Author Archive for carieaots

Episode 28 Housing, Advocacy, and Anthropology with Christin Reeder Young

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 28 Housing, Advocacy, and Anthropology with Christin Reeder Young
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Applied Anthropologist Christin Reeder Young

Applied Anthropologist Christin Reeder Young

Christin Reeder Young has a Master’s degree in Applied Anthropology, focusing on medical and urban anthropology, and works as a Senior Research and Evaluation Manager for Habitat for Humanity. Her work focuses on two main topics, the impact of affordable homeownership for lower-income, first-time homebuyers and the impact of critical home repairs and accessibility modification for older homeowning adults in Memphis, TN. As an anthropologist, however, her view of these issues extends beyond the individual or family to the consequences that extend into neighborhoods, the city, and the health systems that provide services to homebuyers.

Ms. Young’s ability to perform qualitative ethnographic fieldwork allows her to assess the homes of elderly clients and to provide recommendations for critical repairs and accessibility modifications that allow them to stay longer in their homes place rather than moving prematurely to a nursing home. Additionally, her larger view on culture and social institutions makes her exceptionally qualified to influence policy change, as aging trajectories show a boom in elderly populations. Through conferences, trainings, and through visits to Congress, Ms. Young shares her data, recommending concrete ways American human services can evolve to assist people in aging in place healthily and independently in their homes and communities.

*NEW* Transcript available below!

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Episode 27 Politics of Greek Cooking with Dr. David Sutton

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 27 Politics of Greek Cooking with Dr. David Sutton
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Dr. David Sutton hiking in Kalymnos, Greece

Dr. David Sutton collecting wild herbs in Kalymnos, Greece

Dr. David Sutton returns to AOTS, this time to talk about his long career’s work on the anthropology of food. Dr. Sutton explores the politics of food and commensality, or eating together, on the Greek island of Kalymnos at a time when international debt has increased outside pressures on Greece to transform their economics and culture to better suit neoliberal capitalism. For folks in Kalymnos, food and cooking are ways to connect the present to the past, whether it’s through telling stories of food eaten 40 years ago, eating foods today to evoke memories, or cooking using specific techniques and tool choices that emphasize cultural and kinship connections.
As people eat together, Dr. Sutton explains, there is an intimacy and materiality to food that correlates to social relations, the senses, and the political. Food becomes a metaphor for criticizing some of the more abstract elements of neoliberalism, such as the conscious use of food in discourse that opposes concreteness and intimacy of eating with abstract coldness of money and rational economics.

*NEW* Transcript available below!

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Episode 26 Anthropology in Action with Dr. Dana Powell

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 26 Anthropology in Action with Dr. Dana Powell
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Dana PowellDr. Dana Powell has spent the last twenty years working to transform anthropology from its original purpose, of primarily European scholars studying the Other, non-European cultural groups, toward building anthropology as a critical perspective and a toolkit of methods that help us tackle social problems. Rather than entering marginalized spaces and making decisions for informants, she agrees that anthropologists should share their unique skill set to assist in problem-solving projects that have already been identified at a grassroots or local level.

From her work with Diné (Navajo) energy activists to her field research assisting African-American environmental justice activists, Dr. Powell has collaborated with indigenous-led project leaders, offering her skills as an ethnographer to provide data and insight. A decolonized action anthropology has so much potential to become relevant in a new way, she argues, as anthropologists are deep listeners, contributing creative critical thinking to define and resolve social problems.

*NEW* Transcript available below!

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Episode 25 Product Design Ethnography with Dr. Amy Goldmacher

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 25 Product Design Ethnography with Dr. Amy Goldmacher
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Dr. Amy Goldmacher (photo courtesy of Dr. Goldmacher)

Business anthropologist Dr. Amy Goldmacher works with product and software designers to empower them to understand their users and customers. Using ethnographic research, she helps design new and improved products, software and experiences that better meet people’s needs.

Working both independently and as an ethnography consultant at The Understanding Group, Dr. Goldmacher applies anthropological methodologies to help companies organize and manage complex information, clarify purpose, create better products, and more effectively reach customers.

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Episode 24 Pubic Hair Grooming as Cultural Practice with Lyndsey Craig

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 24 Pubic Hair Grooming as Cultural Practice with Lyndsey Craig
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Lyndsey Craig (photo courtesy of Ms. Craig)

Anthropology graduate student Lyndsey Craig examines pubic hair removal practices across 72 societies, and how the practices are tied to cultural concerns about hygiene and sexual activity.

