subsistence patterns and its effects on the major food sources should be evaluated directly. There is an opportunity to explore these implications more rigorously in at least one western Arctic location. My pilot funding will use stable isotope analysis on new faunal collections from Cape Krusenstern, Alaska, to determine if archaeological collections are able to provide proxies of marine environmental change with chronological resolution appropriate to archaeological interpretation. If successful, the isotope analysis will be expanded in geographic and temporal scale in my dissertation research, allowing the comparison of archaeofaunas from Cape Krusenstern to other regional paleoenvironmental proxies, with the intent of clarifying the changes in subsistence through time while accounting for ecological variability in marine prey. This will enhance archaeologists’ understanding of whether and how natural resource variability affected prehistoric cultural change in the region.
- Salem Gugsa
The overall goal of my dissertation is aimed at identifying predictors of HIV treatment choices that can be used to screen individuals upon entry to care once they have incurred a chronic infection. Information obtained from this pilot study is aimed at identifying logistical and ethical considerations I will need to make when studying predictors of initial treatment choices among followers of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity that use Holy Water for spiritual healing purposes. The pilot study will help me evaluate the importance of demographic characteristics, composition of social networks, fertility intentions, and self-predicted infection risk before individuals are tested for HIV in predicting treatment choice intentions. Qualitative and quantitative data obtained from the pilot study will also assist me in identifying additional predictors that might be specific to my study area and will need to be included in my dissertation project.
- Lisbeth Louderback
The ecology of broad-spectrum diets has long been an issue in understanding the prehistory of the arid American west. Broad spectrum diets have been described as energetically expensive, including seed, insect, and small mammal components that required new technologies and social structures to provide sufficient caloric yields for humans. This “broad spectrum revolution” of subsistence modification occurred around 8,000 14C years BP in the Great Basin and northern Colorado Plateau and may be associated with the intensive incorporation of small seed processing and grinding stone technologies. With pilot research funds, I plan to generate patterns of low-ranked resource use from North Creek Shelter (NCS), a well-stratified rockshelter overlooking Escalante Valley in southern Utah. The patterns of low-ranked resources from NCS will define changes in diet breadth from the early Holocene to the middle Holocene, based on plant macro- and microfossil remains adhering to groundstone surfaces, hearth features, and non-cultural sediment. The approach here is to quantitatively measure dietary plant use by developing indices based on species richness (compared to the landscape “palette”) and relative abundance (i.e. intensity of use of selected resources). Upon completion of pilot research, the collections will allow me to greatly strengthen my NSF proposal by observing that I have modern comparative material needed to make the identifications that lie at the heart of my proposal.
- Anna Zogas
Last year, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), major depression, and traumatic brain injury (TBI) were the leading cause of hospitalizations among United States active-duty male soldiers, and the rates of suicides linked to these conditions have been rising. In response, the US military has launched intervention programs that promote psychiatric treatment for both active-duty soldiers and veterans, and has been granting more disability payments for these conditions. These interventions, along with the American media’s focus on what are frequently called the “invisible wounds of war,” suggest that soldiers’ suffering is being seen in newly medicalized ways in contemporary military and popular culture. My dissertation research explores this medicalized framing of soldiers’ mental health from an institutional perspective, and looks at how the military’s framing of these “invisible wounds” shapes individual soldiers’ experiences of health and illness. This pilot research funding makes it possible for me to travel to Chicago, my primary field site, where I will begin research on how the veterans’ health service system works, and how the “invisible wounds of war” are being made visible in that system.
|