Bama Anthro

Did You Ask About the Grad Program’s Mental and Emotional Support?

A potential grad student I met with a few weeks ago said, I’m a first generation college student, so I know there are probably a lot of questions I’m not thinking to ask. Maybe you can tell me the answer to one of them without me asking it.

Did you ask us about our mental and emotional support of grad students? We don’t believe in lone ethnographer pull yourself up by the bootstraps anthropology.…

NEW DUAL DEGREE PROGRAMS IN BIOCULTURAL HEALTH PROMOTION!

HOT OFF THE PRESSES!

Just a few hours ago, the Graduate School Committee unanimously approved our proposal for two dual-degree programs (MA/MPH and MPH/PhD) in Biocultural Health Promotion. These programs will be available as of Spring 2020.

Need & Rationale for Dual Degree Programs

Dr. Stephanie McClure wrote most of this text (from the proposal) and will direct the dual-degree programs for…

Getting Rid of the GRE Requirement

If I were more pragmatic, I’d wait until after November 12 to write on this topic. But then two weeks of recruiting potential grad students would be gone without them having the benefit of this watershed information (and two weeks of considering paying for the GRE).

I personally have never been a fan of the GREs, ever since I took all sorts of courses to do well on them to get myself into…

Why Consider Coming to Alabama for Graduate Study in Anthropology?

I am speaking only for myself, but if I’m being honest, Alabama was not my first choice location to move to teach anthropology. The State of Alabama has a reputation for political conservatism and football. Both of them are well earned. When I was looking for jobs, I was concerned about where I would raise my kids and was not particularly interested in football (that has changed, big time). And…

What Is the “Environment” in Gene-Environment Interaction Research?

The central plaza in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil (photo by Bill Dressler). The notion that nature and nurture interact to produce the phenotype of an individual is a  very old one.  Modern techniques of molecular biology and the mapping of the human genome have led to multiple studies approaching gene-environment interaction as more than a metaphor.  A part of that revolution was led by Caspi and…

Peaks and Valleys of Building Community Rapport: Lessons Learned Through an Investigation of Adolescent Sexual Health

On my graduate school journey in medical anthropology at the University of Alabama, I became curious about HIV risk while conducting fieldwork in Mobile, Alabama. There, I worked on my thesis on intergenerational body image beliefs of working class African American mothers and daughters. Mothers in my study revealed that they could tell someone had HIV by looking at them. These insights…

Replacing the Lone Stranger with Evidence-Based Theory: Collaborative Fieldwork in Anthropology

Drs. Michaela Howells and Christopher Lynn (author) in traditional business attire to meet with officials outside Samoan Affairs, Tutuila, American Samoa. An abridged version of this post first appeared in our column in Anthropology News: http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2016/12/19/replacing-the-lone-stranger-with-evidence-based-theory/ At the 115th Annual Meeting of the American…

“Making a Bill” in search of Health

The Poorest, Sickest State Mississippi is the U.S.’s poorest state and has the lowest rates of insurance coverage. Mississippi also has very poor health outcomes including the highest or second highest rates of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and age-adjusted death rate due to cancer (Mississippi State Department of Health 2014). These rates are nothing new and Mississippi has a history of…

A World Famous African-American Scientist Puts the Presidential Election in Perspective: “I Am Not Surprised At All”

On Wednesday, the day after our 2017 presidential election, I dreaded having to put on my host face to go out to dinner with Dr. Joseph Graves, our ALLELE speaker for Thursday. I couldn’t really stand the thought of talking to anyone. His talk on “Biological determinism in the age of genomics” was supposed to have been anti-climactic after Hillary’s easy sweep. We see how well that went. Joseph…

Building professional social networks through the American Anthropological Association annual meeting

A few years ago, I’d all but decided I wasn’t going to go to the American Anthropological Association main conference anymore. This was the year it was in San Francisco (111th Annual Meeting, 2012). Ironically, that was a memorable conference. I had several good meals in the Vietnamese neighborhood nearby (it was hosted in the Tenderloin—mm, bahn mis), was part of a great neuroanthropology…

Ayahuasca Visions in the Peruvian Amazon

As a psychological anthropologist interested in alternative healing options, I recently traveled to Peru to experience ayahuasca with a shaman I had been corresponding with for some time. Ayahuasca is being used to help treat war veterans and others suffering from PTSD and depression. Its use as a treatment option for addicts has also become widespread. For thrill seeking millennials ayahuasca…

Engaging Activism in Anthropology of Disability

Mirjam Holleman (author, left) presenting on the topic of (dis)ability and social inclusion to a small audience at a festival (Slot Art Festival) in Poland, summer 2016. The anthropologist is frequently construed as an ideally detached observer who doesn’t let his or her own ideals or visions for society interfere with or steer her research. But sometimes it’s hard not to care. As Sally Merry has…

Mortality Among High-School Educated Whites in the U.S.: An Anthropological View

Fig. 1. All-cause mortality, ages 45–54 for US White non-Hispanics (USW), US Hispanics (USH), and six comparison countries: France (FRA), Germany (GER), the United Kingdom (UK), Canada (CAN), Australia (AUS), and Sweden (SWE). Every so often a piece of research comes along that is a real game-changer—it literally shakes the earth under your feet.  I had that experience about a year ago when Anne…

Fieldwork then and now: from graduate student to professor

Dr. Weaver interviews a woman whose garden is the only consistent source of fresh vegetables for purchase in the Brazilian study community. I just returned from two fieldwork trips: one to India for 6 weeks, and the other to Brazil for 4. The purpose of the first one was to scout new sites for my ongoing work on women’s mental health in India, the country where I did my doctoral research. The…

Advancing Critical Food Systems Education through Service Learning

David Meek, Author In anthropology departments across the country, food systems courses are becoming increasingly prevalent. Their rapid growth makes sense, because there is significant overlap between the study of food systems and traditional areas of anthropological inquiry, such as food security, the anthropology of nutrition, and ethnobotany. Yet, despite anthropologists’ attention to…

Dr. Brown established a relationship with AUTh faculty developing a museum studies program & is returning this summer with UA students to conduct research at Vergina. Vergina is the site of the tomb of Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, & a large, extended cemetery for the inhabitants of the city of Pella, which was Phillip’s capital & Alexander’s birthplace, before it was destroyed by an earthquake in 90 BC.

This year, I was selected to participate in the 2017 Initiative. Along with Luoheng Han, Ana Corbalan, Andrew Dewar, Vaia Touna, Rebecca Salzer, Amir Zaheri, and Arun Gupta, I traveled to Thessaloniki to meet with potential collaborators and develop a proposal for research. I met with George Kitsios and George Athanasopoulos and discussed plans for an exciting study I’ll share more about in the future. In the meantime, following are some of the photos from our wonderful visit. Thanks to Dean Olin and our partners at AUTh for making this opportunity possible and for the lovely hospitality!