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Heide Castaneda wins the USF Hispanic Heritage Award 2011 for faculty
Antoinette Jackson in American Anthropologist
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USF's Top Social Work Educator - Iraida V. Carrion - Anthropology Alumni
An Appreciation of Susan Greenbaum
In almost 30 years at USF, Susan Greenbaum set the standard for the kind of engaged, relevant work that is now the signature of USF Anthropology. Read more about her career and goals for a very active retirement
2011 Summer Newsletter - Anthroscope
With support from the National Science Foundation, Drs. Thomas Pluckhahn, Brent Weisman, and Victor Thompson (Ohio State), will conduct archaeological research at the Crystal River site, a mound complex on the Gulf Coast of Florida dating primarily to the Woodland period (ca. 1000 B.C. to A.D. 1000). Their research will examine the dynamic between cooperation and competition in the formation of early village societies. In the few instances where the topic has been directly addressed, the focus has primarily been on chiefdoms and states, where competitive and cooperative practices were already institutionalized.
Field investigations include geophysical survey, coring, and test excavations. Laboratory analyses include a variety of archaeological dating techniques, as well as studies to determine season of occupation and rate of deposition. The research contributes to the understanding of the dynamic between competition and cooperation in human societies---one of the foremost issues in the social sciences. The project also contributes to the study of social complexity through focused study of early villages, precursors to better-studied ranked and stratified societies. Finally, the project contributes to the understanding of Crystal River and related sites of the Woodland period on the Gulf Coast, an area and time period marked by one of the most distinctive, yet least understood, material culture complexes in the prehistory of North America.
Robert H. Tykot has continued with his diversity of geographic and methodological interests, mainly using archaeological science approaches to look at materials exchange and ancient diets in different parts of the world. Expanding on his work on obsidian trade in the central Mediterranean, he spent time in Croatia with his portable, non-destructive X-ray fluorescence spectrometer analyzing obsidian found at prehistoric inland sites, along the Dalmatian coast, and on some of the Adriatic islands. This was the first time ever that significant work was done on obsidian from Croatia, with one of the most important discoveries some pieces from far-away Melos in the Aegean.
Wells follows a greener path
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When USF President Judy Genshaft signed the American College and University Presidents' Climate Commitment in 2008 to green the university, Christian Wells had no idea how his life would change over the next year. After being evacuated from his field site in Honduras in the summer of 2009 because of a military coup d'état, Wells was given the opportunity to apply what he learned from his Honduran archaeological research on sustainable land management to the USF campus by being appointed the founding Director of the USF Office of Sustainability. In his role as chief sustainability officer for USF, Wells is responsible for overseeing the President's climate commitment to reduce the university's greenhouse gas emissions significantly over the next few years (80 percent by the year 2050!), and finding new ways of making the USF campus more sustainable. Toward this goal, and working with the Provost's Office and the Graduate School, Wells helped create the new School of Global Sustainability, which will use the USF campus as a living laboratory to test out novel ideas for renewable energy, water conservation, green building, and native landscaping.
Professor Jacqueline Messing has been invited to serve on the National Science Foundation's Advisory Panel for Doctoral Dissertation Grants in Anthropology starting in 2010. She recently published the article "Ambivalence and Ideology among Mexicano Youth in Tlaxcala, Mexico" in a special issue on INDIGENOUS YOUTH AND BILINGUALISM in the Journal of Language, Identity and Education.
Dr. Heide Castañeda has been awarded a Humanities Institute grant to support archival data collection at the Germany National Library (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek) in Frankfurt am Main as part of an ongoing project entitled "Without Papers: Illegalized Migration to Germany since Reunification."
"Illegality" is an exceptionally fluid category, produced by shifting practices of inclusion and exclusion. In Germany, the idea of "illegal immigration" coincides with the end of the guestworker programs in the early 1970s. German reunification in 1990 set additional population shifts in motion, challenging the boundaries of the newly integrated nation. Increased freedom of movement for citizens of former socialist countries, combined with civil conflict in many regions of the world, led to a surge in immigration during this period. The political asylum mechanism, in particular, was utilized because other channels (such as labor migration) had become too restrictive or closed entirely. By the early 1990s, a concern with Überfremdung ("over-foreignization") became a dominant discourse in public debates, and despite mass expressions of solidarity with refugees, the state's response was to severely limit the constitutional right to asylum in 1993. This marked a turning point in migration policy. The right to asylum had previously held a special place in German postwar society, and it is the only nation in the world to enshrine this right in its constitution. With this calculated removal of legal entry options, unauthorized or "illegalized" migration has increased since the mid-1990s. Unauthorized migrants have increasingly filled gaps in the German shadow economy, while greater numbers of individuals from diverse backgrounds and with varying reasons for migrating have become subject to arrest, detention, and deportation. Although migrant needs in education, medicine, and social service settings were a prominent concern throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, a turning point was reached by the late 1990s with changing criteria of "deservingness" and inclusion.
Dr. Linda Whiteford, (Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and Strategic Initiatives in the Office of the Provost), has been invited to be a member of the Executive Committee for the Commission on International Programs (CIP) of the American Public and Land Grant Universities (APLU), previously named NASULGC.
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