Alex Blanchette
Weatherhead Resident Scholar
This dissertation project is a workplace ethnography of the American “factory” farm that tracks the annual production of seven million pigs at all stages of being from semen to cellophane. At SAR, Alex Blanchette plans to restructure his dissertation into a manuscript that accounts for the cultural-ideological form of vertical integration he encountered on the Great Plains, while completing a photography-based public anthropology project for publication.
Danika Medak-Saltzman
Katrin H. Lamon Resident Scholar
Dr. Medak-Saltzman’s book project analyzes historical moments immediately before and after Japan sought out American expertise to help take over indigenous Ainu homelands and lay claim to what is now Japan’s northernmost main island, Hokkaido. She interweaves an examination of the United State’s role as colonial mentor to Japan, with an examination of how images, imaginaries, and the bodies of indigenous peoples were used to represent their respective colonial nations (the U.S. and Japan) domestically and internationally.
Elise M. Edwards
Henry Luce Foundation Resident Scholar
Focusing on the “Ladies League” in Japan, a corporate-sponsored semi-professional women’s soccer league formed in the early 1990s, Dr. Edwards uses an array of material, including coaching treatises, soccer journalism, practice routines, player interviews, and official corporate promotional materials about the importance of women’s soccer in elucidating linkages between soccer and broader socioeconomic changes in Japan at the turn of the millennium.
Fibian Kavulani Lukalo
Campbell Resident Scholar
This project focuses on the relationship between mothering practices and the schooling of girls in poor rural communities in Kenya. Poverty is central to the educational decisions arrived at for girls by their mothers and key to the socialization process and decision-making “space” that mothers tap into. The research aims to open up new perspectives on gender, mothers’ voices, and decision-making. Furthermore, it develops a typology that combines the role of poverty, mothering daughters, and schooling decisions.
Karla Slocum
National Endowment for the Humanities Resident Scholar
This project focuses on the processes of identity formation among American historic towns known as “All Black Towns.” The project’s purpose is to demonstrate the myriad ways that twenty-first century discourses on race, history and community, together with early twentieth century discourses that were significant to the towns’ identities at their inception, are narrated, mobilized, and negotiated to define the towns today.
Margaret Wickens Pearce
Anne Ray Resident Scholar
This project aims to cartographically represent the connections between local/indigenous and Western knowledge of climate adaptation and resilience. Based on the findings of a livelihood adaptation to climate change study in Northern Tanzania, the project addresses the urgent need for effective cross-cultural dialogue for the sharing and synthesis of climate knowledge. It asks, “How can we connect indigenous and non-indigenous strategies for climate adaptive capacity using cartography?”