Whereas most literature on public hair removal practices focus primarily on Western cultures, in particular how women are included in and affected by marketing, pornography, and pop culture, Craig and biological anthropologist Dr. Peter Gray performed historical, cross-cultural research across dozens of non-Western societies. They found that whether and how pubic hair was removed depended on a diverse array of cultural messages about hygiene, fertility, sexuality and beauty.

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Episode 23 Psychiatric Culture Clashes with Dr. Beatriz Reyes-Foster

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 23 Psychiatric Culture Clashes with Dr. Beatriz Reyes-Foster
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Dr. Beatriz Reyes-Foster (photo courtesy of Dr. Reyes-Foster)

Medical Anthropologist Dr. Beatriz Reyes-Foster returns, this time to discuss her experiences researching a psychiatric hospital in Mexico, looking at how culture shapes the diagnoses, care, and outcomes of mental illness.

How is mental illness cultural? Medical Anthropologists have long demonstrated how a phenomenon categorized as a disorder, like schizophrenia, is understood and experienced very differently from culture to culture. How the illness is viewed in society, what support structures are available, and which ideologies dominate, such as individuality or the importance of family, all play roles in how a person with illness is treated. When these circumstances are situated in a location where the history of colonialism continues to dominate the lives and identities of indigenous patients, what is often narrowly defined as mental health becomes an issue of national economic, race, and identity systems.

Dr. Reyes-Foster documents how staff at a mental hospital in the Yucatan in Mexico struggle to be human in inhumane conditions, which are set from on high at a governmental level, the results of contemporary politics and the long-standing impacts of colonialism.

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Episode 22 Converting Belief at a Creationist Theme Park with Dr. James Bielo

Dr. James Bielo (Photo courtesy of Dr. Bielo)

The Ark Encounter creationist theme park in Kentucky was developed with one purpose in mind, to convince visitors of the truth of Creationism, the evangelical Christian history of the origins of life on earth. To do that, anthropologist Dr. James Bielo explains, Ark Encounter deploys strategies to entertain and evoke emotional reactions in order to legitimate and give authority to its message. Dr. Bielo researched the backstage creative labor of the design team who led the conceptualization and choreographing of the theme park, which is designed not simply to entertain but to transform the minds of attendees.

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Episode 21 Antarctic Anthropology with Dr. Jessica O’Reilly

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 21 Antarctic Anthropology with Dr. Jessica O’Reilly
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Dr. Jessica O’Reilly (Photo courtesy of Dr. O’Reilly)

Dr. Jessica O’Reilly works in the least populated continent on earth by far: Antarctica. Working with an array of scientists, she turns the anthropological gaze on science itself and the culture of the scientists who spend months, if not years, gathering data in an exceptionally challenging environment.

The process of doing science is complex, and anthropologists of Science and Technology Studies like Dr. O’Reilly can help demystify it, showing the general public how scientists come to know what they know.

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Episode 20 American Mosques with Dr. Jacqueline Fewkes

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 20 American Mosques with Dr. Jacqueline Fewkes
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Dr. Jacqueline Fewkes (photo courtesy of Dr. Fewkes)

As an anthropologist of religion, it’s hard for Dr. Jacqueline Fewkes to pin down her research focus to just one element of life. Rather, her expertise in anthropology allows her to see how religion is lived and practiced, how material goods transform us as much as we transform them, and how spaces reflect our lives while helping to craft them.

Tying these elements together, Dr. Fewkes latest project is a focus on the sometimes surprising, always interesting history and architecture of mosques in America.

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Episode 19 The Culture of Teeth with Dr. Julia Boughner

Anthropologist on the Street
Anthropologist on the Street
Episode 19 The Culture of Teeth with Dr. Julia Boughner
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Dr. Julia Boughner (photo by and included with permission from Dr. Boughner)

What do cultural practices have to do with how our teeth and jaws develop? Biological Anthropologist Dr. Julia Boughner works with dentists and oral surgeons to answer the question: why do modern humans in industrialized nations face dental problems that don’t affect primates, modern hunter-gatherers, and previous generations of humans? The key may be in what we eat and how we prepare it.

Over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, our jaws have become smaller and weaker as our preferred foods became softer as humans (and our hominid ancestors) used hands, fire, and tools to do the work jaws used to do. Dr. Boughner explores evolution (and its misperceptions), science journalism, and how anthropology can be integral in developing safer and more effective dentistry.
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