Tag: anthropology

New book: Climate change, indigenous peoples, and legal remedies

This extract is from a review in the blog PowerEngineering:

Elizabeth Kronk, associate professor of law and director of the Tribal Law & Government Center at KU, has co-edited Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples: The Search for Legal Remedies with Randall S. Abate, associate professor of law at Florida A&M University. The editors gathered work from a collection of legal and environmental experts from around the world, many of whom hail from indigenous populations. Their entries examine how climate change has affected indigenous peoples on numerous continents and how future legal action may help their cause.

“As far as I know it’s the only book of its kind,” Kronk said. “There are lots on climate change, but none that I know of that examine the effects of it on indigenous people. A lot of times when you hear about climate change people say ‘when or if this happens.’ Well, it’s already happening, and indigenous people especially are being forced to deal with it.”

The book examines climate change through an indigenous perspective in North and South America, the Pacific Islands, Australia and New Zealand, Asia and Africa. The contributors, all either practicing lawyers or law professors, both explain the problems faced by indigenous populations and break down attempts to devise legal, workable solutions.

WAPA event tomorrow: Anthropology career panel

Washington Association of Professional Anthropologists will hold an anthropology career panel tomorrow.

Speakers: Kirsti Uunila, Frances Norwood, and John Primo

Date: Tuesday, 2 April 2013

Meeting: 7:00 pm, Sumner School, Rotating Gallery G-4

Pre-meeting get-together: 5:30 pm Beacon Bar and Grill

PANELISTS:

Kirsti Uunila is a Registered Professional Archaeologist and has served Calvert County since 1993 as Historic Preservation Planner. She reviews development projects for potential effects on cultural resources, creates projects to capture, preserve and share the history of Calvert County.

Frances Norwood is a medical anthropologist who specializes in end-of-life and long term care research in the U.S. and in The Netherlands. She won the 2011 Margaret Mead award for her book, The Maintenance of Life (2009). She is currently working on health care reform related to the Affordable Care Act as social science research analyst at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation and holds an appointment as assistant research professor at George Washington University in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies.

John Primo is an ecological anthropologist in the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). He oversees a broad body of research focused on understanding the social impacts resulting from the development of energy resources on the outer continental shelf. Some of the issues and topics studied by the bureau, include, subsistence practices in Alaska, ocean space-use, the history of the oil and gas industry in the Gulf of Mexico, and the infrastructural needs of energy development. John’s responsibilities and duties involve research design, coordination, and oversight at the programmatic and project level, as well as a number of associated procurement activities.

Meeting: Charles Sumner School, corner of 17th St and M St NW, Washington, DC.

How to get there: The Sumner School is located at 1201 17th St NW (corner of 17th St and M St NW). The entrance to the meeting area is on 17th St under the black metal stairway. Directions from Metro Red Line: From Farragut North station, take either L St exit, walk one block east to 17th St, turn left and walk 2 blocks north. Enter the building through the double doors under the black metal staircase. MEETING ROOM: Rotating Gallery G-4 (ground floor)

Pre-meeting: Beacon Bar & Grill (one block north of Sumner School)

How to get there: The Beacon Bar & Grill is in the Beacon Hotel located at 1615 Rhode Island Ave NW (corner of Rhode Island and 17th St). Directions from Metro Red Line Farragut North station: take either L St exit, walk one block east to 17th St, turn left and walk 3 blocks north (one block past Sumner School). All are welcome.

April 1st deadline for student anthropology submissions

Student Anthropologist, a peer-reviewed journal of the National Association of Student Anthropologists, seeks scholarly submissions from undergraduate and graduate students worldwide, in particular those emphasizing anthropology’s capacity to shape public issues, social problems, and global realities. These submissions should contain original research.

The two types of submissions accepted include:

1. Scholarly articles: under 6,000 words in length, subject to a peer review process.

2. Commentary submissions: opinion or theory pieces that are the original work of the author. Commentary submissions might include such mediums as written pieces (approx. 2,000 words in length), photo essays (10 photos + 1,000 words of commentary in length) and videos/YouTube© clips (10-minute maximum in duration + 1,000 words of commentary in length).

The deadline is Monday, April 1st. For more information, click here.

Research methods in cultural anthropology class offered at UF

Photo Courtesy of University of Florida Distance Learning

Through Distance Learning at the University of Florida Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology courses are being offerred this summer. Registration for courses in the program will be opening March 25th. Four courses (listed below) are offered in Summer 2013. To explore the courses being offered this summer, and for information on registration and tuition, please visit the Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology website. These courses are offered fully-online and no on-campus visits are required. The courses carry 3 graduate credits at the University of Florida and may be taken for credit or without credit. Courses are limited to 18 participants.

Courses Available for Summer 2013:

Social Network Analysis in Cultural Anthropology
Video Data Analysis
Geospatial Analysis in Cultural Anthropology
Text Analysis in Cultural Anthropology

Important Dates:

March 25th- Registration Opens
May 13th- Classes Start
May 14th- Registration Closes

Upcoming event: The Social Dimensions of Resilience

The Environmental Change and Security Program will host The Social Dimensions of Resilience at the Wilson Center on:

Monday, March 18, 2013
12:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
5th Floor Conference Room

Featuring: Roger-Mark De Souza
Vice President of Research and Director of the Climate Program, Population Action International

 

Elizabeth Malone
Senior Research Scientist, Joint Global Change Research Institute

Betty Hearn Morrow
Professor Emeritus, Florida International University
Moderator: Laurie Mazur
Author, ECSP Consultant

RSVP Here

From the Haitian earthquake to Superstorm Sandy, recent years have presented many “teachable moments” about the need for greater resilience in the face of disaster. To date, much of the conversation on resilience has focused on making infrastructure more robust—by, for example, building seawalls to protect against storm surges. But resilience has social dimensions that are at least as important. Social factors largely determine the extent to which people and communities respond to and recover from changes in the environment, whether gradual (such as climate change) or more abrupt (such as hurricanes). This panel will explore the social dimensions of resilience, including the role of equity–especially gender equity–and inclusive governance. Panelists will present research and initiatives that link reproductive health to climate adaptation, and showcase current projects in Malawi, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and the Caribbean that take a holistic approach to cultivating resilience.

Location: Woodrow Wilson Center at the Ronald Reagan Building, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. (“Federal Triangle” stop on Blue/Orange Line). A map to the Center is available at WilsonCenter.org/directions. Note: Photo identification is required. Please allow additional time to pass through security.

Ed Liebow speaking at WAPA meeting on March 5

Photo courtesy of AAA

Ed Liebow, Executive Director, American Anthropological Association, will speak on “Crafting a Long-Range Plan for the Association’s Future” on Tuesday, March 5, 7pm, at the Charles Sumner School, Washington, DC. Liebow is the new Executive Director of the AAA. Charles Sumner School is located at 1201 17th St NW (corner of 17th St and M St NW). The entrance to the meeting area is on 17th St under the black metal stairway. Directions from Metro Red Line: From Farragut North station, take either L St exit, walk one block east to 17th St, turn left and walk 2 blocks north. Enter the building through the double doors under the black metal staircase. Meeting room Rotating Gallery G-4 (ground floor). Pre-meeting: Beacon Bar & Grill (one block north of Sumner School), 1615 Rhode Island Ave NW. Directions from Metro Red Line Farragut North station: take either L St exit, walk one block east to 17th St, turn left and walk 3 blocks north (one block past Sumner School). All are welcome.

You can now sign up for WAPA’s Google discussion group right from WAPA’s home page. Participants can communicate directly with each other about events, publications, and other information of interest to practicing anthropologists. Click here and scroll to the bottom of the page to sign up.

Applications invited for Summer Enrichment Program in Tibet

Machik is once again offering its Summer Enrichment Program (SEP). All volunteers must arrive on July 12th, and depart on August 10th. There will be a mandatory orientation for all volunteers on July 13, 14, and 15. Please read the application guidelines carefully before initiating your application. Application deadline is March 25, 2013.

Journal issue on applied anthropology of tourism

The latest issue of Anthropology in Action includes the uses of tourism development projects in solving the problems of inter-communal violence, the politics of representation as well as understandings of audiences and media-based constructions of “‘the toured;” and the ways in which the state and capital intersect in the development of tourism policy. This journal is not open access.

Assisted reproductive technologies: reviewing recent perspectives and addressing research gaps in medical anthropology

Guest post by Jessica Grebeldinger

ICSI is a common form of IVF in which sperm is injected directly into the egg. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia.

In 1978, Brigitte Jordan published her foundational cross-cultural ethnography Birth in Four Cultures, declaring that childbirth “is everywhere socially marked and shaped” (Jordan 1993[1978]:3). This publication signaled the birth of reproduction as a focused field of anthropological inquiry. That same year, the world’s first “test tube baby” conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF) was born, ushering in the age of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). Over thirty years later, both biomedical reproductive technologies and anthropological attention to technological approaches to reproduction have increased substantially. Anthropologists are engaged in studying the intersections of technologies and reproduction because they are deeply connected, indeed, central, to many other aspects of human life, including gender, kinship and notions of the family, individual identity, religion, social inequality, globalization, and health care policy. Concerning ARTs, Rapp has stated that “there can be no more hallowed or classic ground on which anthropological interpretation reverentially and critically occurs” (2006:421).

Birth in Four Cultures by Brigitte Jordan

ARTs developed and spread rapidly, if not evenly, throughout the globe after the birth of the first baby conceived through IVF. An estimated 5 million babies have been born using ARTs since 1978, with an average 27% of treatment cycles resulting in the birth of a baby, the majority of these resulting from traditional IVF or intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), in which fertilization is achieved by injecting a single sperm into the egg (ESHRE 2012). Assisted reproductive technologies created new opportunities to study biomedicine’s involvement in conception, and, indeed, medical anthropologists have answered Ginsburg and Rapp’s (1995) call to situate reproduction at the center of social analysis. The importance of ARTs to this effort is evidenced by the number of edited volumes produced in the last 15 years that are devoted either completely or in part to the study of these technologies (Birenbaum-Carmeli and Inhorn 2009; Browner and Sargent 2011; Culley et al. 2009; Dumit and Davis-Floyd 1998; Davis-Floyd and Sargent 1997; Franklin and Ragoné 1998; Inhorn 2007a; Inhorn and van Balen 2002; Inhorn et al. 2009; Morgan and Michaels 1999).

The review that follows presents a survey of some of the most recent anthropological literature on reproductive technologies, focusing on those published in the last 5 years (2007 and forward). The review demonstrates the breadth of this field of research, which has produced important insights on such topics as infertility experiences, the commodification of reproductive bodies, the phenomenon of international reproductive travel, new kinship configurations, among others. However, the review reveals that this research area has also suffered from a narrowed field of focus resulting from certain gaps in the literature along racial, socioeconomic, geographic, and gender lines. These imbalances problematize our ability to document the varied uses and impacts of reproductive technologies at global and local levels. I discuss this problem after the review section and underscore some recent studies that point the way toward a more inclusive and complete field of reproduction-focused medical anthropology.

Continue reading “Assisted reproductive technologies: reviewing recent perspectives and addressing research gaps in medical anthropology” →